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In a Distant Land By KIRK JOHNSON
JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. — Through a live video feed from half a world away in Afghanistan, in an extraordinary night court session, descriptions of chaos and horror poured into a military courtroom here as if from an open spigot.
“Their brains were still on the pillows,” said Mullah Khamal Adin, 39, staring into the camera with his arms folded on the table, describing the 11 members of his cousin’s family he found dead in the family compound — most of the bodies burned in a pile in one room.
Mr. Adin, in a hearing that started here late Friday, was asked about the smell. Was there an odor of gasoline or kerosene?
Just bodies and burned plastic, he replied through a translator.
The Army’s preliminary hearing in the case against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians in Kandahar Province this year, unfolded last week mostly in the bustling daylight of a working military base an hour south of Seattle. But to accommodate witnesses in Afghanistan, and the 12-and-a-half-hour time difference, the schedule was shifted at week’s end, with testimony through cameras and uplinks in Afghanistan and here at Lewis-McChord starting at 7:30 p.m. Pacific time on Friday and running until shortly after 2 a.m. Saturday.
The attacks, which occurred on March 11 in a deeply poor rural region while most of the victims were asleep, were the deadliest war crime attributed to a single American soldier in the decade of war that has followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and they further frayed the relationship between the American and Afghan governments.
The military says Sergeant Bales, 39, was serving his fourth combat tour overseas when he walked away from his remote outpost in southern Afghanistan and shot and stabbed members of several families in a nighttime ambush on two villages. At least nine of the people he is accused of killing were children, and others were women. After the victims were shot, some of the bodies were dragged into a pile and burned.
“ ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ ” one witness, a farmer named Haji Naim, said he had shouted to the American soldier, whom he described as wearing a blindingly bright headlamp in a house that, without electricity, was pitch black. The gunman said nothing, Mr. Naim said, and simply kept firing.
“He shot me right here, right here, and right here,” he said, indicating wounds from which he has apparently recovered.
Most of the testimony, however graphic, was circumstantial, pointing to a lone American gunman but not directly implicating Sergeant Bales. The villagers testified on the fifth day of a military proceeding known as an Article 32 investigation, held to establish whether there is enough evidence to bring Sergeant Bales before a court-martial. If a court-martial is ordered and the Army decides to continue the prosecution as a capital case, the sergeant could face the death penalty.
Sergeant Bales, a decorated veteran of three tours in Iraq before being sent to Afghanistan last December, was deployed from Joint Base Lewis-McChord. He was held at the military prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas before being brought here for the hearing.
Witnesses earlier in the week talked about the blood-soaked clothes that Sergeant Bales was seen wearing when he returned to his base in Kandahar and his comments to fellow soldiers about having done “the right thing.” There was also testimony about the test for steroids in his system that came back positive three days after the killings.
The hearing’s night sessions, which were scheduled to continue on Saturday, were all about the violence that unfolded the night of March 11. Mr. Adin, who was summoned to his cousin’s compound by a telephone call early the next morning, told of boot prints that were on some bodies, including the head of a child who had apparently been shot and stomped or kicked. Mr. Adin talked about a small child who he said appeared to have been “grabbed from her bed and thrown on the fire.” But Mr. Adin never saw the gunman, arriving after the fact.
Another witness, a boy named Sadiquallah, who said he was “around 13 or 14,” ran with another boy and hid behind some curtains in a back room. Sadiquallah said he had seen a man with a gun and a light, but had been more intent on hiding than looking around.
“In that room where I was hiding behind the curtains, a bullet hit me,” he said. The bullet struck one of his ears, but he said he had not heard the gunfire. The boy hiding with him was wounded as well, Sadiquallah said.
A 14-year-old boy named Quadratullah said he had known the shooter was an American because of the pants he wore. He also said the man had worn a T-shirt, which matches what other witnesses said Sergeant Bales had been wearing when he returned to his base. Quadratullah said he had followed footprints back to the American base after the sun had come up.
