Beacon Broadside

The Death of Chris Kyle and the Need for Soul Repair

Rita Nakashima Brock, Ph. D. is Founding Co-Director of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School.(www.britesoulrepair.org). She was a professor for twenty years, directed the Fellowship Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, a prominent advanced research institute, and from 2001-2002, was a Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School Center for Values in Public Life. Her latest book is Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury After War, co-authored with Gabriella Lettini.

The killing of Iraq veteran and national figure Chris Kyle prompted media queries and questions for the three of us who run the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School. Our Center is dedicated to recovery from moral injury in veterans. Rev. Dr. Coleman Baker, Chaplain (Col.) Herman Keizer, Jr. (ret.) and I spent a day reflecting together on what went wrong when Kyle tried to help a fellow vet. Here are some of our reflections.

Chris Kyle, a well-decorated Navy SEAL sniper, completed four tours in Iraq with an extraordinary record of kills. Kyle's book about his experiences in the clandestine fraternity gained him much admiration. Then, a week ago on a firing range in Texas, Eric Routh, a Marine reservist who served in Iraq, killed him and his fellow veteran Chad Littlefield.

Kyle was beloved by many because he tried to support his fellow vets in returning to civilian life, but it seems clear that Kyle himself never really left the military. He overcame his own struggles with alcohol and a fear of leaving his house by re-building a military cocoon as a means of therapy. Kyle's idea of what worked best for returning veterans was the military espirt de corps of an active unit. He used the tools of his military experience at his Fitco Care Foundation, designing treatments built on exercise, counseling and veteran camaraderie. And he kept a live-fire range open and invited others to shoot for therapy.

He recreated the military world of heroism both at work and with other vets. He wanted veterans to be seen as strong and heroic, like soldiers who serve honorably and heroically and for the sake of others. His life was dedicated to still being part of the war. "Being able to do this makes me feel like I'm still a part of it and still giving back."

In trying to treat Eric Routh by echoing his war experience, Kyle, who sought to stay in war, may have provoked a desperate Routh to seek escape from such "help." By not questioning whether military values can simply be relived in civilian life, Kyle failed to understand difficulties some returning vets might have with a "HOOHA" model of counseling and training, especially those with traumatic brain injuries, PTSD, and moral injury. For veterans who feel betrayed by the government, have serious trauma, or experience a collapse of moral meaning after war, more exposure to military life can compound the difficulty of adjusting to the civilian world.

In a telling comment, however, about his first kill in Iraq, Kyle hints at the personal cost of leaving his cocoon: 

It was hard trying to wrap my mind around "Well, how can I shoot another human being?" And even the first time I had to do it, they're yelling at me. "You have to do it! Take it! Take it!" And it's still trying to get over the fact that, well, I'm fixin' to have to kill someone.

 

And then you do it, and you have to think of it differently. You're not killing a person, you're killing an enemy that if you don't do it, they're gonna kill your guys. ... You have to de-humanize it, so you don't go crazy.

In his civilian life, Kyle continued this strategy of de-humanizing his enemies. He referred to people in Iraq as "savages." He also dismissed civilians as shallow and selfish. 

We think Kyle had a good point about civilian society. The care for each other unto death and the willingness to die in service to others bonds a combat unit in ways that are rare in civilian life. During the Iraq War, civilians were shielded from images of coffins returning home and were advised to shop, rather than make personal sacrifices to support the troops. The narcissism, personal ambitions, and self-obsessions with consumerism and celebrity culture have prompted some veterans to ask, "I fought for this?"

Without a new social, emotional, spiritual system that can help veterans of war move from a military system to civilian life, we sentence many of them to military cocoons or lonely states of limbo from which transition is nigh impossible.

Few institutions in our culture ask people to commit to each other over the whole life course, from birth to death. Few organizations welcome strangers and include them in a community of care; attend to those who need help, feel hurt or are troubled in their souls; and hold each other accountable for living into their best selves in circles of generosity and reciprocity. These commitments of lifelong weekly activities describe congregational life. Though no congregation does them perfectly, most try their best, and many do them well.

We believe that congregations are one place that should be welcoming veterans home, but few have committed to this work. It should not be undertaken with just simple good intentions, though good intentions matter a great deal. To welcome veterans into a community's life, we need to understand how to assist the transition from the values of military life to religious life. We must advocate for better services for treating PTSD, and we must support veterans' families and all they go through to welcome veterans home.

