The following Time.com article on the Army’s battle against suicide highlights the dilemma of a smaller Army fighting long term wars. Our soldiers and their families who have served multiple deployments carry enormous emotional and moral stress. As a nation, we need to come to terms with this and figure out a way to reduce the number of back to back deployments we send our soldiers on.
The recent www.wikilinks.org publication of the gun-camera video of the tragic deaths of two Reuters camera men in July of 2007 has generated quite a bit of discussion on the New York Times blog pages. This incident captures the troubling issue of pilots’ moral insulation and humor on the battlefield. Anthony Martinez, an infantryman and an experienced aerial footage analyst, provides an interesting perspective on the wikileaks video.
Suzanne Opton captures the face of a soldier’s vulnerability,
so often shielded from the public. Her work has been shown on billboards
throughout the US and in the DC metro. Do have a look.
For more on the roll of doctors in interrogations, I recommend reading the letters to the editor in NY Times, March 4, 2010: “How to Treat Those Who Aid Torture”
I highly recommend the potent and much needed expose of doctors and psychologists involved in gov’t sponsored torture. Read Doctors without Morals by Rubenstein and Xenakis.