Speaking in a matter-of-fact tone but sometimes animatedly gesturing with a finger — creating the image of a pointed gun as a translator communicated his words to the courtroom — Quadratullah described “a grandmother” whose name he did not know.
She came running to their house, he said, her clothes having been “ripped off.” A few minutes later, he added, “she was shot and she was dead.”
Both defense and prosecution lawyers apologized for their questions, probing for details about scenes of death or the actions of the victims.
Mr. Adin, for instance, was asked whether he believed the clothing had been stripped off or burned off the pile of bodies from his cousin’s family. He answered with a practical, if horrific, observation.
“Nobody was alive to ask whether they were naked before they were burned or killed,” he said.
Sergeant Bales, who has been in custody since the morning of the attack but has not entered a plea, has mostly sat to the right of his lawyers for the testimony, and has rarely shown emotion. When the witness accounts began on Friday, though, he moved close to the big flat-screen monitor mounted on a wall, peering up, a hand on his chin, and occasionally looking down.
Two Afghan Army guards testified on Friday night that they had seen an American soldier leaving and returning to the base near the times that matched the attacks, but neither man could identify the soldier, cloaked as he was in darkness and distance. One remembered, though, that the soldier had laughed when they confronted him and asked what he was doing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/us...gewanted=print
When War Comes Home
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
WILMINGTON, Del.
A DECORATED combat veteran, Staff Sgt. Dwight L. Smith Jr. seemed the perfect soldier. Until, that is, he visited his family in Delaware last Christmas and, as he later told the police, “clicked on.”Inexplicably one morning, while driving his bright red Hummer on a public street, he ran down a 65-year-old woman, Marsha Lee, as she walked her dog, according to police accounts. Then, as a witness watched, he got out and threw Ms. Lee, injured and screaming, into the back seat and drove off.
Ms. Lee’s body, naked except for socks, was found discarded in a wooded area half a mile away. Her head had been bashed in with a heavy, sharp object, perhaps a rock. The police later established that she had been raped.
Police officers searched frantically for the Hummer, and that evening they arrested Sergeant Smith as he drove such a vehicle, still spattered with blood. A police affidavit says that Sergeant Smith admitted to the slaying that night, explaining that he had decided that he “wanted to kill someone.”
Ms. Lee was much loved in the community, for she had devoted herself nearly full time to local causes like an animal shelter and a home for the elderly. Her funeral was one of the biggest anyone can remember in Delaware, and the town has honored her by giving her street a second name: Marsha Lee Way. Her husband, Scottie Lee, declined to speak to me at the request of prosecutors. But family friends see this as straightforward: a case of a young man committing an act of pure evil.
Sergeant Smith, now 25, is in prison, and a trial is still more than a year off, but this may emerge as the pre-eminent American case exploring whether soldiers’ brain injuries and trauma overseas can lead to crimes committed later. The basic question is whether Ms. Lee, as she walked her dog on a quiet street here, became an indirect casualty of our foreign wars.
About half a million American soldiers have suffered from brain-rattling concussions in Afghanistan or Iraq, and one result is an epidemic of traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. We’re seeing many more suicides among recent veterans than among earlier generations, probably because of repeated, extended deployments in combat, coupled with an increase in improvised explosive devices and concussions.
We still aren’t doing nearly enough to provide timely mental health services for these soldiers and veterans. The administration and members of Congress talk a good game about honoring young men and women who went to war, but they don’t allocate the resources necessary to care of them. A result is certainly disability and suicides. Could it also include brutal crimes like this one?
“I know my child,” said Sergeant Smith’s father, Dwight Sr., a 49-year-old manager in the Philadelphia schools. “This isn’t my kid. He was a goofy kid. This isn’t the same man that I sent over.”
The father was sitting morosely in his dimly lit dining room, the curtains all drawn. In the corner of the room was the purple heart that Dwight Jr. earned in Afghanistan, and in the living room just beyond was his wedding photo and a military portrait. It’s impossible to reconcile that beaming young man in the photos with the one who murdered and raped Ms. Lee.