We mourn the deaths of Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield. They are tragic, senseless killings that have left their families and friends with unimaginable loss. We may never know why they were killed. However, we hope their deaths can help us all better understand the complicated and difficult return to civilian life for combat veterans and see this as an important responsibility of us all.

Without adequate ways for veterans to process their war experience, reflect on its moral and psychological impact, and restore them to civilian life, we fail as a society to bring them all the way home. Tragically, just before he died, Kyle hinted he might be ready to come home. He wanted to slow down and just take care of his family, saying he was tired: "I'm just trying to be the me that I am and not all of this other crap."

Related articles

Beacon Buzz: Prairie Silence, women in the military, and more!

I'll Be Home for Christmas (Even Though I'm an Atheist)

Kyle's military cocoon might have hurt, not helped

Suspect in killing of former SEAL had been in psychiatric hospital

Eddie Ray Routh, Iraq Veteran, Charged With Murdering Chris Kyle

Moral Injury: The Crucial Missing Piece in Understanding Soldier Suicides

Rita Nakashima Brock is Founding Co-Director of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School. She was a professor for twenty years, directed the Fellowship Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, a prominent advanced research institute, and from 2001-2002, was a Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School Center for Values in Public Life. This piece was co-authored by Col. Herman Keizer, Jr. (ret.), Co-Director of the Soul Repair Center, who served for 34 years as a military chaplain, and Dr. Gabriella Lettini, co-author with Brock of Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury After War.

This piece originally appeared at Huffington Post.

The crisis of military suicides, averaging one a day, has captured national attention. The July 23 cover story in Time magazine summarizes much of this coverage. Unfortunately, it is misleading.

The article presents the suicides of two officers—a helicopter pilot who served in Iraq and a medical doctor who did not serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. This example skews the article in two ways. First, in focusing on officers, it selects a group that tends to see less direct combat than the enlisted men who both do more direct fighting and commit suicide at higher rates than officers. Second, in contrasting the two officers' deaths, it suggests that suicide rates are the same for those who serve and those who do not serve in combat. However, the medical doctor first was an enlisted soldier who worked on a bomb squad and served in Bosnia. He was also in Oklahoma City just after the federal building was attacked—years before he decided to become a doctor. It's likely he saw war conditions during his earlier service. We need to remember that the U.S. has sent its forces into violent conflicts every year since World War II, except one, so Iraq and Afghanistan are not the only ways a soldier may have experienced combat.

The most serious blind spot in the reporting on military suicides is an absence of discussions about the moral impact of military training and its implementation in combat. Soldiers are trained to kill, which is regarded as criminal behavior in civilian life, and they are trained to be lethal without even thinking about it, a method of training called reflexive fire training.

We suggest that moral injury is likely one of the most important factors in military suicide rates.

Moral injury is not PTSD. The latter is a dysfunction of brain areas that suppress fear and integrate feeling with coherent memory; symptoms include flashbacks, nightmares, dissociative episodes and hyper-vigilance. PTSD is an immediate injury of trauma.

Related posts on Beacon Broadside:

An Epidemic in the US Military

Casualties on the Home Front

Rita Nakashima Brock on the Obama Legacy at Occupy Oakland

Moral injury has a slow burn quality that often takes time to sink in. To be morally injured requires a healthy brain that can experience empathy, create a coherent memory narrative, understand moral reasoning and evaluate behavior. Moral injury is a negative self-judgment based on having transgressed core moral beliefs and values or on feeling betrayed by authorities. It is reflected in the destruction of a moral identity and loss of meaning. Its symptoms include shame, survivor guilt, depression, despair, addiction, distrust, anger, a need to make amends and the loss of a desire to live.

While the Army has long provided protective training for soldiers sent to war, this is clearly now inadequate. Battles with insurgencies make violence against civilians commonplace and acceptable in ways that violate international standards for the conduct of war and the moral code of conduct for soldiers. For example, "Sniper Wonderland," a military drill chant says:

See the little girl with the puppy;
Lock and load a hollow pointed round...
Take the shot and maybe if you're lucky;
You'll watch their lifeless bodies hit the ground....

