Why Drone Operators, Non-Combat Soldiers, and Peace Corps Volunteers Get PTSD | Sebastian Junger

PTSD is a confusing phrase, I think, for a lot of people. I mean first of all it’s not just something that soldiers get. It’s not just something that happens at war. Life is traumatic. There are car accidents; children die of cancer. I mean all kinds of horrible things happen to civilians, and they wind up with a long-term traumatic reaction which is just as crippling as what could happen to soldiers in combat. So it’s important to remember this is just the human condition that we’re talking about.

When I was covering war in the nineties, I had never heard of the term PTSD. I didn’t know that there were long-term psychological consequences to trauma. And so when I came back from Afghanistan in 2000, I was there a year before 9/11 with the Northern Alliance under Ahmad Shah Massoud. I spent two months in the north, and back then the Taliban were a real military force. I mean they had fighter planes. They had an air force. They had tanks. They had everything.

And so fighting the Taliban was a really daunting proposition, and we got hammered a few times. I came back to New York pretty altered, actually, but I didn’t know it. I was a young man; I didn’t think anything really affected me. And I was fine until one day I went down into the subway, and unexpectedly I had the first panic attack of my life. Everything was going to kill me. The trains were going too fast and were going to jump the rails and somehow plow into me. There were too many people on the platform, and they were going to somehow turn on me and attack me. The lights were too bright. Everything was too loud.

I knew I wasn’t in danger, but it felt like I was in enormous danger, and I was absolutely terrified. I finally ran out of there and walked to wherever I was going. I kept having panic attacks in small places where I was confined and couldn’t leave. For months later, I had no idea it was connected to combat. I mean I wasn’t in a situation like that in combat, so I didn’t know that they were connected. But in fact, it was. I was having what’s called short-term acute post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a survival adaptation.

I was having all the reactions that you want to have if your life’s been in danger. You want to react to sudden noises. You don’t want to be in situations where you don’t have control. Small confined spaces with too many people, too much going on. That’s a dangerous situation. You want to be a little bit depressed. It keeps you quiet and out of harm’s way. You want to be quick to anger; it makes you prepared to fight. All the things we associated with PTSD have real survival value in a situation of great danger.

The problem happens when that acute PTSD turns into a long-term disorder that can last even someone’s lifetime. And at that point, it doesn’t have survival value. It actually has negative value. I mean it gets in the way of leading a healthy life. And that’s chronic long-term PTSD. It’s not adaptive. It’s not healthy. It’s the opposite. And that is the problem that America is trying to solve with some of its soldiers.

Most of the U.S. military is not face to face with their enemy. Even at OP Restrepo, a combat outpost that I was at off and on for a year, those guys were in an enormous amount of combat. We never once saw the enemy. There were muzzle flashes. They got shot at, whatever. A lot of stuff was going on, and there were casualties, but they actually never were – they never saw the enemy. Most of the U.S. military is not in combat. Only ten percent of the U.S. military is actually in combat.

But the curious thing is that when you bring these soldiers back to this country, a much larger percentage than ten percent experience pretty intense psychological distress. It can’t be trauma because they weren’t in combat. So what is it exactly? If you look at Peace Corps volunteers who obviously aren’t in war zones but they’re living in small tightly bonded communities in the developing world. And when they come back, something like 25 percent of Peace Corps volunteers go into a serious depression.

Soldiers, even if they weren’t in combat – and most weren’t – soldiers experience a very similar communal life within their platoon. Each person is essential to the group. The group is essential to each person. It reproduces our evolutionary past very, very closely. They do everything together. They eat meals together. They sleep in the same area. They live a communal, in the sense primitive existence. That feels really good.

And when people come back from circumstances like that, be it the Peace Corps or the military or what have you, when they return from a situation like that to modern society, it’s psychologically very, very hard, and the depression rate is very high. Soldiers call it PTSD because that’s the term that is current in society right now. But actually, and I’m not a psychologist, my guess is that a fair amount of those people actually weren’t traumatized, and what they’re actually experiencing is a painful radical transition from communalism to the sort of individualism of modern society, and it doesn’t feel good.

Drone warfare is an interesting example of how you don’t have to be in danger to be traumatized. In fact, what researchers have found is that the most traumatizing thing to human beings is witnessing harm to others, witnessing dismemberment, witnessing people being killed, particularly women and children. But even enemy combatants. Seeing harm and dismemberment to other human beings is extremely disturbing.

I know from my own experience that the times that my life has been in danger, those incidents have changed me, but I wouldn’t say that they’re traumatizing me. The things that have really remained in my mind and can pretty quickly bring tears to my eyes are the times that I’ve seen other people suffering or other people dead, people who should not be dead, and civilians, children, that kind of thing.

So now think about drone operators, you know. They’re in an air-conditioned room somewhere in Nevada, or at least that’s where I picture them, but wherever they are. They’re in an air-conditioned room with a joystick, flying drones around halfway around the world and deciding when to annihilate a group of people on the ground. They’re playing God.

And not only are they playing God, they’re playing God in a situation where they themselves are not in danger. I think, on some level, as tactically sensible as drone warfare is, on some level I think to the actual pilots it might feel a little bit dishonorable. Like you’re killing people without being in any danger yourself, and that sense of, you know, is this honorable or not actually can be – that question can actually be kind of traumatic.

I know from talking to psychologists who studied Vietnam, one of the most disturbing ideas was that we might not be fighting an honorable war over there. That was really disturbing to people in ways that having a bullet go by your head isn’t that disturbing. You can recover from that pretty quickly. And so for drone operators, the fact that they have an elevated rate of PTSD, they have the same rate of PTSD as people who fly combat missions in the arena of combat in actual airplanes.

So that’s something very profound about humans, and in some ways it says a good thing about humans. That we’re that deeply disturbed by doing harm to others, I think sort of allows us to see a glimmer of hope for the human race. I often look at this country through the eyes of soldiers who have fought for us all. And I know that out there, I know this because I’ve seen it.

Out there, there are literally no distinctions of race or politics or religion or anything. People in a platoon in combat are valued for how they act, not for their race, their beliefs, whatever it may be. It’s a weird egalitarian utopia in that sense. And they come back to a country which is really at war with itself. Soldiers fight for this country and come back to a country that’s fighting itself.

And I imagine – I’m not a vet so I don’t know firsthand, but I imagine that is incredibly demoralizing. You have political parties, political leaders who are literally accusing each other of being an enemy of the state, of actively trying to harm this country. You have people mocking their own president. You have political leaders who are actually suggesting that certain segments of the American population, of U.S. citizens, aren’t as sort of legitimate and deserving as other segments.

Whatever your political beliefs, surely that is an insult to our shared idea of democracy and equality. And when soldiers go overseas to fight for those ideals and come home to watch a country that can’t agree on them and, in fact, is endangering itself through this behavior, it must be incredibly demoralizing.

And again, I’m not a psychologist, but I know a lot of soldiers who have gone through a lot of stuff, and I’ve gone through a lot of stuff with them. I imagine that along with the other psychological stresses that come with combat, there’s this other horrible psychological stress that happens when they return home and they see what we’re doing to each other. And if only for their sake, I wish we’d stop it.