“This is a tragedy for two families,” Mr. Smith added. “I just don’t think my son was ready to come back in regular society.”
Mr. Smith thinks that his son’s mind became poisoned by war, and Dwight Jr. seems to think that as well. I couldn’t get access to him in prison, but in a recent handwritten letter to his father (which is posted with the online version of this column), he wrote:
“I am going to be honest with you dad. I have killed a lot of men and children. Some that didn’t even do anything for me to kill them. Also some that begged for mercy. I have a problem. I think I got addicted to killing people. I could kill someone go to sleep wake up and forget that it ever happened. It got normal for me to be that way. I never wanted to be this way. I just took my job way to serious. I took things to the extreme. Anyone can tell you that I changed. It is like being a completely different person.”
If Sergeant Smith did indeed randomly kill civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan, I could find no record of that. What is clearer is that he was exposed to concussions while in combat, apparently at least two of them. One occurred when he was in Iraq and his Humvee was thrown into the air in an explosion. He was not visibly injured.
Then, in March 2011, a mortar shell landed near him in Afghanistan and blew him 15 feet in the air, shattering a ceramic plate in his body armor, according to his public defender, Bradley V. Manning. Sergeant Smith was hospitalized, flown back to the United States, and given a diagnosis of a traumatic brain injury with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Jasmin Smith, a 29-year-old German woman who is now his wife, and was then his girlfriend, recalls seeing him in the hospital shortly after his return.
“He was in a wheelchair,” she said. “His hand was shaking. He looked pretty bad. He didn’t say anything for 15 or 20 minutes. At the beginning, he didn’t even recognize me.”
She says they celebrated his apparent recovery by marrying two months later. But the recovery seemed fleeting, she says, for he began to abuse alcohol and prescription painkillers and would sometimes fly into violent rages.
“He was always angry about little things,” Mrs. Smith said. “He would throw laptops, punch holes in walls.”
“He used to go crazy,” she added. “He stood in front of me one time and said, ‘I should kill you, I should kill you.’ ”
Mrs. Smith says that he did once choke her and, fearing for her safety, she flew back to Germany. “I didn’t tell him I was leaving, because I was scared.”
Dwight Sr. says his son called then, despondent. “Dad, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” the father quoted his son as telling him. “I just get mad. I can’t help myself.” Eventually, after he promised to control himself, Mrs. Smith did return to his base at Fort Drum, N.Y., and they resumed married life.
TWO months later, on the day of the murder, they were at Dwight Sr.’s home for Christmas vacation. Jasmin says that her husband asked her to go jogging in the morning, but she declined. Then he left the house — and allegedly killed and raped Ms. Lee.
He seemed relatively normal when he returned, Mrs. Smith told me, and they went Christmas shopping that afternoon. After he was arrested that evening, she spoke briefly to her husband; she says that his only explanation for the crime was that he had become enraged while running that he wasn’t physically fit enough. Sometimes since, she says, he has suggested that he blacked out and can’t remember exactly what happened. He also says that he wants to apologize to Ms. Lee’s family.
Rape hasn’t been part of the typical pattern of crimes committed by returning soldiers with T.B.I. or PTSD. But Bennet Omalu, an expert on brain injuries who is also a clinical professor of pathology at University of California, Davis, told me that T.B.I. could indeed lead to such sexual violence. Indeed, Dr. Omalu said he had recently performed an autopsy on an elderly woman who had been randomly raped and murdered by an Iraq war veteran.
Frankly, I hesitated to write this column. I feel strongly that we as a nation have let down our veterans, failing to provide the mental health services they need, and we owe them better. But I can’t be sure that the murder of Ms. Lee is related to these failures. In the end, I decided to go ahead because here’s a young man with no adult criminal record who was promoted rapidly within the military and then suffered brain injuries. And then on his return he allegedly committed a horrific rape and murder that do not make any sense — not to me, not to you, not to his family.
“You lie next to your husband every night,” Mrs. Smith said. “I know he had anger issues, but didn’t think he would do something like that.”