The most recent Army attempt to prepare troops for battle appears to have failed miserably. Its "Comprehensive Soldier Fitness" (CSF) program, begun in 2009 with a $125 million investment and lauded in a New York Times Magazine article in March 2012, has been widely criticized. It bypasses the difficult ethical questions that many healthy human beings ask about war, and its spiritual fitness component has no moral content. It suggests that a soldier's commitment to a higher purpose—mission first—makes for resiliency. But most people capable of such a commitment also have empathy for others and deep moral values.

The Army's "spiritual fitness" encourages soldiers to see events in a neutral light, rather than labeling them as good or bad, and to create a nightly list of positive things that happened that day. The lack of awareness is startling regarding what it might mean to ask someone to think of killing a child, losing a close friend or torturing detainees as neutral or positive.

Proving a direct cause-effect relationship between such training and suicides is difficult, of course. However, there are certain moral reactions to war and the experience of combat training that indicate a violation of moral conscience in war can have devastating inner consequences in soldiers. A larger proportion of soldiers and veterans who serve in combat seek the counseling help of a chaplain over the help of a clinician. This choice has two likely reasons. First, speaking to a chaplain does not create a negative psychological record in a military career. Second, psychological training does not require knowledge of theological issues, moral discussions of good and evil, or religious meaning. In fact, when soldiers raise moral questions about conscience in therapy, they are often referred to clergy.

The reporting on military and veteran suicides mostly fails to explore the role of moral injury. When a suicide occurs years after a soldier returns from war, combat experience is often disregarded as a primary cause of the suicide. Yet, as Karl Marlantes, a Vietnam veteran, reports in "What It Is Like to Go to War," he was fine for a decade, and then, he crashed. Often, such delays are used to deny VA services or are regarded as a family problem, rather than as a consequence of service in combat.

The alarming rates of reported suicides are squishy statistics and do not reflect the true numbers of soldiers who take their own lives. Many combat veterans tell stories of comrades who shot themselves, but who were reported as "non-combat" or "accidental" casualties. Soldiers who deliberately place themselves in harm's way in hopes of dying are reported as casualties, not suicides. Since many life-insurance policies will not pay benefits to families if suicide is the cause of death, the need to disguise suicide may mean some apparently accidental deaths were, in actuality, planned. We will never know the true suicide numbers, but we do know moral injury causes intense inner anguish.

Moral injury is not a clinical condition that can be medicated or cured by psychology. It requires the reconstruction of a moral identity and meaning system with the support of a caring, nonjudgmental community that can provide a way for veterans to learn to forgive themselves. But any community that wants to offer such support must have the moral courage to examine its own responsibility for war. With such a small percentage of Americans (1 percent) serving in the military, and the escalating unpopularity of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, too few people or communities remember the initial popularity of the wars or care about the cost to the men and women we send to fight on our behalf.

We care, and we believe our whole society bears responsibility for addressing moral injury. Whether or not we supported the wars, they do not end when soldiers come home. Instead, they continue in the souls of those who fought and in their families and communities when they return to civilian life. That is why we believe one right response of moral conscience to military and veteran suicides is to study and address moral injury as a hidden wound of war.

 

An Epidemic in the U.S. Military

Imagine a military health issue that affects almost every woman who enlists. Imagine that this same problem affects a smaller proportion, but a large number, of men. This problem seriously impacts a soldier's ability to serve, often causes mental and physical health issues, and can even lead to suicide.

And imagine that those who face this issue are likely to find themselves further traumatized by any attempt to address the problem. According to Invisible No More, since 2006 more than 95,000 service members have been sexually assaulted in the military. While most victims do not report their crimes, the few that have the courage to come forward are often ostracized, further harassed, and sometimes even punished more harshly than their perpetrators. They can see their dreams of serving their country in the military shattered, their careers derailed by something for which they are not to blame. 

On July 6th at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, I saw The Invisible War, a film that investigates the epidemic of rape in the U. S. military. This wasn't a topic that was news to me: I am old enough to remember the Tailhook scandal and the assaults at Aberdeen Proving Ground. And in 2009, Beacon published Helen Benedict's book The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, which tells the story of five women soldiers who bravely served in Iraq but were faced with a culture of misogyny, homophobia, and sexual violence so pervasive, as one female soldier put it, "I ended up waging my own war against an enemy dressed in the same uniform as mine." 

The Invisible War filmmakers (director Kirby Dick and producers Amy Ziering and Tanner King Barklow) credited Benedict's writing as an inspiration, and she is one of many experts who appears in the film. Since the book was first published, Benedict has appeared before Congress to testify about military sexual assault. She has also written a novel, Sand Queen (Soho Press), and a play, The Lonely Soldier Monologues, inspired by her research.

