Anti-social, mal-adjusted, ridden with PTS, and ready to take it out on innocent bystanders!
Or, troubled by what they did, seeking redemption….
It all started with Rambo: First Blood. I’ll grant you that I loved the movie, but that is where the mythos of the deranged veteran coming back from war really started. In case there is anyone who hasn’t seen it, it’s an easy premise. Special Forces soldier comes home, becomes a drifter, gets messed with, and goes on a killing spree. Although whacking folks left and right with skills honed with the Snake Eaters, Rambo is set up as the hero and simultaneously as the victim.
[Just as an aside, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the actors in that movie, Brian Dennehy liked to make up stories about his fictional service in Vietnam:
“I lied about serving in Vietnam,” Dennehy told the supermarket tabloid The Globe, “and I’m sorry. I did not mean to take away from the actions and the sacrifices of the ones who did really serve there…I did steal valor. That was very wrong of me. There is no real excuse for that. I was a peace-time Marine, and I got out in 1963 without ever serving in Vietnam… I started the story that I had been in ‘Nam, and I got stuck with it. Then I didn’t know how to set the record straight.”
One way to set the record straight would be to stop saying you served there. One reason I will never have to set the record straight about my heroics during the Spanish Civil War is that I never claimed to be there.]
Recently I read Stephen King’s book, Under the Dome. Now, I liked it, but it wasn’t his best. I have a sort of personal affinity for Mr. King because he lives about 500 meters from my Dad in Bangor, Maine, and he and his wife Tabitha graciously helped bring a Maine National Guard unit home for the holiday’s last year:
Author Stephen King and his wife are donating money so that 150 Maine Army National Guardsmen can go home for the holidays.
King and wife Tabitha, who live here, are paying toward the cost of two bus trips for members of the 3rd Battalion, 172nd Infantry, who left Maine last week for training at Camp Atterbury, Ind. One bus will bring Guardsmen to Bangor and the other one will return to Portland.
Nonetheless, in his recent book, the protagonist is a former Army Lieutenant and drifter in a small town in Maine. (Almost the exact same as Rambo.) Although the hero, he is bothered by an incident he witnessed in Iraq, of interrogators roughing up an Al Qaeda guy. By the end of the book he has to atone for not having done anything to stop them. It’s the cliché-driven crap that we see everywhere lately: Soldier goes to war, does something bad or fails to act, strives to overcome this…. It almost, but not quite, ruined the enjoyment for me.
So, flash forward to this weekend, as I spent some time (not spent watching my beloved New England Patriots winning again) watching TV with my wife. Of the few programs we mutually agree to (since I will not watch shows about Teen Moms, anyone from New Jersey, or folks competing to get their clothing line in Marie Claire-this last one for the obvious reason that it represents a conflict of interest with my own plans to market a line of Spanish American War uniform based clothing for the ‘tween set-did I mention I’m a Spanish American War veteran?) most are of the Law and Order, CSI or Serial Killer variety. So, the first one we watched was Law and Order: Los Angeles. The basic premise was that a bunch of Al Qaeda guys were looking to blow something up. This Al Qaeda cell consisted of three Caucasian males, and one white lady who at one point in the show states:
Every time an infidel soldier dies in Afghanistan, I thank Allah that another Crusader has gone to hell.
The leader of this unit is a guy named Walker. One of the investigators helps along the plot line by stating that they had enough explosives to:
“take down the Staples center if they knew what they were doing.”
Investigator 2: “Walker would, he’s Army Reserve, Demo Unit.”
See, this guy Walker is building a bomb out of a minivan, and “reinforcing it with steel plates to kill thousands of people, families going home for Thanksgiving.”
Now, I don’t know about you, but I remember the class I got on turning an RV into a fuel explosive bomb and reinforcing with steel plates to make sure it caused more casualties. I think we did that right before the dime/washer drills at the range.
Seriously, how stupid is this? How would steel plates kill more people? Wouldn’t loading up the RV with marbles cause more damage? I don’t really know, because despite 12 years in the Infantry, no one ever taught me how to create bombs to wreak havoc at LAX.
But, Hollywood always knows better than us. Just to give you a spokesperson for this asinine premise, I give you Val Kilmer, who in a memorably insane interview with Esquire Magazine answered the following question with the most absurd answer in the history of answers, and that includes Ms South Carolina’s “US Americans” geography answer:
[Klosterman:] You understand how it feels to shoot someone as much as a person who has actually committed a murder?
