On March 11, 16 villagers including 9 children, were murdered by an American staff sergeant in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province in rural, southern Afghanistan. The early reports told a horrifying story. The sergeant was part of a village stabilization operation. The team was trying to develop relationships with village leaders and help organize local policeman to search out Taliban leaders. It has been reported that the soldier is 38 years old with 11 years of service. He is married with two children and had been on three tours of duty in Iraq. The sergeant left his base, walked more than a mile, forced his way into three separate homes and went on a killing spree. He subsequently burned some of the bodies. A patrol had been dispatched to find him when he was reported missing, and apprehended him after the killings on his way back to the base. He hasn’t provided any explanations for his actions.

The massacre provoked official reaction. President Hamid Karzai called the act inhuman, intentional and demanded justice. President Obama and Secretary of Defense Panetta extended their condolences and promised a thorough investigation. President Obama, further, characterized the actions as tragic and shocking. The NATO spokesperson expressed his deep sadness.

It is feared that the massacre will set off riots and others forms of violence. Common reactions outside of Afghanistan are revulsion and puzzlement. How could such an atrocity happen?

According to Jonathan Shay, M. D., Ph.D., this type of outrageous killing by an isolated individual has been going on for thousands of years. Dr. Shay explored the subject in Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. He combines an examination of Homer’s Iliad with narratives and analysis drawn from his experiences as a psychiatrist treating veterans with chronic post- traumatic stress syndrome.

Shay’s chapter 5, “Berserk,” may help explain the current atrocities in Afghanistan committed by the staff sergeant,

Restraint is always in part the cognitive attention to multiple possibilities in a situation; when all restraint is lost, the cognitive universe is simplified to a single focus. The berserker is figuratively — sometimes literally — blind to everything but his destructive aim. He cannot see the distinction between civilian and combatant or even the distinction between comrade and enemy. One of our veterans was tied up by his own men and taken to the rear while berserk. He has no clear memory but suspects that he had become a serious threat to them.

Shay assembled a list of characteristics of the berserk state that are common to Vietnam combat veteran narratives and Homer’s Iliad. The list is as disturbing as it is long:

… beastlike; godlike; socially disconnected; crazy, mad, insane; enraged; cruel, without restraint or discrimination; insatiable; devoid of fear; inattentive to own safety; distractible; indiscriminate; reckless, feeling invulnerable; exalted, intoxicated, frenzied; cold, indifferent; insensible to pain; and suspicious of friends.

To illustrate the characteristics, Shay juxtaposes Vietnam veteran narratives with specific passages drawn from Homer.

Shay prefers to use the term berserk rather than aristeía which is frequently used by commentators on Homer. According to Shay, the origins of berserk is a Norse word which has been used to describe warriors who are seen as being frenzied, sometimes going into battle without clothes or armor and seemed to be possessed by god, but also display beast-like behaviors and fury. Some of these same characteristics are found in the Iliad in which the line is blurred between heroic behaviors and blood thirsty abuses. Was Achilles a prototype of a hero or a type of berserker?

There are, though, differences between the berserking actions of Homer’s warriors and the murderous rages of some Vietnam War soldiers. Many of the atrocities occurred after superiors urged solders to “not be sad but to get even.” This is not a characteristic of Homeric warriors. In the Iliad, berserk behavior is of shorter durations. Triggering events in the Iliad are usually much closer to the berserking behaviors. Both Homeric heroes and Vietnam soldiers share a feeling of the betrayal of “what’s right” as a conditioning element, especially as it relates to the passing of a very close brother in arms. Yet, grief alone is not a sufficient trigger. The absence of restraints seems to be an elemental trait.

Shay reflects:

On the basis of my work with Vietnam veterans, I conclude that the berserk state is ruinous, leading to the soldier’s maiming or death in battle — which is the most frequent outcome — and to life-long psychological and physiological injury if he survives. I believe that once a person has entered the berserk state, he or she is changed forever … If a soldier survives a berserk state, it imparts emotional deadness and vulnerability to explosive rage to his psychology and a permanent hyperarousal to his physiology — hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder in combat veterans.

In American military culture, the suppression of grief coupled with using revenge as motivation provoke berserk behavior such as that we have observed in Afghanistan, Shay strongly suggests. The prosecution of the staff sergeant who killed 16 civilians in Afghanistan will be a challenge, as will be managing the political repercussions of his monstrous actions. Is he a berserker? If so, how should the military justice system deal with him? How does his actions affect American policy in Afghanistan?

