All of the stories I'm reading about the soldier in Iraq who just killed five other servicemembers focus on the question of combat trauma, suggesting that his multiple deployments may have driven him crazy. But here's the part they don't look at very closely, and (it seems to me) the probable key to the thing: "Sgt. John M. Russell, 44, first joined the Army National Guard in 1988; he went into the active Army in 1994."
Twenty-one years in the military, fifteen of them on active duty, and he's an E-5. (I did four years of spectacularly undistinguished active duty in the same army, and was promoted three times; I finished as an E-5.)
Doesn't it seem likely that this guy was a chronic shitbag?
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- Chris Bray
- Itinerant historian, former infantry soldier, and the author of "Court-Martial: How Military Justice has Shaped America, from the Revolution to 9/11 and Beyond," forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
3 comments:
It's entirely plausible that he might have been mustered out, or encouraged to retire, or whatever it is the military used to do, were we not in a manpower crisis.
As the army lowered its enlistment and retention standards, a lot of it defenders (some of that at Cliopatria, where I wrote about the changing standards) pointed out that relatively small numbers of people were being brought in and kept under the new, lower standards; most soldiers, they argued, were still being recruited under the old, higher standards. But the problem is that it only takes a few really spectacular fuck-ups to inflict massive damage on everyone around them. If any readers of Poorly Named Blog have ever been company commanders, feel free to weigh in on the shitbag problem....
This whole incident reminds me of Columbine and I get the feeling that this guy was being forced out the door and snapped. You are right Chris being an E5 with that much Time in Grade/Time in service is a warning sign. Especially with the changes in policy that you can be conditionally promoted while deployed without the requisite schooling. Theoretically with his 3 deployments he could have gone from E5 to E7 very easily during his deployments. All I know is this whole event is tragic, and the irony of this guy shooting up the only place on the whole base that was weapon free just makes it worse.
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