Could the Army have done a better job screening Sergeant Smith’s mental health and addressing his needs? The Army does indeed ask returning soldiers questions about mental health, but self-reporting doesn’t work well because soldiers don’t answer questions honestly. “They don’t want to get kicked out of the Army, and they don’t want to admit anything is wrong,” Mrs. Smith said.
Dwight Sr. notes that his son’s PTSD wasn’t diagnosed until after his arrest and thinks the Army should have given him more help after his brain injury in 2011. “I believe if he’d been in a program, I don’t think we’d be sitting here talking,” he said.
Stephen N. Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired brigadier general who has advised the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on military mental health issues, agrees that we have failed our service members exposed to blasts. He compares it to the runaround soldiers were given for decades about damage from Agent Orange.
What the military most needs, he says, isn’t new weapons systems but a “surge against brain disease” to invest in protecting its most valuable assets — its people.
To its credit, the military this year has stepped up efforts to elevate mental health concerns. But the Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs will have to do far more — and this will suck up resources that planners may prefer to invest in ships and planes.
Another lesson has to do with the larger cost of war: President George W. Bush’s worst mistake was the Iraq war, and President Obama’s was roughly tripling the number of troops in Afghanistan. Let’s hope that future presidents remember that the cost of dispatching ground troops on foreign battlefields isn’t measured only in lives and limbs lost but also in the invisible mental health toll on warriors and those around them.
Mr. Manning, the public defender, is himself a veteran, and he thinks that there are going to be many more crimes like this. He declined to discuss his strategy for the trial, which is set for early 2014 because of the complex mental health issues involved, but added, “It’s hard to make sense of, but when you take somebody’s brain and rattle it around, it damages it in ways they don’t understand.”
I don’t know just what could have led an apparently normal young man to commit such a crime. All we know for certain is that a caring, much loved woman here in Delaware has been horrifically murdered, leaving a vacuum of sadness and a vexing uncertainty about whether there is a link to distant wars.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/op...gewanted=print
In a Distant Land By KIRK JOHNSON
JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. — Through a live video feed from half a world away in Afghanistan, in an extraordinary night court session, descriptions of chaos and horror poured into a military courtroom here as if from an open spigot.
“Their brains were still on the pillows,” said Mullah Khamal Adin, 39, staring into the camera with his arms folded on the table, describing the 11 members of his cousin’s family he found dead in the family compound — most of the bodies burned in a pile in one room.
Mr. Adin, in a hearing that started here late Friday, was asked about the smell. Was there an odor of gasoline or kerosene?
Just bodies and burned plastic, he replied through a translator.
The Army’s preliminary hearing in the case against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians in Kandahar Province this year, unfolded last week mostly in the bustling daylight of a working military base an hour south of Seattle. But to accommodate witnesses in Afghanistan, and the 12-and-a-half-hour time difference, the schedule was shifted at week’s end, with testimony through cameras and uplinks in Afghanistan and here at Lewis-McChord starting at 7:30 p.m. Pacific time on Friday and running until shortly after 2 a.m. Saturday.
The attacks, which occurred on March 11 in a deeply poor rural region while most of the victims were asleep, were the deadliest war crime attributed to a single American soldier in the decade of war that has followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and they further frayed the relationship between the American and Afghan governments.
The military says Sergeant Bales, 39, was serving his fourth combat tour overseas when he walked away from his remote outpost in southern Afghanistan and shot and stabbed members of several families in a nighttime ambush on two villages. At least nine of the people he is accused of killing were children, and others were women. After the victims were shot, some of the bodies were dragged into a pile and burned.
“ ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ ” one witness, a farmer named Haji Naim, said he had shouted to the American soldier, whom he described as wearing a blindingly bright headlamp in a house that, without electricity, was pitch black. The gunman said nothing, Mr. Naim said, and simply kept firing.
“He shot me right here, right here, and right here,” he said, indicating wounds from which he has apparently recovered.
