LaVena Johnson
And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars
Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound;
Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny
Shall here inhabit, and this land be call'd
The field of Golgotha and dead men's skulls.
--William Shakespeare, King John
To a certain degree, Pfc. LaVena Johnson's death came to me as a random event. I'd meant to write about the coverup in Cpl. Pat Tillman's death and the subsequent congressional investigations into it. But just a half hour's worth of googling found plenty of questionable deaths in Iraq and plenty of families in the Tillmans' situation.
I opened with the Shakespeare quote because it's old enough to show a historical theme -- in war 'kin with kin and kind with kind confound' or, more simply, people kill people on their own side. LaVena Johnson and Pat Tillman are just a few we know of. The best place in the world to get away with murder is on a battlefield. There are more names we'll never know and more murderers who'll get away with it. Once you fire up the war machine, anyone who gets caught in the gears gets chewed up. It doesn't matter who's uniform they wear. War is game theory, about winners and losers. It doesn't have an ideology and is, therefore, amoral at best and immoral at worst.
To a certain degree, it's hard to understand why anyone would expect all soldiers to behave honorably. We take them from home and drop them down in a foreign culture. We tell them that what is a crime at home is their job here, that doing evil is good, that hate overrides love. Anyone who comes out of that with their head still screwed on straight is admirable, at the very least. Sending people from home to bass-ackward moral reasoning-land and back home again would be damned confusing. Actions that make you a hero on the battlefield make you a criminal in Boise or Cedar Rapids or Los Angeles. It's hard to imagine that people in war aren't all a little mad for a little while. We hear a lot about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but nothing about the trauma as it happens and what that does to the person in the moment. We concentrate on what happens after, but not what happens while -- as if the insanity of war doesn't hit you until you're out of it.
We all know what happened to Cpl. Tillman. And we know because he was famous. It doesn't detract from his service to point that out. He's getting the congressional investigation he deserves -- without a doubt. But people like LaVena Johnson aren't. They're just dead, without any good explanation, and that's supposed to be that. They don't get the congressional investigation because, I guess, they aren't worth bothering over. Yet their deaths are just as questionable as Tillman's.
Welcome to Pottersville:
On July 19th, 2005, Pfc. LaVena Johnson was found dead in her tent, a single bullet wound to her left temple (she was right-handed). Her nose was broken. One of her lips was battered so badly that a mortician had to reconstruct it. Two of her front teeth were knocked loose. Her shoulder or elbow was dislocated. A trail of blood led from her tent to outside.
A slam dunk, right? You'd think even an Army sawbones half a step ahead of a civilian malpractice suit and the laziest, most jaded and indifferent Army CID officer would rule this a murder, right?
Instead, the Army initially ruled her death a "non combat-related" one as a result of a self-inflicted wound. Not officially a suicide, but a death due to an SIW. When pressed to reopen the case by a St. Louis television news station and Johnson's parents, the Army then planted its second boot squarely and firmly in Bizarro World and ruled LaVena Johnson's death a suicide.
She was nineteen years old -- not even old enough to drink in most states. And now she's just gone...
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1 comments:
Sad.
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