Excerpt from an interview on Iraq war: Chris Hedges - by Sarah Ruth van Gelder

from YES! Magazine, Winter 2005 Issue,
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1165

CHRIS HEDGES: Iraq is a particularly bad situation for
combat soldiers and Marines because it is classic
insurgency warfare. It's very similar to what soldiers
and Marines experienced in Vietnam, what Israeli
soldiers experience in Gaza and on the West Bank, and
what the French experienced in Algeria.

You have an elusive enemy. You're not fighting a set
organized force, the way we were, for example, in the
first Persian Gulf War. So you very rarely see your
attacker, and this builds up a great deal of
frustration. This frustration is compounded by the
fact that you live in an environment where you are
almost universally despised. Everyone becomes the
enemy. And after your unit suffers -- after, for
instance, somebody in your unit is killed by a sniper
who melts back into the slums where the shot was fired
from -- it becomes easy to carry out acts of revenge
against people who are essentially innocent, but who
you view as culpable in some way for the death of your
comrades.

Robert J. Lifton, who did a lot of studies on the
Vietnam War, called these "atrocity-producing
situations." It became very easy in Vietnam to shoot
down a woman in a rice field as revenge for a comrade
who may have stepped on a mine a few hours before.

War always creates trauma. But in counter-insurgency
wars, you are constantly on edge. Going down to a
corner store to buy a Coca-Cola creates tremendous
amounts of anxiety because somebody could come up
behind you and put a gun to the back of your head and
kill you.

That's what we're seeing in Iraq. The psychological
cost -- the emotional cost -- that we're inflicting on
our soldiers and Marines is devastating.

One of the disturbing things about this war is that,
because they are so short on numbers, they are
treating people for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and
then sending them back into combat situations.

So I'm worried about what we're going to see over the
long term as these young men and women are
re-integrated into the society. . .

[Read more of this interview at:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1165

Chris Hedges has written for The Dallas Morning News,
The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio,
and The New York Times. Hedges was part of The New
York Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for
coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002
Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights
Journalism.]