I've followed Benedict's work since the book was published, and through it I've had an education in the lives of women in the military. I've learned about organizations such as the Service Women's Action Network and Protect Our Defenders, and about the work being done by Massachusetts Representative Niki Tsongas (who introduced the movie when I saw it at the Coolidge) and others in Congress to investigate the problem of military sexual assault and encourage positive changes in military culture. The men and women who have come forward to share their stories--with Benedict, with the filmmakers, before Congress--to call them brave is an understatement. They speak for countless others who suffer in silence. 

After seeing the film, I interviewed Helen Benedict via email. —Jessica Bennett, Blog Editor, Beacon Broadside

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The women profiled in the film and in your book were different and their stories were each unique, but the similarities are striking: harassment, assault, retaliation, threats, and a lack of accountability. The Lonely Soldier focuses on women from one war, in one branch of the military, but it seems that this is a problem that has been persistent in all branches of service, and one that manifests itself both stateside and overseas. How pervasive is sexual assault and harassment in the military and how does it affect soldiers—both women and men?

The latest Department of Defense figures are showing that 20 percent of military women are sexually assaulted while serving, while for men, the number is one percent. Because men outnumber women in the military, this means that many more men than women are assaulted, but proportionally the vast number of victims are women. Other studies I cite in my book show an even higher rate – 33 percent of women sexually assaulted – and a 90 percent rate of sexual harassment. These numbers are of epidemic proportions and affect women on home bases and at war.

Watch Helen Benedict on C-SPAN's BookTV discussing The Lonely Soldier

The stories of abuse in the movie and in your book are harrowing, but it seems that a good deal of the damage inflicted upon victims comes from the way they were treated by the military after they are assaulted. How does military leadership fail assault and harassment victims?

The military is a blame-the-victim culture, thus many victims are met with skepticism, disbelief or outright blame when they report an assault. They are often treated as liars trying to get attention or bring down the career of a man, or blamed for drinking, flirting or otherwise “inviting” the assault. (No one invites a brutal attack, ever.) Furthermore, even for those cases that are taken seriously and prosecuted, the conviction and punishment rates are shockingly low--much lower than they are in civilian courts. This sends the message that assailants will be protected by the military, whereas their victims will be vilified.

The most recent scandal--which has received surprisingly little media attention--involves twelve instructors and at least 31 female trainees at Lackland Air Force Base. One instructor, Staff Sgt. Peter Vega-Maldonado, was allowed to plead guilty to "having sex with a female trainee" and received 90 days confinement before he acknowledged being involved with a total of ten trainees. The most serious charges, which will be addressed in a court-martial trial beginning this week, are leveled against Staff Sgt. Luis Walker. The leadership at Lackland has taken great pains to stress the personal responsibility of the perpetrators for their crimes, emphasizing that the great majority of instructors are ethical in their treatment of trainees. While this is certainly the case, does this PR tactic sound familiar?

Well, in all fairness, most men in the military are not sexual predators. Many too many are, but not most, so in a way the military is justified in saying most of their leaders behave correctly. We should be careful not to paint all military men as rapists, for this is terribly unfair to the majority who would never behave like that and are as appalled by it as women are. Sexual predators are repeat offenders, so one man can cause an egregious amount of harm.

That said, the military must take more responsibility for this huge problem in its ranks and its culture. It has been denying and covering up the problem for decade after decade, thus perpetuating and even supporting what is essentially a rape culture. No organization in the U.S. gives individuals as much power as the military does: with that power must come ethical behavior and anyone who abuses the power should meet with the proper justice.

Sexual "predators" or repeat sexual offenders like Jerry Sandusky at Penn State, Catholic Priests accused of abusing parishioners, and military serial abusers thrive in an environment where they have power imbalances and institutional secrecy on their side. Predators also feel empowered by "getting away with it," something that happens in an overwhelming number of sexual assault cases in the military. What does the military do to screen out or identify sexual predators?

As far as I understand, the military does almost nothing to screen out or identify sexual predators. Under President Bush, many criminal records were waived for recruits because the military was too short-staffed to run two wars. No one with a criminal record, especially one that entails abuse of women, should be allowed to serve.

