How Wars Come Home

"President George Bush's "war on terror" reached the desert village of Hajibirgit at midnight on 22 May." Thus began a chilling story by Robert Fisk, of the British Independent newspaper.

The essentials are that US Special Forces raided the village of Hajibirgit and shot dead the 85-year-old village leader. Villagers were then accused of being members of the Taliban or Al Qaeda, flown to an interrogation center in Kandahar (home of the 101st Airborne). One later told Fisk that "the villagers were, by their own accounts, herded together into a container. Their legs were tied and then their handcuffs and the manacle of one leg of each prisoner were separately attached to stakes driven into the floor of the container. Thick sacks were put over their heads. Abdul Satar was among the first to be taken from this hot little prison. 'Two Americans walked in and tore my clothes off,' he said. 'If the clothes would not tear, they cut them off with scissors. They took me out naked to have my beard shaved and to have my photograph taken.'"

Eventually the villagers were taken to the stadium which the Taliban had used for executions and ultimately released.

According to Fisk, "The Pentagon initially said that it found it 'difficult to believe' that the village women had their hands tied. But given identical descriptions of the treatment of Afghan women after the US bombing of the Uruzgan wedding party, which followed the Hajibirgit raid, it seems that the Americans--or their Afghan allies--did just that."

The villagers returned to find their village looted by a group of Afghans led by Abdul Rahman Khan--once a brutal and rapacious "mujahid" fighter against the Russians, and now a Karzai government police commander who had raided the village once the Americans had taken away so many of the men. Ninety-five of the 105 families had fled into the hills, leaving their mud homes to be pillaged. It seems likely, Fisk writes, that Rahman had instigated the attack by US Special Forces, alleging that Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders were there.

Now here's a story, replete with specifics about another appalling episode like the slaughter of the Afghan wedding party. A check shows that thus far not a single word of the destruction of Hajibirgit had appeared in any mainstream US news medium.

But the war is coming home, the way wars always do, in the form of drugs and psychosis. Witness the murders of four Fort Bragg soldiers' wives in the space of six weeks. Fort Bragg is the home of the Special Forces Command. Three of the four soldiers had recently returned from Afghanistan, where they served with Special Forces units.

"He was like my own child," said Wilma Watson, describing her son-in-law Master Sergeant Wright. "Until he came back from Afghanistan, I didn't worry about violence." Wright killed her daughter. "He was getting these attacks of rage." One line of defense, discussed in an interesting piece published last Sunday in Newsday by UPI reporters Mark Benjamin and Dan Olmsted, is that at least two of the soldiers had been taking Lariam, a.k.a. mefloquine, in Afghanistan. As the reporters wrote: "Lariam has been blamed for psychotic episodes and suicidal behavior for more than a decade. The official product information sheet, written by manufacturer Hoffman-La Roche and approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, states Lariam has been associated with aggression, paranoia, and suicidal thoughts."

It is the Army's drug of choice to prevent malaria.

There's nothing to equal the military as the incubator of violence. The villagers of Hajibirgit paid the price. The four murdered women in Fort Bragg paid another installment, and the payments in terms of rage, drunkenness, drug addiction, and anti-social behavior will be exacted month after month for years to come, amid the resolute determination of the press NOT to connect up the dots.

The "Violence Gene"

But meanwhile the search goes on for ... yes, our old friend, the "violence gene."

For years racists in the think tanks and research labs have been beating the bushes for this Holy Grail: proof that poor people, and more narrowly poor black people, have an inherent biological tropism towards violence.

The search for the "violence gene" is always with us. Last week it surfaced once again, when the London Economist proclaimed that "the first study has just been published showing how a particular gene and a particular environment interact to produce violent individuals." The Economist cited the publication of "a clear-cut case--a paper showing that the degree of expression of a gene implicated in the development of aggression does indeed interact with a person's early circumstances to shape a violent or a pacific personality."

Terrie Moffitt, of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, and her colleagues, picked MAOA, the gene for a protein called monoamine oxidase-A, for their study, which has just been published in Science. Monoamine oxidase-A is an enzyme that breaks down members of an important group of neurotransmitters including dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine, all of which help to regulate a person's mood.

"There is abundant evidence," the Economist continued excitedly, "that a reduced level of monoamine oxidase-A (and therefore an elevated level of these neurotransmitters) results in violent behavior. There is also evidence that chronically low levels early in life result in an individual who is more than averagely predisposed to react violently to any given situation in adulthood, regardless of monoamine-oxidase levels at the time."

You take your pick: the elusive "violence gene" or a militarized culture that sees unending war, with racism and cruelty associated with that activity. Was it a "violence gene" that drove McVeigh on or an anti-malarial medication, or what he experienced in his military training and in the war in Iraq?