Most of the testimony, however graphic, was circumstantial, pointing to a lone American gunman but not directly implicating Sergeant Bales. The villagers testified on the fifth day of a military proceeding known as an Article 32 investigation, held to establish whether there is enough evidence to bring Sergeant Bales before a court-martial. If a court-martial is ordered and the Army decides to continue the prosecution as a capital case, the sergeant could face the death penalty.
Sergeant Bales, a decorated veteran of three tours in Iraq before being sent to Afghanistan last December, was deployed from Joint Base Lewis-McChord. He was held at the military prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas before being brought here for the hearing.
Witnesses earlier in the week talked about the blood-soaked clothes that Sergeant Bales was seen wearing when he returned to his base in Kandahar and his comments to fellow soldiers about having done “the right thing.” There was also testimony about the test for steroids in his system that came back positive three days after the killings.
The hearing’s night sessions, which were scheduled to continue on Saturday, were all about the violence that unfolded the night of March 11. Mr. Adin, who was summoned to his cousin’s compound by a telephone call early the next morning, told of boot prints that were on some bodies, including the head of a child who had apparently been shot and stomped or kicked. Mr. Adin talked about a small child who he said appeared to have been “grabbed from her bed and thrown on the fire.” But Mr. Adin never saw the gunman, arriving after the fact.
Another witness, a boy named Sadiquallah, who said he was “around 13 or 14,” ran with another boy and hid behind some curtains in a back room. Sadiquallah said he had seen a man with a gun and a light, but had been more intent on hiding than looking around.
“In that room where I was hiding behind the curtains, a bullet hit me,” he said. The bullet struck one of his ears, but he said he had not heard the gunfire. The boy hiding with him was wounded as well, Sadiquallah said.
A 14-year-old boy named Quadratullah said he had known the shooter was an American because of the pants he wore. He also said the man had worn a T-shirt, which matches what other witnesses said Sergeant Bales had been wearing when he returned to his base. Quadratullah said he had followed footprints back to the American base after the sun had come up.
Speaking in a matter-of-fact tone but sometimes animatedly gesturing with a finger — creating the image of a pointed gun as a translator communicated his words to the courtroom — Quadratullah described “a grandmother” whose name he did not know.
She came running to their house, he said, her clothes having been “ripped off.” A few minutes later, he added, “she was shot and she was dead.”
Both defense and prosecution lawyers apologized for their questions, probing for details about scenes of death or the actions of the victims.
Mr. Adin, for instance, was asked whether he believed the clothing had been stripped off or burned off the pile of bodies from his cousin’s family. He answered with a practical, if horrific, observation.
“Nobody was alive to ask whether they were naked before they were burned or killed,” he said.
Sergeant Bales, who has been in custody since the morning of the attack but has not entered a plea, has mostly sat to the right of his lawyers for the testimony, and has rarely shown emotion. When the witness accounts began on Friday, though, he moved close to the big flat-screen monitor mounted on a wall, peering up, a hand on his chin, and occasionally looking down.
Two Afghan Army guards testified on Friday night that they had seen an American soldier leaving and returning to the base near the times that matched the attacks, but neither man could identify the soldier, cloaked as he was in darkness and distance. One remembered, though, that the soldier had laughed when they confronted him and asked what he was doing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/us...gewanted=print
When War Comes Home
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
WILMINGTON, Del.
A DECORATED combat veteran, Staff Sgt. Dwight L. Smith Jr. seemed the perfect soldier. Until, that is, he visited his family in Delaware last Christmas and, as he later told the police, “clicked on.”Inexplicably one morning, while driving his bright red Hummer on a public street, he ran down a 65-year-old woman, Marsha Lee, as she walked her dog, according to police accounts. Then, as a witness watched, he got out and threw Ms. Lee, injured and screaming, into the back seat and drove off.
Ms. Lee’s body, naked except for socks, was found discarded in a wooded area half a mile away. Her head had been bashed in with a heavy, sharp object, perhaps a rock. The police later established that she had been raped.
