None of Us Were Like This Before

In an interview on Violence

Let’s move on to your next choice, None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture by Joshua E S Phillips.

This book is a different kind of book entirely. It is the intersection of war journalism and human rights. It takes the story of a tank unit in Iraq and this was a tank unit that didn’t end up doing much fighting with tanks after the first few days of the war and the members of the unit were assigned to prison detail and in the process ended up doing terrible things which they didn’t tell anyone about. 

And when they came back to the United States, one of the members, Sergeant Adam Gray, became a disciplinary problem wherever he was stationed, and he eventually committed suicide. Another one, Jonathan Millantz, an army medic, approached the author, a war reporter, and asked him to look into this matter. Eventually Millantz too committed suicide. What emerged is that the unit had been immersed in torture and people were feeling guilty, and guilt is one of the most toxic emotions we know of, and whether you feel it is not in your power to control. In this way soldiers become a danger to themselves as well as, potentially, to others like their families. So it is a really important book on atrocity-related trauma and the blow-back effect from Iraq, as well as the importance of seeking help for these conditions as soon as possible.

There are many things in this book that are fascinating and generally unknown. One is that these soldiers were afraid to report what they had seen and done for fear of losing their military pensions, but without reporting it they couldn’t receive any medical help for their trauma. And so they were caught in that Catch 22 which is where torturers often find themselves. 

And had the order for torture to do this come from above?

This is another very important feature of this story; there was no order in that sense. There was a sort of implicit understanding that you had to be tough and that is one of the points that the book makes and I think this is where my take comes in. One of the things that this book shows is that torture had begun in Afghanistan well before the memos were even drafted. It also shows that torture in the US military was far broader and more extensive than torture in the CIA but it remains the least investigated part of the Bush era legacy. The book goes through all the ways the US military managed to evade allegations of torture within the army so it is a very good antidote to a myopic approach on memos, water-boarding and the CIA. 

It also shows something that we all know, which is that torture has a slippery slope and once you authorise it, or even create the atmosphere to encourage it, it rapidly runs out of control. That happens for a number of reasons. For example, people who are tortured become desensitised to pain, the body can only take so much damage. Faced with the limits and variability of pain, torturers say, ‘I know I am only authorised to do seven techniques but what if I go beyond that? If I overtake his pain threshold I know I will be successful and it will be hard to blame me for success.’ So they begin to disregard the rules. Another problem is they become competitive amongst themselves and each wants to be the one who breaks the victim, and this leads to a spiral of competitive brutality. Lastly, torture has a well-known deprofessionalisation effect – why would you want to learn the hard, hot work of a normal investigation when you have a bat? So all those reasons combined lead torture units to be less responsive to those who encourage them to torture. This book really shows how a situation can drive a unit that has no background at all in torture to start down a very dark road.