[Kilmer] I understand it more. It’s an actor’s job. A guy who’s lived through the horror of Vietnam has not spent his life preparing his mind for it. He’s some punk. Most guys were borderline criminal or poor, and that’s why they got sent to Vietnam. It was all the poor, wretched kids who got beat up by their dads, guys who didn’t get on the football team, couldn’t finagle a scholarship. They didn’t have the emotional equipment to handle that experience. But this is what an actor trains to do. I can more effectively represent that kid in Vietnam than a guy who was there.
I’m looking forward to the day that Val Kilmer plays Bo Jackson, because while Bo Knows Everything, Val knows that plus much, much more. Val knows what it is like to see a dying Indian by the side of the road (Doors), Val knows what it was like at the OK Corral (Tombstone), and more than any man in the history of our species, he knows what it is like to be a Knight Industries Two Thousand , 1982 Pontiac Firebird (Knight Rider).
[Yes-I am very much aware that David Hasselhoff and not Val Kilmer starred in the seminal 80’s action TV show “Knight Rider” but I felt it was more exciting to mention Knight Rider than Kilmer’s turn in the Drunk Driving themed ABC Afterschool Special: One Too Many-although the latter did feature co-star Michelle Pfeiffer. And he was afterall the voice of KITT.]
Anyway, so last night, in the after-glow of my aforementioned Patriots win, I settled in with the wife and my mildly retarded Puggle to watch Criminal Minds. This is sort of our favorite on-call TV show, because it can generally found on between one and three channels 24 hours a day, seven days a week on our ATT U-Verse. Criminal Minds follows the FBI’s “Behavioral Analysis Unit” (BAU) as they track down serial killers. Last night I made it through two episodes before chewing some Excedrin PM to knock myself out.
The first one was an Episode called “Distress” wherein a veteran of B 3/75th Rangers from Somalia one day just completely loses his mind and starts killing folks in Houston, Texas, thinking he is back on the streets of Mogadishu. During his service there, he and a buddy got separated from their unit, and at one point he kills a young kid, probably 13-14 and starts seeing the kid everywhere. All the classic PTS symptoms you’ve come to expect from Hollywood and Dr. Phil. In the end the guy gets drilled in the back by a Sniper and lies dying in the street but wants to make sure the kid was ok.
I should have punched out than and let the wife watch Project Runway. But, I’m a glutton for punishment. The second one was an episode entitled “Unfinished Business” about two guys who are killing folks, often with a meticulous MO. Must be military! Look, this one guy folds his socks and his underwear in perfect squares, just like they teach you to in the military! I can’t even give you a full synopsis of this piece of drek, because by the time we got around to the two military “unsubs” I had mentally shifted into “well, I will show them by writing a blog post” mode.
This morning when I came into work I decided to look and see which serial killers were actually military. My first problem in approaching this is that most people aren’t able to differentiate between a “serial killer” and a “mass murderer.” The first website I found on the subject was a classic in this regard. Let me quote a little from this classic post entitled: KILLITARY: Are America’s Armed Forces Creating Serial Killers and Mass Murderers?
According to the July 30, 2007 issue of The Nation magazine, damning photos of a U.S. Soldier using a spoon to literally scoop out the brains of a dead Iraqi and pretending to eat the gray matter were recently acquired.
Of course, everyone is appropriately appalled and make all claims of disgust and finger-wagging. Research shows, however, that such unacceptable behavior happens more often than the United States military wants you to know.
When it comes to training killing machines, the military really does create “an Army of one.”
The list of serial killers and mass murderers who have spent time in the military is astounding.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that Nation article was a heaping pile of crap. Here is Mr. Greyhawk’s takedown of that piece. Go and read that for the definitive crushing.
I like what Ace of the Ace of Spades HQ blog had to say about the “KILLITARY” posting:
I trust you can see where this is going. Desensitized to violence, their empathy for other humans drilled out of them, culture of death, etc., etc., etc.
Incidentally, given the millions upon millions upon millions of young (and not so young) men who’ve served in the military in the past 50 years, it’s hardly surprising to find serial killers among them. And drug dealers. And hit men. And rapists. And gentleman cat-burglar jewel-thieves, even.
Anyway, that “KILLITARY” post was good for one thing, in that it gave me a list of military serial killers to work off of. They gave me this:
John Allen Muhammad (“The Beltway Sniper”), Arthur Shawcross, Lee Harvey Oswald, Randy Kraft, Dennis Rader (“BTK”), Howard Unruh, Robert Lee Yates, Gary Heidnik, Charles Cullen, Charles Ng, Henry Louis Wallace, Julian Knight, Courtney Mathews & David Housler, Daryl Keith Holton, Wayne Adam Ford, Richard Marc Evonitz, etc.
