Ghostly Observations of What’s Very Ghastly

Nightmares, panic attacks, hallucinations,

are the symptoms of P.T.S.D. of US marines who have to fire

artillery shells without personal observations

of the mortality that they have caused and are distressingly most dire.

Among the problems about which many of them will complain,

is the appearance of their victims as imaginary ghosts.

Catastrophes that the marines have caused but never seen drive them insane,

marooned in profound mental waters, far from landlubbers’ coasts.

The complications caused by current combats clearly do not differ vastly

from those in Hamlet’s rotten state of Denmark, where they were extremely ghastly.

An investigation by The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/us/us-army-marines-artillery-isis-pentagon.html found that many of the troops sent to bombard the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017 returned to the United States plagued by nightmares, panic attacks, depression and, in a few cases, hallucinations. Once-reliable Marines turned unpredictable and strange. Some are now homeless. A striking number eventually died by suicide, or tried to.

Interviews with more than 40 gun-crew veterans and their families in 16 states found that the military repeatedly struggled to determine what was wrong after the troops returned from Syria and Iraq.

All the gun crews filled out questionnaires to screen for post-traumatic stress disorder, and took tests to detect signs of traumatic brain injuries from enemy explosions. But the crews had been miles away from the front lines when they fired their long-range cannons, and most never saw direct fighting or suffered the kinds of combat injuries that the tests were designed to look for.

A few gun-crew members were eventually given diagnoses of P.T.S.D., but to the crews that didn’t make much sense. They hadn’t, in most cases, even seen the enemy.

The only thing remarkable about their deployments was the sheer number of artillery rounds they had fired…..

Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.