Police officers searched frantically for the Hummer, and that evening they arrested Sergeant Smith as he drove such a vehicle, still spattered with blood. A police affidavit says that Sergeant Smith admitted to the slaying that night, explaining that he had decided that he “wanted to kill someone.”
Ms. Lee was much loved in the community, for she had devoted herself nearly full time to local causes like an animal shelter and a home for the elderly. Her funeral was one of the biggest anyone can remember in Delaware, and the town has honored her by giving her street a second name: Marsha Lee Way. Her husband, Scottie Lee, declined to speak to me at the request of prosecutors. But family friends see this as straightforward: a case of a young man committing an act of pure evil.
Sergeant Smith, now 25, is in prison, and a trial is still more than a year off, but this may emerge as the pre-eminent American case exploring whether soldiers’ brain injuries and trauma overseas can lead to crimes committed later. The basic question is whether Ms. Lee, as she walked her dog on a quiet street here, became an indirect casualty of our foreign wars.
About half a million American soldiers have suffered from brain-rattling concussions in Afghanistan or Iraq, and one result is an epidemic of traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. We’re seeing many more suicides among recent veterans than among earlier generations, probably because of repeated, extended deployments in combat, coupled with an increase in improvised explosive devices and concussions.
We still aren’t doing nearly enough to provide timely mental health services for these soldiers and veterans. The administration and members of Congress talk a good game about honoring young men and women who went to war, but they don’t allocate the resources necessary to care of them. A result is certainly disability and suicides. Could it also include brutal crimes like this one?
“I know my child,” said Sergeant Smith’s father, Dwight Sr., a 49-year-old manager in the Philadelphia schools. “This isn’t my kid. He was a goofy kid. This isn’t the same man that I sent over.”
The father was sitting morosely in his dimly lit dining room, the curtains all drawn. In the corner of the room was the purple heart that Dwight Jr. earned in Afghanistan, and in the living room just beyond was his wedding photo and a military portrait. It’s impossible to reconcile that beaming young man in the photos with the one who murdered and raped Ms. Lee.
“This is a tragedy for two families,” Mr. Smith added. “I just don’t think my son was ready to come back in regular society.”
Mr. Smith thinks that his son’s mind became poisoned by war, and Dwight Jr. seems to think that as well. I couldn’t get access to him in prison, but in a recent handwritten letter to his father (which is posted with the online version of this column), he wrote:
“I am going to be honest with you dad. I have killed a lot of men and children. Some that didn’t even do anything for me to kill them. Also some that begged for mercy. I have a problem. I think I got addicted to killing people. I could kill someone go to sleep wake up and forget that it ever happened. It got normal for me to be that way. I never wanted to be this way. I just took my job way to serious. I took things to the extreme. Anyone can tell you that I changed. It is like being a completely different person.”
If Sergeant Smith did indeed randomly kill civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan, I could find no record of that. What is clearer is that he was exposed to concussions while in combat, apparently at least two of them. One occurred when he was in Iraq and his Humvee was thrown into the air in an explosion. He was not visibly injured.
Then, in March 2011, a mortar shell landed near him in Afghanistan and blew him 15 feet in the air, shattering a ceramic plate in his body armor, according to his public defender, Bradley V. Manning. Sergeant Smith was hospitalized, flown back to the United States, and given a diagnosis of a traumatic brain injury with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Jasmin Smith, a 29-year-old German woman who is now his wife, and was then his girlfriend, recalls seeing him in the hospital shortly after his return.
“He was in a wheelchair,” she said. “His hand was shaking. He looked pretty bad. He didn’t say anything for 15 or 20 minutes. At the beginning, he didn’t even recognize me.”
She says they celebrated his apparent recovery by marrying two months later. But the recovery seemed fleeting, she says, for he began to abuse alcohol and prescription painkillers and would sometimes fly into violent rages.
“He was always angry about little things,” Mrs. Smith said. “He would throw laptops, punch holes in walls.”
