Year: 2015

Talk on Moral Injury and PTSD

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From a talk I gave to the Licensed Professional Counselors Association of North Carolina in October on my own issues with PTSD, depression, moral injury, alcohol abuse and suicidality. Please feel free to share this video with others. Other men and women sharing their stories with me has helped in my recovery and I want to do my part and pass that kind of assistance along.

Prior to giving this talk, as I was driving to the conference and walking into the venue, I planned on drinking as soon as I was done. Not just a few beers to watch my Mets play the Dodgers in the playoffs, but a medicinal drowning and extinguishment of that all too familiar, exhausting and debilitating anguish in my head, heart and soul. When I was finished with my talk, although tired, the plan was still there. I drove to a bar, got out of my car, and walked to the bar door. My desire, at that moment, not to be a liar was stronger than my need to drink, and I got back in my car and drove home.

From watching the video I doubt you can tell the pain I was in during this talk, an emotional, existential pain, unlike any known physical pain, and a sort of pain that seems to have no hope or end to it. It is as if a wedge or filter is placed into my head, not allowing me to access the functional, rational, more evolutionary modern parts of my brain. I am living in the poisonous fog that William Styron so masterfully articulated in his Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness;  a book that I can’t recommend enough to help friends and family understand how such mental pain and torment seems inescapable and unending, and drives otherwise very strong men and women to levels of despair that self-euthanizing becomes, in that ill and pained mind, a prudent, practical and necessary option.

My greatest gratitude to my good friend John Shuford who organized this talk and provided me with the video. I hope, in the future, to provide more information on an initiative John is working on to provide greater clinical training to therapists assisting veterans with combat related issues of PTSD, moral injury, depression, alcohol abuse and suicidality.

[Note: The introduction to the video gives a bit of a distorted summary of my career. You can find a professional biography on the About Me page of this blog. Not that it really matters though, as Babe Ruth said: “yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s ball games”]

 

Gallery Added

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I have added a gallery of photos to help describe how I have gotten to this point. Writing out the captions was a great help to me and, hopefully, it will allow my friends and family to understand why I am as I am. I hope, too, that strangers may find the photos helpful as well, either to understand themselves or a loved one better, or just to receive the testimony and witness I want those photos to portray for those who have suffered in these wars.

What continues to strike me, a couple of days after I have posted these photos, is that these photos represent just a tiny percentage of my experiences and, more importantly, an amazingly small cross section of the lives changed, afflicted and destroyed by war.

You can find the photos, over 300 of them, by scrolling down to the right.

I would not change anything I said about Afghanistan

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From an interview I did in the summer of 2011 on Afghanistan with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This may be the most complete summation of my views on the war in Afghanistan, on counter-insurgency, and on American political and military decision making. I do not believe anything I said in this interview differs from what I said in 2009 when I resigned from my State Department position in Afghanistan and I don’t believe I have said anything different in the past four years as I have worked against these policies. Sadly, I think the results of our military and political policies in Afghanistan delivered the consequences I feared so greatly.

I am also horrified, four years later, that my t-shirt was showing during this interview…

The program that aired in Australia can be found here:

In Their Sights…

The web page for the program also has other extended interviews with some of the other commentators on the program, including Major General Nicholson, whom I remember meeting and speaking with a number of times in Kandahar, I always liked him. Please give them a watch and let me know what you think. I am not looking to be told I was right,  I am just looking to be told I am not crazy.

 

 

Insulting America’s Sacred Idols: Helping Veterans Recover from Moral Injury

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Back in March, Quaker House in Fayetteville, NC, the home of America’s largest military base, Fort Bragg, hosted me to discuss my recovery from PTSD and moral injury. The full video is below, along with a three minute clip that Lynn Newsom, the co-director of the Fayetteville Quaker House, is using in the talks she gives to military and non-military audiences on moral injury.

During my talk I am not very clear about the correlation, and, yes, I would also say causation, between combat and suicide. However, there is a very clear link between combat veterans and suicide, a link that is obviously very dangerous to cherished American myths of war, with all too familiar, prevalent and false motifs of justice, honor and redemption. To illustrate the connection between war, violence and suicide, a connection that manifests in veterans through PTSD, depression, substance abuse, and moral injury, I have included, at the end of this essay, 15 fairly easy to find studies of the last few decades documenting the prevalence of suicide in combat veterans.

Among the below studies, and among the most recent, dealing with my fellow veterans of the Afghan and Iraq Wars, researchers at the National Center for Veterans Studies have found that veterans who were exposed to killing and atrocity had a 43% greater risk of suicide, while 70% of those Afghan and Iraq veterans who participated in heavy combat had attempted suicide. We spends millions of dollars and thousands of hours to physically, mentally and morally condition each young man and woman who volunteers to serve in the military to travel abroad and kill, but upon their return, in reality, effective and thorough programs to decondition our veterans, help them reenter and reintegrate into society and regain emotional, moral and spiritual balance and health are nonexistent, while care for developed wounds, both physical and mental is underfunded. Continue reading →

“Longevity is Nothing Without Dignity”

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The film follows the story of S. Brian Willson, a Vietnam veteran and trained lawyer, whose wartime experiences transformed him into a revolutionary non-violent pacifist. In 1986, Brian and several veterans fasted for more than 40-days on the east steps of the U.S. Capitol to protest against the war in Central America.

