Please note: it’s not that he simply “saw a body”. The CNN article said he witnessed a man get cut in half by machine gun fire. That’s not at all like finding a corpse or sitting with a body of someone who died of old age or illness.
The Drudge Report is more detailed. I get the impression that what may have been the faux pas was that he asked for help. It may have pissed off his superiors. Maybe it’s one thing for a commanding officer to say “Smith, go to the counselor, you’re shaking” and irksome if a soldier comes and says “Sir, maybe I should see the counselor, I can’t stop shaking.”
The shrinks who talked with him said he was suffering a common stress reaction, easily fixed. But for some reason his superiors were being stinky about it. Maybe they were afraid it would set a precendent of “can I have a day off for stress management, please?”
I knew a guy who was in a car accident that really wasn’t particularly traumatic. He hit an ice patch and hit a tree. Low speed but it totalled his roommate’s car. He’s not a wuss. You’d think he’d just shake if off. But for some reason he kept shaking for hours and hours and hours. He couldn’t keep his food down for a few days either. Stress is weird that way. Though your rational brain says “well, that wasn’t so bad” sometimes your brain just goes ahead and sets off the chemicals that should be reserved for major trauma.
You know you should be fine, so asking for help was the right thing. My friend’s doctor just got him a prescription to help him sleep and he was fine after a day or so.
Action: Soldier asks for help with combat stress, a normal condition under such circumstances.
Result: Superior tells him to “get his head out of his ass and get with the program.”
Action: Army psychologist calls it a normal reaction and recommends a day of rest and return to duty.
Result: Commander orders him back to the U.S. to face court martial.
Action: On two different occaisions he was determined to be a suicide risk, apparently by military personnel untrained to make such a determination.
Result: Army psychologists and Pogany himself both deny that he was every a suicide risk.
So, to sum it up:
Action: Soldier sees a very disturbing sight and has a normal reaction.
Result: Because he told someone about his normal reaction, he now faces dishonourable discharge and prison time!
Silly soldier. Doesn’t he know that there are only two manly ways to deal with combat stress? He can either keep bottling up his feelings until one day they bubble over and he does something terrible, or he can just relive his horrible experiences through bad dreams every night for the rest of his life. Therapy? The military might give it some lip service, but everybody knows that stuff is for pansies, not real soldiers. :rolleyes:
You’re right. I shouldn’t have been so general. His example does hold true for the command he was under at the time, though.
One of the other sailors on his submarine who needed and asked for help wasn’t given any. He was at home one day, and called his father in Chicago, telling him he was going to kill himself. When the police showed up at his house, he shot at them, killing a 28 year old officer, and died in the resulting gun battle. Here’s a link, it’s the article at the bottom.
Obviously, not everyone gets treated as badly as the men on my husband’s boat. Like I said, though, it doesn’t surprise me that there are other service members who have had similar experiences.
Same kinda deal I expect. You have a guy who has probably had a pretty good career as a secret squirrel–nice and cerebral person gets a nice cerebral army job. Because of his particular skill set–maybe he’s been trained as a linguist/interrogator/intel analyst–he gets attached to a killin’ unit. It’s entirely possible he’s not seen the up-close nastiness that can be a war fatality. Not having had the benefit of specialized block of instruction in killin’ it’s entirely possible he could have had a normal, humane reaction to the graphic realization that people not only come apart, but don’t always do so along neatly perforated lines. As I recall it was also a problem for some of the intel guys in Desert Storm who surveyed the destroyed equipment and personnel on the Highway of Death.
When outraged, nearly any normal person will SAY something to the effect of, “Gimme a gun and I’ll do the job myself.” But when it comes down to it, anyone who CAN do or see the job with no remorse, horror or revulsion in the absence of specific and long-term training is a sicko who probably doesn’t belong on the battlefield.
So dude wigged out. It’s no good for the morale of the rest of the killers to see “weakness” like this, and it surely wouldn’t do for the bosses to say, “That’s OK son, go ahead and throw up in revulsion in front of Iraq (and show to them on OUR behalf that we literally don’t have the stomach for war) and your own comrades (and bring the horor to the forefront of THEIR minds.”
Probably could have been handled better by The Army, though: lower profile removal of Sgt Pogany, new Intel guy the next day with no more explanation than, “Here’s our new interrogator. Buy him a beer.”
snort Wuss. I lived above a funeral home from the time I was about a year old until I was four. My dad’s a mortician, and sometimes I would sit on the kneelers in front of the coffins and talk to the bodies. (At the time, I didn’t know they were “dead people”-I thought they were fake bodies made out of glass).
As for this guy-who knows? Perhaps it’s not just this one incident, but just a lot of stuff that built up, and this triggered it.
Guinastasia: When I was stationed at DLI, one of the Privates in my platoon had worked in a mortuary before joining the Army. Of course, everyone called him “Mort.”
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. As others have pointed out, there must be more to the article as this can’t be unique to the army. It did seem like they had a giant bug up their asses though.
spooje: Well, he did watch an Iraqi become virtually cut in half by machine gun fire. That’s got to be awful.
Then again, he is a member of the United States Armed Forces; to have an image of death convert a sergeant into a sniveling blob at the bottom of a Bradley is not only harmful to morale, it’s dangerous to the lives of his fellow warriors and the mission itself, so poisonous in fact, that court-martial is too easy on this piece of crap excuse for a soldier who by all rights should have been – at the first sniffle – summarily restrained to a stretcher in the back of a HUMVEE until he could be deposited into a stockade in Fallujah whereupon he would break rocks or build barricades or empty asscans in the hot sun, in plain view, until the end of his miserable tour of duty, after which, should his atonement be sufficient, he would receive an Honorable Discharge and return to the States to live out the rest of his life in the shadow of his cowardice.
When you put your hand into a bunch of goo, that a moment before was your best friends face…
Approaching Armistice Day, my earlier post was written in honor of General Patton (may God rest his eternal soul), in celebration of his November 10 march into Oran in World War II. By taking the city, he helped put an end to France’s resistance to the Allies – and interceded into one of the earliest in a long string of modern episodes where Muslims were forced into subjugation, suffering and death for another’s cause.
That’s what I found confusing. Some sources write rather ambiguously something like: “He saw an Iraqi killed by machine gun fire.”
That does not make it clear whether he “saw the Iraqi killed” or that he saw “an Iraqi that had been killed” previously.
The CNN article says quite clearly that he did witnessed the actual killing, but it’s not like CNN is particularly accurate (IMHO). No other news source has since said that he witnessed the killing, but it’s hard to tell the actual timeline (a few stories I’ve seen have the “What a wuss! Scared by a dead body!” slant to them.)