“He used to go crazy,” she added. “He stood in front of me one time and said, ‘I should kill you, I should kill you.’ ”
Mrs. Smith says that he did once choke her and, fearing for her safety, she flew back to Germany. “I didn’t tell him I was leaving, because I was scared.”
Dwight Sr. says his son called then, despondent. “Dad, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” the father quoted his son as telling him. “I just get mad. I can’t help myself.” Eventually, after he promised to control himself, Mrs. Smith did return to his base at Fort Drum, N.Y., and they resumed married life.
TWO months later, on the day of the murder, they were at Dwight Sr.’s home for Christmas vacation. Jasmin says that her husband asked her to go jogging in the morning, but she declined. Then he left the house — and allegedly killed and raped Ms. Lee.
He seemed relatively normal when he returned, Mrs. Smith told me, and they went Christmas shopping that afternoon. After he was arrested that evening, she spoke briefly to her husband; she says that his only explanation for the crime was that he had become enraged while running that he wasn’t physically fit enough. Sometimes since, she says, he has suggested that he blacked out and can’t remember exactly what happened. He also says that he wants to apologize to Ms. Lee’s family.
Rape hasn’t been part of the typical pattern of crimes committed by returning soldiers with T.B.I. or PTSD. But Bennet Omalu, an expert on brain injuries who is also a clinical professor of pathology at University of California, Davis, told me that T.B.I. could indeed lead to such sexual violence. Indeed, Dr. Omalu said he had recently performed an autopsy on an elderly woman who had been randomly raped and murdered by an Iraq war veteran.
Frankly, I hesitated to write this column. I feel strongly that we as a nation have let down our veterans, failing to provide the mental health services they need, and we owe them better. But I can’t be sure that the murder of Ms. Lee is related to these failures. In the end, I decided to go ahead because here’s a young man with no adult criminal record who was promoted rapidly within the military and then suffered brain injuries. And then on his return he allegedly committed a horrific rape and murder that do not make any sense — not to me, not to you, not to his family.
“You lie next to your husband every night,” Mrs. Smith said. “I know he had anger issues, but didn’t think he would do something like that.”
Could the Army have done a better job screening Sergeant Smith’s mental health and addressing his needs? The Army does indeed ask returning soldiers questions about mental health, but self-reporting doesn’t work well because soldiers don’t answer questions honestly. “They don’t want to get kicked out of the Army, and they don’t want to admit anything is wrong,” Mrs. Smith said.
Dwight Sr. notes that his son’s PTSD wasn’t diagnosed until after his arrest and thinks the Army should have given him more help after his brain injury in 2011. “I believe if he’d been in a program, I don’t think we’d be sitting here talking,” he said.
Stephen N. Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired brigadier general who has advised the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on military mental health issues, agrees that we have failed our service members exposed to blasts. He compares it to the runaround soldiers were given for decades about damage from Agent Orange.
What the military most needs, he says, isn’t new weapons systems but a “surge against brain disease” to invest in protecting its most valuable assets — its people.
To its credit, the military this year has stepped up efforts to elevate mental health concerns. But the Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs will have to do far more — and this will suck up resources that planners may prefer to invest in ships and planes.
Another lesson has to do with the larger cost of war: President George W. Bush’s worst mistake was the Iraq war, and President Obama’s was roughly tripling the number of troops in Afghanistan. Let’s hope that future presidents remember that the cost of dispatching ground troops on foreign battlefields isn’t measured only in lives and limbs lost but also in the invisible mental health toll on warriors and those around them.
Mr. Manning, the public defender, is himself a veteran, and he thinks that there are going to be many more crimes like this. He declined to discuss his strategy for the trial, which is set for early 2014 because of the complex mental health issues involved, but added, “It’s hard to make sense of, but when you take somebody’s brain and rattle it around, it damages it in ways they don’t understand.”
I don’t know just what could have led an apparently normal young man to commit such a crime. All we know for certain is that a caring, much loved woman here in Delaware has been horrifically murdered, leaving a vacuum of sadness and a vexing uncertainty about whether there is a link to distant wars.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/op...gewanted=print