COURTESY OF DEBRA SCHIANO
THE RECRUITS
says, once you know the truth of
war, you can’t un-know it. After
that tour in Afghanistan, Schiano
left the Marine Corps and went
home to Connecticut. The war
still weighed heavily on him. He
couldn’t fit back. Daytimes, he felt
he didn’t belong. At night, he had
screaming nightmares.
One Sunday afternoon several
weeks after he returned, Schiano
went off the road in his 2003 Volkswagen Jetta and rammed a utility
pole. At his funeral in Riverside,
Conn., Marines of One-Six carried
the casket. He was 23 years old.
In other combat situations,
where the kind of “considered, values-based decision” that Col. Haas
advises is theoretically possible,
young troops have two handicaps.
Their ability to make split-second
moral assessments, a function of
the prefrontal cortex of the brain,
may not be fully developed, researchers say, a fact that may be
familiar to any parent of teenagers.
But in war, when 20-year-olds are
licensed to kill, the stakes are far
higher. And they may not be getting enough sleep, another critical
factor in making moral judgments,
according to Shay, the VA psychologist. A 2008 Army study reported
that combat troops were averaging
HUFFINGTON
03.16-23.14
less than six hours of sleep a night,
month after month.
“The problem for a lot of these
kids is that psychologically, morally and neurologically they are
not fully developed by any stretch
of the imagination,” Nash said.
That makes it impossible “for the
people pulling the triggers, impossible for the medics and corpsmen
and doctors who are treating people ... you want to try to live up to
the ideal of protecting people, and
you fail to protect them.”
Challenges to live up to a moral
code are precisely what young
Americans have been encountering in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his
account of a 2003 combat deployment in Iraq, Soft Spots, Marine
Sgt. Clint Van Winkle writes of
such an incident: A car carrying
two Iraqi men approached a Marine unit and a Marine opened
fire, putting two bullet holes in the
Joseph
Schiano is
welcomed
home from
bootcamp.