William McNulty blames the high suicide rate among young veterans on the “amorphous nature” of the wars they fought in:
No amount of counseling can dispel the gnawing sense that one sacrificed for a bogus cause. From this stems despair — from a sense that so much of one’s life was given for so little purpose. Today’s vets do not see themselves as saviors, they cannot identify whom they defeated, they are not certain that they truly liberated anyone, and they fought, at best, a holding action against an ill-defined threat. Progress has been absent.
Joe Klein seconds McNulty:
McNulty makes an important distinction: between depression and despair. Depression is one of the prevalent symptoms of post-traumatic stress. It is a natural reaction to the unimaginable terror that comes with combat, the survivor’s guilt that comes with the loss of friends, the frustration that comes with the loss of a limb or a traumatic brain injury. Despair is more profound: it comes when you’ve experienced any or all of those things–and you come to the conclusion that it was all in vain, that there was no earthly reason to have invaded Iraq in the first place or extended the war in Afghanistan beyond the counter-terrorist effort to snuff out Al Qaeda.
Iraq veteran Elliot Ackerman has a different perspective. He reflects on the fall of Fallujah, where he fought almost ten years ago:
I wear a black bracelet on my wrist. It’s got Dan’s name on it, and the date 10 November 2004. I wear it for him but for others, too. Next to that bracelet is another one, a plastic one threaded with pink hearts and blue stars that my three-year old daughter made for me. If it weren’t for the black bracelet, the plastic one wouldn’t exist.
Does Fallujah falling into the hands of the ISIS make what Dan did for me and for the forty-six of us a waste? I wonder what he’d say.
When I think about my wars, and what happened, I do sometimes ask myself if it was worth it. I’m not thinking about Bush or Obama, or about Iraq or Afghanistan. I’m thinking about Pratt and Ames, and of course Dan, and unfortunately other friends like him. I hope they’d think what we’d did for each other was worth it.
(Photo: The remains of three US servicemen, their equipment, and a Humvee lay scattered on a dirt road after a massive IED vaporized their vehicle on August 4, 2007 in Hawr Rajab, Iraq. By Benjamin Lowy/Getty Images)
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