SBAND Seminar Materials 2013 Free Ethics: Echoes of War The Combat Veteran

The EPICON team, first, found that violent crime among the soldiers at Ft. Carson was well outside normal levels of crime in civilian society. The murder rate for Ft. Carson had doubled since the start of the Iraq war. Rape arrests had tripled and stood at nearly twice the rate of other Army posts.54 Second, the EPICON team ruled out the “bad seed” theory. Long a favorite of military commanders, the “bad seed” theory posits that the only troops acting out criminally were troubled before their military service and would have acted out whether they had served or not. The EPICON team found no such common tie. Soldiers who had acted out had disparate pre-?service criminal backgrounds and mental health issues. They also came from diverse racial, socioeconomic, and educational backgrounds. The common thread among all those who had committed violent crimes was that they had seen serious combat. From a public health standpoint, combat seemed to be a contagion. PTSD, drug and alcohol abuse, violence, and murder were just the symptoms. The more soldiers were exposed to combat, the more they showed the effects. The EPICON study also concluded that the crimes reported on and around Ft. Carson were just the tip of the iceberg. Of the Ft. Carson soldiers surveyed, 40% reported choking, beating, kicking, or pointing a gun at someone—in other words they had committed some kind of felony assault.55 In the end, the EPICON team found two major factors contributed to post-? deployment violent behavior: (1) repeated deployments and (2) the intensity of combat in those deployments. The study concluded with a carefully worded assertion that “[s]urvey data from this investigation suggest a possible association between increasing levels of combat exposure and risk for negative behavioral outcomes.”56 In other words, the military finally confirmed what civilian sociologists had long believed: combat contributes to crime. Soldiers come home different. By sending young men and women to war, a country is unintentionally bringing violence back on itself. Closely linked to the criminal justice system is the homeless population. A 2006 study found that fully 24% of Minnesota’s male homeless population are veterans. More than 54 55 Id. at 10?11. Id. at 12?13. 56 Id. at 18. 15

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