At the moment, one in four veterans in prison is there for a sexual assault. Furthermore, if a sexual predator is expelled from the military, the civilian community to which he returns is not informed of his record.

In a postscript at the end of the Invisible War, the filmmakers note that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta took steps this past April to assist victims, clarify sexual assault policies, and elevate investigations of assault beyond the local unit commanders. When I saw the film, Representative Niki Tsongas of Massachusetts spoke to the audience about how she has worked in Congress to affect positive change in the military. The military has promised change before—do you think that we are finally moving in the right direction?

I do. We need to take sexual assault cases out of the chain of command and military justice system because it is too closed a system to be fair to victims. For example, some 25 percent of victims must report their assault to the very man who assaulted them; whereas 33 or so percent must report to someone who knows the assailant. This results in a system in which friends and those in command can close ranks and protect one another, shutting out all justice for the victim.

Read Helen Benedict on Invisible War at Word and Film.

Watch the Trailer for The Invisible War

Sexual Assault in the Military: Q&A with Lonely Soldier author Helen Benedict

"You should not have to be subjected to being raped or sexually assaulted because you volunteered to serve this nation." -- Susan L. Burke, lead lawyer in a case filed this week against the Department of Defense.

On Tuesday, two men and fifteen women filed a class action lawsuit against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and current Secretary Robert Gates, claiming that the Pentagon leadership failed to protect servicemembers against sexual assault. We asked Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, about her book, which chronicles the lives of several women serving in the military, and the accusations in the case.

Why did you decide to write this book?

I was unhappy about the Iraq War from the start, but I wanted to hear what the soldiers who had actually been fighting it thought. Then I met my first woman soldier, and she told me, "There are only three things the guys let you be if you're a girl in the military: a bitch, a 'ho, or a dyke." She also told me that no one believed that she'd served in a war because she's a woman. Then I discovered that more women were fighting, being wounded and dying in the Iraq War than all US wars put together since World War Two. All that made me know I had to write about women soldiers.

How long did it take, and how many people did you end up interviewing?

I interviewed for about three years. I interviewed over 40 women who'd served in Iraq, as well as some who had served in Afghanistan and earlier wars. I also talked to male soldiers. Of all these people, I picked five women to spend a lot of time with, visiting their homes, seeing them several times, talking to them for many hours, both in person and on the phone.

What surprised you in the course of your research and interviewing?

I never expected to hear so many stories of the women being relentlessly harassed, sexually assaulted and raped by their own comrades – while they were training or actually at war. I was also surprised by how engaged in ground combat these women were, despite the Pentagon's ban against women doing this job. They were raiders and gunners and guards. They were fighting.

Finally, I was surprised by how much I liked and sympathized with the women, and how touched I was by the idealism of the young.

A play was produced as a direct result of your book. How did that come about, and what was it like for you to see your book come alive?

I wrote the play myself, The Lonely Soldier Monologues. Then, through sheer luck, I found a director (William Electric Black) who had a theater ready to go. He suggested I expand the play, and he figured out how to stage it.

It was humbling to see the words come alive on the stage, but as the play was in the words of the real soldiers I had interviewed, it was also odd. As I watched the actors perform, I could see the actors, the real soldiers behind them like ghosts, and hear the words in my head as I had written them down – all at once. I also learned how many fewer words you need when a human being adds expression and gestures to them. I learned how much I could cut!

What kind of effect has the book and play had as far as you can tell?

The effects have been gratifying, and numerous.

• Top members of the Defense Department have read the book and implemented some of the changes I suggested. 
• I have been invited to testify to Congress twice on behalf of women soldiers.(Read testimony from May 2010 here.)
• Many articles have been written about the book and its subject, here and abroad. (The book is out in Italy now.)
• And a lawyer named Susan Burke came to see the play, and subsequently read the book, and then she contacted me and we met. She said she was inspired by the soldiers' stories to start a class action suit against the Pentagon on behalf of military women who have been sexually assaulted while serving. That suit is now a reality.
• I have also received dozens of emails thanking me and the soldiers -- and the actors -- for bringing this great injustice to light.
• Last, but not least, the real soldiers came to see themselves portrayed in the play, and it was a moving experience for them, the actors and the audience alike. 

The class action lawsuit you mentioned accuses the Department of Defense of allowing a military culture that fails to prevent rape and sexual assault, and of mishandling cases that were brought to its attention. The case claims that the Pentagon violated the plaintiffs' constitutional rights. Can you explain the claims in the case? Do you think that the leadership has failed to protect service members?

