Word: stressed
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...once Harding returned to base, he had trouble sleeping. His mind replayed the gruesome scene over and over. He suffered changes of mood and was beset by anxiety about why the incident had happened. He went out on patrol the next day carrying with him classic symptoms of combat stress: the emotional, physical and psychological fallout from living through--or under the extended threat of--traumatic events. Said company commander Captain Patrick Rapicault, "You have to get over your feelings and keep on pushing, just for the simple reason that you have another 170 Marines to take care...
These days, stress is a given in Iraq for locals and foreigners working in just about any capacity. Combat troops no doubt feel it most acutely. Day after day in the hit-and-run, chase-and-hide rhythm that has defined most of the fighting over the past 20 months, front-line forces are confronting the bulk of the horrors. So far, more than 1,200 have died and at least 8,400 have sustained physical injuries. That does not count the 1 in 5 who, according to a recent study, are suffering what the military calls "stress injury...
...easy to see why so many troops are succumbing to stress. Every trip "outside the wire" brings the possibility of attack from any direction, from people who look like everyday citizens and from everyday objects--cars, oilcans, dead animals, even human beings--refashioned into deadly bombs. "It's relentless," says a Marine who was deployed in al-Anbar province, which includes violent hotbeds like Ramadi and Fallujah. "From the moment you arrive until the moment you leave, you're in danger." The life-threatening character of the daily job steadily erodes an individual's psychological immune system...
...makes everyone even more susceptible, less resilient, to whatever happens," says Navy Captain Bill Nash, a psychiatrist who heads the Marines' Operational Stress Control Readiness (OSCAR) program in al-Anbar. "The war here has produced more significant stress injuries than any other conflict since Vietnam," he says. "And you'd have to be exceptionally optimistic and using massive denial to believe we are not going to generate a hell of a lot more of these stress injuries before we are done here...
Gonzales later requested a legal opinion from a Justice Department agency that ultimately argued that subjecting suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in captivity to extreme stress "may be justified." When abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison came to light last spring, some Administration critics cited that memo as the legal backbone for the harsher treatment of prisoners, which is now the subject of court-martial proceedings...