I couldn’t care less what actions were taken by this soldier in the course of war. My maternal grandfather served in WWII. My paternal grandfather served in Korea. I have 4 uncles who served in Vietnam. I have three cousins and six friends, 5 of whom lost their lives, who served in Iraq/Afghanistan. I have heard stories from every last one of them that would make the hair on your neck stand on end. I have heard stories of bravery, stories of sacrifice, stories of valor, and stories of pride. I’ve heard stories of shame.
War destroys the man and leaves behind a husk. It turns on its ear the very notion of morality and ethics. It makes men out of boys. It turns cowards into heroes. It kills those who would sacrifice everything. War, put simply and succinctly, is HELL.
Put yourself in Behenna’s shoes. Imagine you’re out with a bunch of friends doing a job. You’re a lineman for a phone company or a cable rat for a satellite installer. You’re an electrician or a plumber. You hook up your phone, your line tester, your ammeter, or your a flow meter, and BOOM! Just like that, every man in your crew is dead or injured. You’re alive but barely, and you see a bunch of slimy assholes running from you laughing. I don’t know about you, if I lived to see it, I would hunt down every last one of them and ensure they died the most horrific deaths they could possibly ever imagine.
My best friend Alan killed himself just 8 days after returning from Iraq. In those 8 days, he told me things that made me cry. He told me things that gave me pride being an American. He told me things that made me question who I was and what it meant to be alive. The last thing he ever told me was over a beer at a local Winghouse. He said, “Never let war come to these shores. Never let it infect you. Never let it turn you into what I’ve become.”
It destroys the humanity in a person. I don’t blame Behenna for what he did, regardless of the actual events. He was fighting in a war and did what war makes a man do: react. God bless him and may he be pardoned at some point before his release. I’d be there to shake his hand.
Please go to the link below and listen to the interview with Michael Behenna’s girlfriend, Shannon, that took place this evening. The show archive should be posted soon.
“God bless him and may he be pardoned at some point before his release.”
Since what he did was almost certainly due to brain injury, he cannot be pardoned, for the sole reason that he is not guilty. However, he can no more be released than can a man with severe bleeding be turned out from a hospital.
Thus what he needs is not pardon, but commutation; not release, but what amounts to confinement for medical care.
This means recognition that his is a medical case, not a criminal one; but a medical case so severe that he might not ever be allowed to walk free. That, for as yet undetermined reasons, he still represents a severe threat to himself and others.
Mental illness can be a truly horrifying thing, because a victim is no longer in the realm of reason. It is frightening to a person of reason that a person with mental illness make look fine, or even appear rational, but there is no real communication. It creates apprehension difficult to describe.
Few people can stand being around such people for any length of time. Society shuns them, because they are seen as an existential threat to reality itself. Even discussing their care in uncomfortable for most people.
But they cannot be ignored. And they cannot be free, for they can no longer function within society. And it is not their fault. They are tragedy personified.
And this is his fate.
If there is injustice, he will be put in confinement in a military prison. But in turn this may exacerbate his condition until even they realize that he does not belong there.