A singular atrocity shouldn’t influence national and international policies, but it appears this may be happening. President Karzai is asking for NATO forces to leave the villages and return to its bases, even though small village stabilization teams have been proven to be effective in numerous conflicts. Karzai also is suggesting that NATO forces might be exiting earlier than planned. It isn’t clear what the Afghan and NATO strategic objectives are. What is clear is that the United States’ all volunteer military has been asked to serve in combat for a decade or more, with telling consequences. Multiple deployments are taking their toll on military personnel. It is tearing them apart, and the physical, social and psychological toll on them, their families and communities is enormous. To date, PTSD has been a huge problem, but berserking has been rare and isolated. If berserking incidents increase should we blame the perpetrators, the military, or ourselves?

One of our rhetorical tics, so common and so universal as to be unremarkable, is the shared assertion by liberals and conservatives alike that our soldiers are our heroes. We may disagree about foreign policy, but soldiers are the bravest and the greatest. That mainstream politicians should make this claim – Obama and Bush, McCain and Kerry – should provoke little surprise, but it flourishes as a trope among the anti-war left as well. Political strategies reverberate through time as we refight our last discursive war.

In the heated years of the War in Vietnam there was a palpable anger by opponents of that war that was directed against members of the military who bombed the killing fields of Cambodia, Hanoi, and Hue. While accounts of soldiers being spat upon were more apocryphal than real, used by pro-war forces to attack their opponents. According to sociologist Jerry Lembcke in his book The Spitting Image the story was an urban legend, but it is true that many who opposed the war considered soldiers to be oppressors, or in the extreme, murderers. This was a symbolic battle in which the anti-war forces were routed, and such language was used to delegitimize principled opposition to the war and to separate the young college marchers from the working class soldiers who were doing the bidding of presidents and generals. In the time of a national draft, college students were excused from service, making the class divide evident. (For the record, I admit to cowardice, fearing snipers, fragging, and reveille. I was a chicken dove).

After the war, war critics learned a lesson. No longer would the men with guns be held responsible for the bullets. All blame was to be placed upon government and none on the soldiers, even though the draft had been abolished, and the military became all-volunteer (and the working class and minority population continued to increase in the ranks).

By the time that American adventures in the Gulf and in Afghanistan became part of our political taken-for-granted, so did the rhetoric of soldier-as-hero. Perhaps these rhetorical choices were strategic, but they also served to give our military a moral pass.

When Barack Obama was a candidate he assured voters that he would conclude this national nightmare. Yes, politics involves bluster and blarney, but bringing the troops home in an orderly process seemed a firm commitment, a project for his first term. I trusted that this hope and change was not merely a discursive sop to those who found long-term and bloody American intervention intolerable. Here was a war that seemed hopeless in year one and now in year eleven it seems no more hopeful. To be sure it is a low-grade debacle, but a debacle none-the-less. If, as some have suggested, we invaded Afghanistan to put the fear of God into the hearts of Pakistanis, the strategy has been charmingly ineffective. It seems abundantly clear that our choice is to determine when we will declare the war lost, and when Americans and Afghans will no longer die at each others hands.

Wars cannot be conducted without the connivance of soldiers. Soldiers are the pawns that permit State policy. I recognize that in parlous economic times there are many strategic reasons for desiring the benefits of a military life. And spittle is not political philosophy. But choice is always tethered to responsibility. Members of the military are accepting and even benefiting from a misguided and destructive policy. The nation of Afghanistan deserves self-determination free from our boots on the ground. And the absence of complaint among the all-volunteer military underlines the complicity of our soldiers.

So I do reject the choices of the members of the military whose presence and obedience makes possible the fantasias of foreign policy strategists. They have moral responsibility for their decisions. But the responsibility is not theirs alone, but ours. That we have been unable, unwilling, or unconcerned to stop an unending war against a nation that did not attack us is a mark of shame. It reveals the American public as timid and craven.

Are soldiers responsible for their actions? Surely. Should soldiers be hated? Not until the rest of us are willing to hold a mirror to our own acquiescence in a system that reveals in our political priorities that War and Peace matters far less than Standard and Poors.