This case came about for several reasons. Too many female servicemembers have reported rapes and assaults only to be countercharged with threat of court martial to keep them quiet. Military culture fosters and encourages a blame-the-victim attitude that intimidates women out of telling anyone about sexual persecution. And among those cases that are brought the trial, the vast majority are either dismissed, or result in non-judicial and absurdly light punishments for the perpetrators. The details are in the book, but, in short, the command from the top down has done little to either prevent or punish the sexual harassment and assault of its female servicemembers, and this has been the case since women were first allowed into the military over 100 years ago.

Related reading: this post on the Ms. Magazine blog discusses the case, and mentions The Lonely Soldier and another Beacon Press book, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight: Gender, Folklore, and Changing Military Culture

Reflections on Memorial Day

Sophia Raday lives in Berkeley, California, with her soldier/police officer husband, their two children, a bipartisan dog, and assorted firearms. She is the author of Love in Condition Yellow: A Memoir of an Unlikely Marriage, which chronicles her peacenik/warrior love story and provides insight on age-old political divisions in the United States. This post originally appeared on military.com.

In a very un-scientific survey, I asked kids around the country what Memorial Day meant to them:

"Memorial day is about playing games, resting, and celebrating the Lincoln memorial too." Boy, 8, MT

"Picnics" Girl, 4, CA

"I think Memorial Day is about honoring our troops. I think it's about loving and caring for our troops and we should honor it and respect it." Boy (whose dad is in Iraq), 11, TN

"Watermelon" Boy, 3, CA (with Momma's help)

"We celebrate the soldiers that died. But it just came to mind that we celebrate this day because our flag was still there in fort." Girl, 8, MT

"My daddy has people tell him thank you all day for his hard work for the USA and Chico." Girl, 6, CA

"I don't know what Memorial Day is. I do not even know what the word means." Boy, 8, MT

"It is a day to acknowledge the men and women who have died serving our country." Boy, 11, NJ

"Where are you going with this? I don't want to answer." My son, 9, (who is tired of being the subject of his mother's writings and knows his Miranda rights.)

Among military families, I'd wager most everyone knows what Memorial Day means. But the rest of the country?

The Anniversary of “Operation Babylift” and the fall of Saigon

In the weeks leading up to the fall of Saigon on April 30th, 1975, nearly three thousand babies and children were airlifted out of South Vietnam, often under chaotic and dangerous circumstances. Dubbed "Operation Babylift," the mission was a highly publicized U.S. backed plan to evacuate Vietnamese orphans and bring them to America for adoption.

In The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam, Dana Sachs, who has written about Vietnam for 20 years, draws on extensive research and countless interviews in both the U.S. and Vietnam to offer a fresh look at this complex and often controversial mission. She traces the stories of adoptees, including a woman whose Vietnamese mother managed to find her twenty years later, and looks at why there was so little oversight and such sparse documentation attached to the movement of these children, many of whom, it was discovered, weren't orphans at all and were desperate to go home.

This week, in the lead up to the 35th anniversary of the fall of Saigon on Friday, Sachs was interviewed about Operation Babylift and how its lesson can be applied to the current debate about international adoption:

Joy Cardin Show/Wisconsin Public Radio (scroll down to Monday, April 26, at 8:00 a.m.)

The Leonard Lopate Show/WNYC Radio

Link Roundup: Sri Lanka, Schizophrenia, The Abortion Wars

The Sri Lankan election is tomorrow, and the Toronto Star spoke with Adele Barker about the tensions and bitterness of the contest.

African-American men are diagnosed with schizophrenia at rates four to five times more than other groups. The Root talked with Jonathan Metzl about this issue and his new book, The Protest Psychosis.

Sophia Raday is now blogging at Military.com, contributing posts about her politically-mixed marriage.

Carole Joffe discusses the Abortion Wars with Salon.com.

The authors of Hollowing Out the Middle look at an Endangered Species: the American Heartland.

CNN Newsroom featured a live interview with Sonia Sanchez on Sunday. The five minute interview focused on the Smithsonian's Freedom's Sisters traveling exhibit, which features Sonia Sanchez and nineteen other 19th and 20th century African-American female activists. The video is embedded here, but if it doesn't appear, you can follow this link.

