Report on Marine morale in Okinawa

“If you asked the guys in my barracks, ‘How many of you would like to go home tomorrow?’ I’d say maybe 90% would raise their hands.” So says a young Marine stationed on Okinawa. Morale is way down, on – base crime is up, the violence level is up; at the psychiatric clinic at the Naval Hospital, most of the patients are Marines. You hear stories of kids back from Iraq suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) being treated as malingerers by their COs, stories of kids drinking themselves crazy, stories of attempted suicide.

But at this point, this doesn’t necessarily translate into feeling opposed to the war in Iraq, especially among the people who haven’t been there. Those who have been there mostly don’t want to go back. But those who haven’t, and don’t know what it’s like, tend to feel left out: “What’s the point of all this, if I don’t get to go and do The Real Thing?” Military training never teaches recruits that war is a picnic; “War is Hell” comes from General Sherman, after all. What the troops are taught is that it is terribly hard, but also exciting, the highest high you’ll ever have, and maybe most important, is the rite of passage that will make a Real Man out of you, and get you admitted to the Band of Brothers, the people who have been to war. And those people around you who came back from Iraq in a state of deep medical depression, who can’t sleep, who get the shakes, who panic at sudden sounds, well, those must be the losers. That won’t happen to me. It’s awfully easy for someone 18, 19, or 20 to fall for this line, which is why the military has a steady supply of new people to send off to war. But as the Iraq War grinds on and on, the same thing that happened in the War in Vietnam is sure to happen again. More and more troops will begin to see that the war is not the solution to their misery, but rather the cause of it. And that’s what the Pentagon fears the most.

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