What the System Says

Arthur Silber examines the story of the Walter Reed scandal and says that the story no one is getting is that the process through which the story came to light is, in a sense, more important than the story itself. The story, he says, is that politicians are cowards and are motivated to action, such as it is, only though concerted effort and repetitious outrage. He says, and he’s right about this too, that it’s inconceivable the military leadership was unaware of what was going on. He says, and he’s right about this, that it’s inconceivable the Congress, or at least the important members on the appropriate committees and subcommittees, didn’t know what was going on. He says the real story here is that they would all happily have let it continue and paid it no mind, but for the slow trickle of reports, the gradual appearance of certain news stories, and finally the reportage of a major newspaper. He says that what we should understand is that none of the major players in this story—not the Congress, not the military brass, not the Secretary of Defense—is trying to right a wrong; they are trying to fix an embarrassment.

I agree with Arthur that this is a story no one is getting, but I don’t think that it’s the story. The word I’ve been hearing over the last few days is “systemic.” As in: “the problems at Walter Reed maybe systemic throughout military hospitals.” As in: “Poor treatment of wounded prisoners may turn out to be a systemic problem.” The word seems to me to connote a certain quality that I might call a lack of intent. It seems to suggest something sui generis. It seems to indicate a certain random aggregation of acts, practices, intentions, and circumstances, some good and some bad, whose final combination catalyzed a ghastly mistreatment of desperately hurt individuals that no one wanted to address in its totality.

I think we underestimate the frequency with which systemic becomes an exculpatory euphemism for intentional. Systemic can also be a synonym for policy. It seems to me that the story here is less about the mistreatment of soldiers, the poor standard of care, the poor living conditions, than it is about the huge impediments to their return to the world. It seems to me that the story here is about keeping a certain kind of soldier tied up. Many war opponents point to the policy of the Administration to prevent airing photographs of the coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq. But a flag-draped coffin, even if it indicates a casualty of war, is also a visual symbol of nationalism. A crippled soldier, meanwhile, or a disfigured soldier, or a mentally ill soldier, is a very different kind of symbol. He suggests something else entirely about war. We all know war kills, and the coffins themselves are an abstraction, cloaked again in the abstraction of the flag. An amputee resists abstraction. A man suffering from sever mental illness resists abstraction. There are by reports about 20,000 of these men. It seems to me that what we had was a system designed explicitly to keep them bottled up for months and years, to render them less fit for eventual return to civilian life, not more. I think many of us have had the acquaintance of a “crazy” Vietnam veteran—a friend, or the father of a friend, perhaps. I think we all understand that there’s a certain stigma about these men. I think we all understand that although we admit they may have “seen some things,” we also largely accept that they are unreliable narrators.

Let me suggest that there is a purpose to the mistreatment of a certain kind of returning soldier. Let me suggest that our military and our government have a compelling interest in impeaching a certain kind of witness.