Eboo Patel: The Murderer at Fort Hood

Today's post is from Eboo Patel, the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation. Patel is the founder and Executive Director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based institution building the global interfaith youth movement, and is a member of the Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Initiatives, where he is working to realize President Obama’s priority of interfaith cooperation. He writes "The Faith Divide", a featured blog on religion for the Washington Post, where this post originally appeared.

I'm writing from Toronto, where last night I gave a plenary address on Muslim-Jewish cooperation to the Biennial conference of the Union for Reform Judaism. Backstage after the address, my friend Rabbi David Saperstein gave me a grim look and said, "The shooter had a Muslim name."

He called his wife who works for NPR, and his face got more grim as I heard him say:

"Are you sure he was a Muslim? Are you sure he was a Muslim?"

He hung up the phone and turned to me. "This is our worst nightmare." 

Rabbi Saperstein knows there will be a thousand voices broadcasting the news that a Muslim opened fire at Fort Hood in Texas yesterday - the implication being, of course, that this act represents Islam. He knows how distorting that perception is for Muslims, and how dangerous that distortion is for America.

Link Roundup: Rural Youths, A Picnic in North Korea, Sexual Assault in the Military

Review of Hollowing Out the Middle on the Daily Yonder blog:

Most impressively, the authors keyed into what concerns rural youths about their adult lives and how these quandaries fuel the exodus of young people from rural places. Their dilemma, in short, is between remaining as adults in rural communities where they sacrifice educational or economic opportunities or leaving beloved rural places for expanded options in urban areas. Rural kids find that they must negotiate between their commitment to place and their commitment to the American ideal of individualist achievement, an ideal increasingly difficult to reach as the economic foundations of many rural communities continue to crumble. “When moving up implies moving out,” what should young people do?

In this weekend's New York Times, Marie Myung-Ok Lee (author of the novel Somebody's Daughter) discussed a recent trip to North Korea with her mother.

We sweltered through customs at the hands of men in gray Mao suits and women in neutral “Mad-Men”-era outfits, every heart topped by a pin of Kim Il-sung. Then over the next few days we were shown carefully presented slices of Pyongyang: the subway, for example, which we rode for a single stop, where elaborate murals of a workers’ paradise were lighted by chandeliers. We went to endless museums and parks but were sternly instructed not to speak to any locals. We took meals at restaurants where we were the only customers, and the food seemed to come from the same Western-facsimile kitchen: bread with swirls, bland fried flounder, mayonnaise-based salad served in a martini glass. Finally my mother, weary of the utter weirdness of the place, told our tour guide in Korean that we needed to try some real North Korean food.

Penny Coleman poses a difficult question: does military service condition men to commit sexual assault?

Yet for decades, in spite of the terrible numbers, the military has managed with astonishing success to get away with responding to grievances like Krause's with silence, or denial, or by blaming "a few bad apples." But when individual soldiers take the blame, the system gets off the hook.

And it can be shown that the patterns of military sex crimes are old and widespread -- for generations, military service has transformed large numbers of American boys into sexual predators.

Interfaith Youth Core founder and Obama faith advisor Eboo Patel was named one of America's Best Leaders by U.S. News and World Report; documentary photographer and journalist David Bacon was named an Utne Reader Visionary. Beacon Press sends out its congratulations to both of them for these much-deserved accolades. 

Observation Post by Philip C. Winslow Cluster Weapons: On the Way Out

Today's post is the latest in a Beacon Broadside series: Observation Post by journalist and foreign correspondent Philip C. Winslow. Over a career that has spanned more than twenty-five years, Winslow has reported on world events for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Maclean's magazine, ABC radio news, CTV News, and CBC radio. He also served in two United Nations peacekeeping missions and worked for the UN in the West Bank for nearly three years. He is the author of Victory For Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis and Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War.

Ten years ago this spring an historic international treaty came into force banning antipersonnel land mines. Although the U.S. has not joined the 156 nations who ratified the treaty, American forces have not used antipersonnel mines since 1992, and have destroyed three million stockpiled mines; call it a reluctant phasing out of an indiscriminate weapon that U.S. forces have used since the Civil War.

Now a world movement to ban cluster weapons is gathering pace. It’s possible that this time around the U.S., which has not used cluster munitions since 2003 in Iraq, will join, helping make the weapons and their explosive sub-munitions a military artifact. So far 96 nations have signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) and seven have ratified it. The treaty will enter into force on the thirtieth ratification.