Then, in September 1987, Brian and other Veterans Peace Action team members sat on the tracks to protest a weapons train carrying missiles and bombs bound to be used against peaceful civilians in Central America.

Instead of the train slowing down for the protesters on the tracks, the conductor increased the speed of the train to three times its legal speed limit. Brian tried to get off the tracks, but the speeding train struck him, cracked his skull, and tore off both his legs.

Today, Brian continues his efforts to fight for peace on his prosthetic limbs. Please join him and stop illegal American wars and other covert military actions waged against peaceful sovereign states and citizens internationally.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/final-production-for-paying-the-price-for-peace/x/11474221#/story

 

Letter from an Afghan-American to the US Government on behalf of Afghan Villagers

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From my friend Kadir, representing a point of view not often heard in the West:

July 13, 2015
To the Honorable Daniel F. Feldman
U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan
The U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street, NW
Room 1517
Washington, DC 20520

Dear Ambassador Feldman:

The negotiations in Islamabad, Pakistan on July 7, 2015 between the Afghan puppet government, the Pakistan government and current prisoners of Pakistan, are a sham. These negotiations will not lead to true peace in Afghanistan. However, maybe that is what the governments of the United States and Pakistan want– negotiations they know will never lead to peace. I believe the “sham” negotiations are for appearance only, so that the United States and NATO look like they want peace. It is common knowledge that the current Afghan freedom fighters were not represented at the negotiations. However, the U.S. Department of State has reported that it has held face to face negotiations with the Taliban in Pakistan but that is a big lie. It is common knowledge that the Taliban will not participate in negotiations inside Pakistan. The United States government knows this fact. Such deception and sham negotiations will not bring peace, which the majority of Afghans and the American public want.

Also, the Pakistani government’s involvement in any negotiations is definitely an obstacle to peace. Pakistan profits from the United States’ war in and occupation of Afghanistan. I believe it is a repeat of the mistakes made in the 1980s during the Soviet Union’s war in and occupation of Afghanistan when the negotiations went through Pakistan.

I believe these negotiations will not work because the Afghan Freedom Fighters are not at the table. To achieve true peace, I strongly believe the United States needs to directly negotiate with the representatives of the Afghan villagers, who are resisting the illegal war and occupation and fighting the thugs of the Afghan puppet government, who are carrying out ethnic cleansing and retaliation against the Pashtun.

I am also concerned that Pakistan has imprisoned thousands of Afghan villagers, who are mostly Pashtun, since the tragic events of 9/11. These villagers are sitting in prisons for years without having been convicted of any involvement in 9/11 or other crimes. Also, I believe the thousands of Afghan villagers, who the majority are Afghan/Pashtun and Muslim, imprisoned in CIA “ black hole” detention centers around the world, need to be released. Their continued detention violates international law. Detaining these villagers are war crimes. I believe this unlawful detention of Afghans creates an obstacle to peace and security in Afghanistan, the region and the world. The rendition and detention of Afghans in these “black hole” CIA detention centers is itself terrorism. When will the superpowers and its puppets stop terrorizing the Afghan villagers? I thought the U.S. Department of State was about diplomacy and not promoting terrorism.

As a concerned U.S. citizen, who was born in Afghanistan, I strongly believe that it is time the United States government changes its war/occupation policy to a “sincere” negotiation and peace policy. I have been waiting for 4 decades for true peace in my motherland. I have been waiting for 15 years for the government of my homeland, the United States, to follow the law and end the war in and occupation of Afghanistan. The Afghan villagers have never received justice these past four decades. Don’t the Afghans, who are victims of war crimes from 1978 to the present, deserve justice just like the Jewish people, the Bosnians and the Rwandans received? Justice delayed is justice denied. Without justice there can never be peace.

Sincerely,

Kadir A. Mohmand
Former Representative of the Afghan Freedom Fighters for North America during the 1980s

Was the Afghan War Worth It?

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And a quick interview I did with Chinese TV from last March where I briefly discuss how a military first US foreign policy has led to war, chaos and terrorism throughout the Muslim world.

Updated with transcript from RT:

As long as the Afghan government aligns itself with the US, which is keeping troops, planes, special operations and drones to bomb targets in Afghanistan or Pakistan, there will be no peace, says former US Marine Matthew Hoh.

RT: Peace talks between Afghan officials and Taliban representatives have ended with both sides agreeing to meet again after the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. After more than a decade of war the Afghan government and the Taliban are finally talking. Was it worth the thousands of lives lost, both military and civilian?

Matthew Hoh: No, it wasn’t and I think the proper way to look at the Afghan War, as you look at all wars or all conflicts, is not in an isolated vacuum or is because of one solitary event, in this case the last fourteen years of the war in Afghanistan as being caused by the Al-Qaeda attacks on 9/11. However, it should be viewed as this is a war that has been going on continuously since the 1970s.

Continue reading →