戰爭創傷後遺症：帶著愧疚活下去
文化交流
作者：by Kevin Sites
November 2004， against a shattered wall in south Fallujah in Iraq， with video rolling， I conduct a battlefield interview with 1）US Marine Corporal William Wold. He has just shot six men dead inside a room adjoining a 2）mosque and is juiced with a mix of 3）adrenaline and relief.
“I was told to go the room，” he says，“and my first Marine went in… he saw a guy with an AK， I told him to shoot the guy， then I shot the six guys on the left… and my other Marine shot two other guys.”
Wold grew up near Vancouver in Washington State. A high-school 4）linebacker， he had a college football scholarship waiting for him， but gave it up to join the Marines.
“My fiancée’s worried that I’m not going to come back the same. I’ll never tell her what things I did here. I’ll never tell anybody， ’cause I’m not proud of killing people. I’m just proud to serve my country. I hate being here， but I love it at the same time.”
Wold’s fiancée was right. He wouldn’t come back the same. He thought his war was over， but a few months later， back in the safety of his childhood home， surrounded by his adoring family， the dark secrets and all the guilt emerged from his mind—like the Greeks from their hollow wooden horse， unrelenting in their destruction of ancient Troy.
A recent study by the US Department of Veterans Affairs （VA） shows that nearly two-dozen veterans are killing themselves every day， nearly one an hour. This 5）attrition， connected at least in part to combat-related 6）post-traumatic stress disorder （PTSD） and other war-related psychological injuries， is an enormous price to pay for avoiding the subject. So great， in fact， that the total number of US active duty suicides in 2012 （349） was higher than the number of combat-related deaths （295）.
“When a leader destroys the 7）legitimacy of the army’s moral order by betraying ‘what’s right’，” writes psychiatrist Jonathan Shay， an expert in combat trauma， in his book Achilles in Vietnam （1994）， “he 8）inflicts manifold injuries on his men.”
This could be what happened to Corporal William Wold. Wold’s mother Sandi said he was fine for a while when he first got home， but after a few months the darkness seeped out. He couldn’t eat and he never slept.
The 9）transgression that bothered him most wasn’t the carnage in the mosque， but another， even more disturbing incident， an accidental killing at a vehicle checkpoint in Iraq. The vague description Sandi gave to a local television reporter is horrifying： “A vehicle came through that hadn’t been cleared，” she said. “The lieutenant says：‘Take them out.’ He took them out. They went to the van—it was a bunch of little kids. And he had to take their bodies back to the family.”
Instead of killing an armed enemy， Wold had， through the orders of an officer， killed several children. The accidental killing of civilians in the Iraq War， as in all wars， is much more common than you can imagine. Numbers are so high it wouldn’t benefit the military to keep accurate tabs； rigorous documentation would just fan the public relations nightmare and boost the 10）propaganda value of those deaths for the other side.