“You know, they’d come back from war, it might be three months, it might be two years, it might be five years, all of a sudden they relive it again, and all that has to come out.”
– Fred Allen, Witness to an Execution radio documentary
Before police finally caught sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad, there were two theories about who this menace to society might be. Some were sure the perpetrator was a military man, trained to kill without remorse, now back to wreak havoc like Timothy McVeigh and so many others. The homeland security ilk were sure the shootings were the work of a Muslim terrorist, another chapter in post-9/11 terror. News stories reported that Al Qaeda was training snipers to shoot their way through our land, in places like gas stations and Home Depots.
Turns out they were both right. Well, sort of. Muhammad is a war veteran and a convert to Islam. As our nation inches ever closer to a second war in Iraq, it seems clear that our war policies have again come home to roost. As Alexander Cockburn wrote recently in his Nation column, “America is living in the blowback years. What goes around comes around… A nation always on the war path means a nation always under arms, a nation to which war is always coming home.”
Muhammad is not the first Gulf War veteran to be charged with high-profile, mass homicide. Timothy McVeigh became the most famous when he was convicted and executed for blowing up a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more. This summer, murder and suicide rocked the Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina. Three of the four servicemen accused of killing their wives at Fort Bragg were Gulf War veterans. The University of Arizona student who shot three professors and himself in October just days after Muhammad’s arrest was also a Gulf War vet.
According to a recent Reuters story, researchers are asking more and more questions about the link between “Gulf War syndrome” and these high profile shootings. Although the U.S. Government doesn’t acknowledge such a “syndrome,” it does admit to the pattern of illnesses that have emerged in Gulf War veterans.
Dr. Robert Haley, a member of the research advisory council on Gulf War illnesses to the Department of Veterans Affairs told Reuters, “It’s common for these guys to have become (different). Their wives will tell you, ‘This isn’t the guy who went over. He’s had a personality change.’ And they typically come back (with) difficulty controlling temper, often depressed, withdrawn, not wanting to be around other people, difficulty dealing with complex environments.”
Gulf War syndrome or not, the links between war and violent crime at home are hard to ignore. When you train and deploy young men to kill, at least some are going to become unstable and pose future dangerousness. Cockburn reminds us of the case of World War II veteran Howard Unruh, who shot 13 of his neighbors in 1949, stopping only because he ran out of bullets. “His military firearms training made his ‘walk of death’ the first modern serial-killer case,” Cockburn writes.
On a less visible front, according to Cockburn, a 1999 Defense Department task force found that the number of domestic violence cases against military spouses was five times the number in the general population, with rates among the military rising by over a third from 1996 to 1999. During this same period, domestic violence rates declined in the general population. Former U.S. military psychologist David Grossman told the Toronto Globe and Mail that new programs, now part of basic training, are designed to break down the human aversion to killing in order to make new recruits more effective. “Once this aversion has been removed, it never comes back, and can make it easier for former soldiers to become murderers,” writes Cockburn.
Once police caught Muhammad and 17-year-old John Lee Malvo, the sniper debate found a home in our nation’s other killing field – the death chamber. A macabre battle, dubbed by The New York Times as a “capital punishment bidding war,” erupted between Maryland, Virginia, and the feds. Virginia prosecutors boasted about their state’s execution record – over 80 killed since 1976, second only to Texas. With only three executions, Maryland, where most of the victims fell, just couldn’t compete. Attorney General John Ashcroft settled the argument by turning the suspects over to Virginia, making it crystal clear his decision was based on the state’s ability to execute the juvenile, too. Neither Maryland nor the federal government allow the execution of juvenile offenders.
And so the cycle continues. Death begets death. Violence begets violence.
Before he left his job with the Texas death chamber, Fred Allen participated in over 120 executions, working as part of the team that strapped people down to the gurney prior to lethal injection. The experience was scarring, and Allen eventually had to leave the job. He described how the images of those executed continually run through his head in the 2000 radio documentary, Witness to an Execution: “Just like taking slides in a film projector and having a button and just pushing a button and just watching, over and over: him, him, him. I don’t know if it’s mental breakdown, …probably would be classified more as a traumatic stress, similar to what individuals in war had.”
“My main concern right now is these other individuals [who work in the death chamber],” Allen continued. “I hope that this doesn’t happen to them – the ones that participate, the ones that go through this procedure now. And I will say honestly – and I believe very sincerely – somewhere down the line something is going to trigger. Everybody has a stopping point. Everybody has a certain level. That’s all there is to it.”
Sources:
Alexander Cockburn, “Blowback: From Unruh to Muhammad,” The Nation, November 18, 2002.
Reuters USA, November 16, 2002.
Soundportraits Productions, “Witness to an Execution,” premiered on NPR’s All Things Considered, October 20, 2000.
