America's Medicated Army (Illustration by Lon Tweeten and D.W. Pine for TIME)
(TIME.com) "Seven months after Sergeant Christopher LeJeune started scouting Baghdad's dangerous roads — acting as bait to lure insurgents into the open so his Army unit could kill them — he found himself growing increasingly despondent. 'We'd been doing some heavy missions, and things were starting to bother me,' LeJeune says..." More>>
(WQ) A natural reaction but a military doctor prescribed heavy psychotropic drugs. (And if you can't trust military psychiatrists, who can you trust?) LeJeune was shamed and "psychologized." The pharmaceutical industry, after all, is more profitable than the oil industry. So far as the military is concerned, there's nothing better than a soldier who is light on his feet and happy in mind when he's killing "the enemy," whoever that happens to be at the time. - Military psychiatrist kills fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in Killeen
- Why he shot them (TIME.com)
- Was army-doctor-turned-killer a "Manchurian Candidate"?
- US Army doctor/mass-murderer conscious (BBC)
You will follow orders -- without question -- and you will kill, even if you have to be medicated into doing so. Soldiers may (or may not) have an excuse for their atrocities and crippling silence. But one has to wonder what everyone else's excuse is. The karmic result, while by the fact that it is often coerced, is still very heavy for any killers and those who support, praise, and approve of their killing.
- Masanari Kawahara's understated and gently affecting story of Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh
