Before I took command of my company in Baghdad, I helped my boss manage interrogation operations for Task Force 1st Armored Division. When the Abu Ghraib prison was established as the military’s consolidated interrogation facility for Iraq, I regularly called the prison and asked them to pull prisoners that we had given them out of the general prison population for interrogation.
I never received a single piece of useful intelligence back from the prison. Those guys have to be the worst interrogators ever, I often thought. But in war, especially a counterinsurgency, you feel you can’t afford to leave any stone unturned in the search for intelligence. So, I kept up a steady stream of requests.
I had no inkling at the time of the awful abuses prisoners were enduring in the prison’s hard site, where interrogation subjects were housed and questioned. That inkling came later, in early April 2004, when my battalion commander told me that there was an investigation into serious prisoner abuse at the prison. Suspicion turned to disgust when, a couple weeks later, I viewed the shocking Abu Ghraib photos on television.
For years afterwards, I wondered if any of the prisoners I had asked Abu Ghraib interrogators to question were in that naked pyramid. Then I learned that the prisoners in the photos were, for the most part, not interrogation subjects. Although the prosecuted abuses took place where interrogation subjects were held, nearly all of the prisoners in the published photos were common criminals. They had been pulled out of the general population tents by a group of corrupted military policemen looking for some late-night fun.
But this fact made me feel only slightly better, since I also learned later that there were photographs of worse abuses that President Obama elected not to release, photographs that involve crimes like rape and probably depict prisoners who were interrogation subjects. I learned, too, that Abu Ghraib interrogators had routinely employed such abusive practices as “Forced Nudity” and “Stress Positions” on their subjects—practices I consider torture.
Most American soldiers feel tainted by what happened at the prison. I feel tainted more than most. It makes me sick to think that, by my making calls to that prison and asking for certain prisoners to be interrogated, I was likely part of the causal chain that led to the torture of certain Iraqis. My feelings regarding my unintended role in torture range between anger and mild depression. This is not the terrible event that would later lead me to such grief and moral distress that, for the period of a couple months, I seriously contemplated suicide—an event I’ve written about elsewhere. I can understand, however, how someone might be so guilt-stricken over their abuse of powerless human beings committed to their custody to actually do it.
I can’t remember the names of the prisoners I asked Abu Ghraib interrogators to question. If I did and I met them, I don’t know what I would say to them. It wasn’t my fault? I’m sorry?
The statement that “the U.S. military currently has a suicide problem” is an understatement. From 1990-2003, the active-duty suicide rates of the four major services remained steady at about 10 suicides per 100,000 service members. Since then, this rate has doubled for the Navy and Air Force, making it comparable to the rate among U.S. civilians of like age and gender. But this rate also more than doubled among Marines and tripled among soldiers. Moral distress from combat has been linked to the suicides of warriors for thousands of years. The U.S. military’s suicide rate began its steep climb with our military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus, it is reasonable to conclude that moral injury could be a significant contributing factor to the U.S. military’s suicide problem.
Not all or even most U.S. service members suffer from moral injury, but the potential for such suffering is great. The military’s 2006 and 2007 mental health surveys of soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan found that ten percent of these troops believed that they had mistreated noncombatants or damaged property “when it was not necessary.” If this ratio holds true during the other years of these conflicts—and there is little reason to think that it does not—then nearly 250,000 soldiers and Marines may have cause to suffer moral distress from their actions downrange. This number does not include those who may suffer from other potential sources of moral injury, such as th