BLACKFIVE: The Public Editor Responds to "Trail of Death" Caused by Veterans

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The Public Editor Responds to "Trail of Death" Caused by Veterans

Posted By Blackfive

The New York Times Public Editor responds to accusations from us about their "War Torn" series:

...The Times was immediately accused — in The New York Post and the conservative blogosphere, and by hundreds of messages to the public editor — of portraying all veterans as unstable killers. It did not.

But, the first article used colorfully inflated language — “trail of death” — for a trend it could not reliably quantify, despite an attempt at statistical analysis using squishy numbers. The article did not make clear what its focus was. Was it about killer vets, or about human tragedies involving a system that sometimes fails to spot and treat troubled souls returning from combat?

Finally, while many of the 121 cases found by The Times appeared clearly linked to wartime stresses, others seemed questionable. One involved a Navy Seabee accused of arranging her ex-husband’s murder during a bitter child custody battle, and another involved a soldier who was acquitted of reckless homicide in a car crash after a jury concluded that his blood alcohol level was below the legal limit and that many other accidents had happened on the same stretch of road...

The end of the piece discusses the motivations of the reporters - concern for veterans returning from a war zone. As all of us know, the system doesn't work very well and many vets are not cared for. There are lots of reasons for this - and certainly there are very many dedicated people in the VA trying to help - but the VA needs money and, most likely, a new plan. A "Surge" for veterans care, if you will.

I, for one, believe the New York Times reporters were concerned about the vets. But I am also inclined to believe that they were pushing a stereotype, one that began with Viet Nam vets, and their stories fit their own mental narratives. Obviously, I cannot prove that. But it does ring true for anyone who's experienced that kind of bias before - "Soldiers and Dogs Keep Off the Grass".

In the end, I think we can all agree that war sucks, it affects everyone, and that our vets deserve all of the support that we can afford to give. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) are NOT being addressed at the level that they need to be addressed. I don't know anyone who believes that our veterans are being effectively treated. No. One.

One of you readers sent me a very compelling email but asked me to withhold it. Bottom-line: If you have a lot of veterans who have been trained to kill and they are all very likely to become unhinged, there would be a lot more murders than less than 121.

If you've been around here long enough, you know that I've tried to help a few returning vets who've wound up in prison. In most cases, they did the crime and need to do the time, but they also need support to help them recover (they don't get medical and mental support they need in prison).

To be fair to the New York Times, I reached out to the reporters, Lizette Alvarez and Deborah Sontag, and I'll put the reply from Lizette Alvarez after the Jump.

Hi Matt,

This is what I have been saying in response to our angry readers. Keep in mind that we spent a lot of time (in consultation with criminologists) trying to find a way to compare the numbers to civilian society but it simply can't be done, for many reasons. Two of the reasons are outlined in my response. I think we were careful to say that while the great majority of service members come home and face re-adjust to civilian society, some do not. It is undisputed that the rates of PTSD and other mental ailments are increasing, and are relatively high, among returning service members. This, obviously, can sometimes lead to other problems. Most service members are still not seeking or getting the treatment they need. What surprises me is that a society we have little trouble accepting a service members's physical wounds. But once you veer off into psychic wounds, politics somehow elbows its way in.

The notion that service members sometimes have a hard time adjusting to civilian society and sometimes tumble into crime is not exactly a new one. Many Vietnam veterans can speak to that.

Anyway, here is the response...

*********

Thanks for your comments.

The series (and there are other stories to come that grapple with this issue in different ways) is not meant to scare people or portray veterans as monsters. It is most certainly not anti-military. I think that most people who came away from the first day story would not think to be frightened of someone like Sepi or Strasburg or Walter Smith. If we wanted to portray veterans as crazy killers, I think the piece would have been written in a very different way.

Some people view the series as offering another reasons to help veterans who are having trouble adjusting to civilan life, particularly after war, and wind up committing tragic crimes, some of them perhaps avoidable.

Rather than framing it as anti-veteran, many people, including members of the military, their families, lawyers, prosecutors and judges who are dealing with veterans in the courthouses, see it as pro-veteran. These combat veterans are different from civilian criminals, and it is worth pointing that out. Lumping them together does them a disservice. In some of these cases, their war experience (as you know everyone reacts to war differently) clearly played a part in their undoing.

It was impossible for us to compare the military homicide rate to the civilian one, for many reasons, One reason is that the military (unlike civilian society) does not keep records of homicides that it does not prosecute through its own mility justice system. Many of the homicides are handled through the civilian courts. The military does not know how many of its own service members are convicted of homicides across the board. It would be lovely if the military kept such statistics. Even the internal statistics they provided us were faulty. What we have collected is an absolute mininum number of cases that we could find. Many service members and new veterans are not identified as such when they go to court or their cases never get reported publicly.

Also please keep in mind that the military population is very different from the civilian population. Military recruits are screened for criminal records and mental illness. That is why you have only a tiny number of felons, or criminals in general, who are allowed into the military, and obviously very few people with documented mental illness. The vast majority of these military men and women have no prior records at all, which makes them very different from the average person charged with murder in the civilian world. Those men and women typically have criminal records by the time they commit a murder.

As far as I know civilian society has no such screening method. This fact, among others, obviously also complicates any comparisons between a military population and a civilian one.

This is not an indictment of service members. No one has ever told the stories of these men who wind up in prison (not to mention their victims, who wind up dead) and we thought the stories were worth telling. For decades, the prisons in America held a relatively percentage of Vietnam veterans, and many feel strongly that if they had gotten help, they would not have ended up there. Some believe that perhaps those who really need help when they return from war stand a better chance of getting it if their difficulties and crimes are acknowledged.

Sincerely,
Lizette

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January 28, 2008 • Permalink
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The New York Times Public Editor responds to accusations from us about their "War Torn" series:

...The Times was immediately accused — in The New York Post and the conservative blogosphere, and by hundreds of messages to the public editor — of portraying all veterans as unstable killers. It did not.

But, the first article used colorfully inflated language — “trail of death” — for a trend it could not reliably quantify, despite an attempt at statistical analysis using squishy numbers. The article did not make clear what its focus was. Was it about killer vets, or about human tragedies involving a system that sometimes fails to spot and treat troubled souls returning from combat?

Finally, while many of the 121 cases found by The Times appeared clearly linked to wartime stresses, others seemed questionable. One involved a Navy Seabee accused of arranging her ex-husband’s murder during a bitter child custody battle, and another involved a soldier who was acquitted of reckless homicide in a car crash after a jury concluded that his blood alcohol level was below the legal limit and that many other accidents had happened on the same stretch of road...

To be fair to the New York Times, I reached out to the reporters, Lizette Alvarez and Deborah Sontag, and I'll put the reply from Lizette Alvarez after the Jump.

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