From Howard Unruh to John Muhammad
by Alexander Cockburn
A nation always on the war path means a nation
always under arms, a nation to which war is always
coming home. A minority of these homecomers
arrive in the form of psychically maimed people,
violence-prone drunks, domestic abusers, drug
addicts, basket cases. This summer, before
Muhammad and Malvo embarked on their lethal
jaunts, the whole issue of of blowback, of wars
Coming Home had turned red hot with the murders
and suicides in North Carolina's Fort Bragg, a vast
military base and home to the elite Special Forces.
On June 11 Sgt. Rigoberto Nieves, 32, of the 3rd
Special Forces Group, shot his 28-year-old wife,
Teresa, and then himself, in their bedroom, as
Teresa's sister and other relatives sat downstairs. He
had returned from Afghanistan two days earlier,
having requested leave to resolve "personal issues."
On June 29 Jennifer Wright was strangled by her
husband, William. The 36-year-old Green Beret
confessed to the killing three weeks later.
On July 9 Sgt. Cedric Griffin, 28, of the 37th Engineer
Battalion at Fort Bragg, was arrested after stabbing
his wife, Marilyn, more than fifty times before setting
her body on fire. The couple had been married for
eight years but had recently separated.
Sgt. Brandon Floyd was a member of the Delta
Force, a champion triathlete. He'd just come back
from Afghanistan. On July 19, amid a domestic
quarrel, Floyd shot his wife, Andrea, in the head. Then
he put the barrel inside his mouth and blew the top of
his head off.
On July 23 in Fayetteville, the support town for Fort
Bragg, Joan Shannon killed her husband, Maj. David
Shannon, part of the Special Operations Command.
The 40-year-old was shot in the head and chest while
sleeping in his bed.
A common theme of the few good news stories on
this issue cites wives complaining of the great
difficulty in getting any help in dealing with a violent,
maybe homicidal, husband. Analisa Nazareno had a
harrowing account this month in the San Antonio
Express-News about Rhonda Pion, terrified of her
husband, legally blind and therefore unable to drive
away from Fort Sam Houston, an army base there.
Rules required that Pion seek permission from her
husband's commanding officer to get a protective
order from the military judge advocate general's
office. As one victim's advocate said, "It's like having
to go to your father-in-law and asking him for
permission to protect yourself from his son."
Ultimately Pion fled to a relative in Louisiana.
Maj. Gen. Robert Clark is having trouble getting his
third star because he's accused of not doing enough
to deal with domestic and antigay violence when he
was commanding officer at Fort Campbell, in
Kentucky. In 1999 Pvt. Barry Winchell was beaten to
death there. In addition to Winchell's murder, there
were four homicides related to domestic violence
while Clark was in charge. Kathy Spence, the mother
of one victim, LaRonda Spence, said her daughter
complained at least thirty times to her husband's
superiors about his abuse, but they did nothing. "How
can you promote someone who is supposed to
protect the country when they can't even protect our
daughters?" Spence asked Ron Martz, a reporter
from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Congress established a Defense Department task
force in 1999 after findings showed that the rate of
domestic violence in the military had risen by more
than a third, to 25.6 per 1,000 soldiers in 1996 from
18.6 per 1,000 in 1990. At the time, domestic
violence rates were dropping among the general
population. In that six-year period there were 61,000
cases of military spouses suffering domestic violence,
five times higher than the number in the civilian
population. In the year 2000, 12,068 cases of
spousal abuse were reported to the military's Family
Advocacy Program. There were eight deaths that
year-all women, and all involving domestic violence.
The military is desperate to bury the stats, but it's
clear that most abusers get away with it. Special
Forces soldiers, at hairtrigger readiness to kill, can be
away for up to ten months a year. A Green Beret
with five to seven years' experience earns $25,000.
Each partner in this financially stressed duo worries,
often with reason, that the other is fooling around.
The two best recent stories on the Fort Bragg killings
have, maybe unsurprisingly, appeared outside this
country, which most recently hosted a bland piece of
Army PR in USA Today, by Dave Moniz. Tim Reid,
always a good reporter, had a fine piece in the
London Times, as did Doug Saunders in the Toronto
Globe and Mail.
Saunders quotes David Grossman, a former US
military psychologist who helped develop programs
to make new recruits more effective killers, to
increase what's called the "trigger-pull ratio." These
programs are now part of basic training. Grossman
says that the trick is to break down the natural
human aversion to killing. He calls this
"disengagement." Once this aversion has been
removed, it never comes back, and can make it
easier for former soldiers to become murderers. "The
ability to watch a human being's head explode and to
do it again and again-that takes a kind of
desensitization to human suffering that has to be
learned," Grossman said.
So don't blame Charlton Heston. The US military is
the chief sponsor of violence in this country. One day
in 1949 Howard Unruh, a 28-year-old World War II
veteran, shot thirteen of his New Jersey neighbors.
His famous line was, "I'd have killed a thousand if I'd
had enough bullets." His military firearms training
made his "walk of death" the first modern serial-killer
case.
From Unruh to Muhammad. Millions have been
molded in this manner. Blowback is the consequence.
It will be with us as long as the Empire needs war as
its guarantor. America is living in the blowback years.
What goes around comes around, with unforeseen
consequences, or consequences foreseen but
discounted. Unleash the mujahedeen on the Soviets
in Afghanistan, and you get Osama bin Laden.
Blowback usually comes as a shock, because the art
of politics is to separate actions from consequences.
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