Civilian deaths and disabilities from antipersonnel mines have been well documented. The unnecessary suffering and a persistent international campaign brought about the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, also known as the Ottawa Treaty. Cluster munitions casualties are less well known, in part because the weapons have been used in fewer countries, about 30. But where they have been used, the terrible wounds and denial of land access have led arms control experts, doctors and civil society groups, under the umbrella of the Cluster Munition Coalition, to demand that this weapon be added to the list of prohibited weapons along with antipersonnel mines, dum-dum bullets, poison gas and blinding lasers.

Although antipersonnel mines and cluster munitions are in different military categories, they have one thing in common: catastrophic results for the civilians who come across them. America’s massive bombing of Laos from 1964 to 1973 still claims casualties today. One is Ta Douangchom. “I was living in a village called Ka Oy . . . in southern Laos. I was a farmer. One day, I was 28 years old at the time, I went out with my two sons to look for food and found a strange object. It looked green.” You can read the rest of Ta’s story here.

Troubling New Military Strategy in Afghanistan

Today's post is from Garry Leech, the author of Beyond Bogotá: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia and Crude Interventions: The United States, Oil and the New World Disorder. Leech is an independent journalist and editor of Colombia Journal.

With the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan struggling on the battlefield against a resilient insurgency and opium poppy cultivation on the rise, Navy admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently suggested that the United States should import the counterinsurgency and counternarcotics model currently being employed in Colombia to Afghanistan. "I think many of us from all over the world can learn from what has happened with respect to the very successful developments of Plan Colombia," Mullen stated, adding that the counterinsurgency approach used in Colombia would be applicable to Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, Mullen and others who advocate transferring the Plan Colombia model to Afghanistan point to improved security in Colombia's major population centers and a dramatic reduction in murders and kidnappings in recent years. While a significant percentage of the Colombian population has indeed benefitted from these successes, Mullen and others conveniently ignore the humanitarian crisis that has resulted from this establishment of "security" and Plan Colombia's complete failure as a counternarcotics initiative.

Weapons of War in Gaza: Israel and International Law

Today's post is from Philip C. Winslow, author of Victory For Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis. Winslow has been a journalist and foreign correspondent for more than twenty years; he has worked for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Maclean's magazine, ABC radio news, CTV News, and CBC radio. He also served in two United Nations peacekeeping missions and spent nearly three years living in the West Bank.

Israel's use of white phosphorus munitions in the Gaza Strip in January was one of the most intensely debated issues of the hyper-violent 22-day war, in which 13 Israelis and 1,300 Palestinians died. Dramatic photographs showed Israeli shells bursting over a United Nations school in northern Gaza as Palestinians ran for cover and others frantically tried to extinguish burning lumps amidst the smoke.

Israel's phosphorus shells--and Hamas's rockets aimed at Israeli civilians--are only part of a disturbing picture of modern warfare. The use of phosphorus deserves a closer look, because of its particular danger to civilians and because of its relevance to what is legal in warfare.

Raped in the Military? You May Have to Pay for Your Own Forensic Exam Kit

Today's post is from Penny Coleman, author of Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War. Coleman writes frequently on Veterans' issues for Alternet, where this story originally appeared.

Sarah Palin's decision not to pay for rape kits when she was mayor of Wasilla was an issue in the campaign for the White House. But allow me to introduce the large pink elephant that has been sitting quietly in the corner of the room:

At the Winter Soldier Investigation* in March, Spec. Patricia McCann, who served in Iraq with the Illinois Army National Guard from 2003-4, read a memo issued to all MEDCOM commanders clarifying that "SAD kits"-- which are forensic rape kits--"are not included in TRICARE coverage."

TRICARE, the United States Department of Defense Military Health System that covers active duty members, will only pay for rape kits if the victim is seen in a military or a VA facility.

But the Pentagon acknowledges that 80 percent of military rapes are never reported. And that 80 percent who go off-base to protect their anonymity (and/or their careers) are on their own. If a soldier is on leave, or is five-hours from the nearest VA, or if a soldier is simply delivered to the nearest hospital by the local ambulance driver, their rape kits are not covered under TRICARE. Neither are other forensic exams that might be used in domestic violence situations.

Front-line treatment shouldn't be conditional on where a rape occurs or where the nearest treatment is available. This is not only a parity issue, but a further obstacle to treatment and justice.