I am not going through all of them. I don’t have the time, and you don’t want to read it all. But first, there is a distinction between serial killers and mass murderers. So, let’s start with John Allen Mohammed, Lee Harvey Oswald and Tim McVeigh (although he is not listed.) They were mass murderers (or assassins with regard to Oswald) and not serial killers. But, it gives me an opportunity to post something from Jonn Lilyea, that remains my favorite post on this subject ever:
McVeigh was a Bradley gunner in the same division that I went to Desert Storm with – no one I know got any “training” in anything McVeigh did that day in Oklahoma City. Nothing. He built a truck bomb, he parked a truck bomb, he ran away. Check the eleven-mike skill level two tasks. He was never trained by the Army to do those things. Any doofus off of the block could accomplish those things without ever having served in the military.
The fact that McVeigh was a veteran wasn’t even relevant to his crime, but it’s something veterans get beat over the head with in every discussion. How about if I pronounced that Blacks are dangerous because of John Muhammad, the DC sniper? […]
Muhammad was a mechanic who happened to fire “expert” with the M16 once. That means he hit 36 out of 40 targets – and because he was a mechanic, he probably shot on the 25-meter range with tiny targets instead of the full-sized range. That’s how mechanics qualify generally. He didn’t even do all of the shooting – Malvo shot at least one victim in the series of slayings and he’d never served a day in the Army.
Some other brain trust I came across in my search this morning was this article from Sam Houston State University entitled “Serial Killers With Military Experience: Applying Learning Theory to Serial Murder.”
Abstract: Scholars have endeavored to study the motivation and causality behind serial murder by researching biological, psychological, and sociological variables. Some of these studieshave provided support for the relationship between these variables and serial murder.However, the study of serial murder continues to be an exploratory rather than explanatory research topic. This article examines the possible link between serial killers and military service. Citing previous research using social learning theory for the study of murder, this article explores how potential serial killers learn to reinforce violence, aggression, and murder in military boot camps. As with other variables considered in serial killer research, military experience alone cannot account for all cases of serial murder. Future research should continue to examine this possible link.
Apparently the writers of Criminal Mind must have read this before their show. But, how does it match up against actual serial killers?
Dennis Rader: Spent four years in the Air Force, 1966-1970, started killing folks four years after his discharge. Just how he learned to “Bind, Torture, Kill” folks from his 4 years spent installing radio antennas is unclear. Also hard to explain how he came to be de-sensitized to killing with his duty in Alabama, Texas, Greece and other non-combat countries. His military service neither prepared him for his later disgusting activities, nor seems to be the genesis of them.
Jeffrey Dahmer: Served less than two years in the Army, in Alabama, San Antonio and Germany. Never anywhere near combat, served as a nurse. He would go on to murder 17 men and boys, in an incredibly gruesome manner, “involving rape, torture, dismemberment, necrophilia and cannibalism.” Needless to say, none of those things did he learn in the Army. As a nurse, he would have been surrounded by folks with empathy, not cook books on human consumption. (Or a VHS copy of Twilight Zones “To serve man“.)
David Richard Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”) served in the Army from 1971 – 1974, service in the US and Korea. I can’t find all that much on his service, although repeatedly on the internet one finds the phrase that he “became a skilled marksman.” (Example here) Then again, other sources say he “went in a gung ho for military service, but came back a dove.”
(Something else to consider about Son of Sam-becoming a “skilled marksman” in the Army-Son of Sam killed with a .44 Charter Arms Bulldog Revolver, which is not a weapon generally taught in a military that generally focuses on long arms marksmanship. Anyone who has ever fired a pistol and a rifle can tell you they are really somewhat different in application) Anyway, just what these have to do with being ordered by a neighbors dog to shoot folks is beyond me.
The takeaway from all this is that Hollywood likes to view us as coming back from War, and having been traumatized by what we saw. OK, where has this happened in real life? I mean, if we are going to run with stereotypes, shouldn’t we be able to identify just one of them? Note that in Rambo he was a Green Beret, in Under the Dome it was an Army Lieutenant who was an interrogator, in Criminal Minds a Ranger. Just how many special ops guys have we had that just leave the reservation? I couldn’t find any. McVeigh was a grunt who used explosives for terrorism; he wasn’t by definition a “serial killer.” Dahmer was a nurse. BTK killer was an antennae repair guy.
Is it too much to ask to get Hollywood to at least malign us on something that is plausible and historically accurate? I mean really, how many Hollywood bad guys have you seen that say “Yeah, I was in the Army, I installed showers points in the Mojave for guys at NTC”? That would be just as accurate as the Green Beret with a beef with society and a penchant to kill droves of folks with his kung fu fighting skills.
In the meantime, I’ll wait for that ellusive movie featuring the vet returning to be a cat-burglar jewel thief.
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