Politics
Election 2012: Military (war) veterans slanting towards Obama
As for voting in this presidential election: “I haven’t had that spark to get out and register.”
The Pentagon counts more than 6,300 American dead and 33,000 wounded in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Rand Corp study estimates that as many as 300,000 post-9/11 veterans suffer from PTSD or major depression, and about 320,000 may have experienced traumatic brain injuries, mainly from bombs.
For combat veterans such as McDowell, who enlisted at 19, the statistics are starkly personal.
With his direct gaze, erect posture and fondness for war mementos, he may seem to fit the stereotype of a battle-hardened sergeant. But this father of five shudders at the memory of the young Vietnamese-American at Fort Jackson, whose fear of deployment was brushed off by an officer. The soldier tried to commit suicide by shoving a pencil up his nose into his brain.
He chokes up when he recalls “the geek-faced kid” from Oklahoma who was brought in to fix office computers in McDowell’s Iraq bomb dismantling unit. The young man, with no combat training, was sent into the field to hack into terrorists’ laptops. Within weeks he suffered a mental breakdown. Returning stateside, he shot his two children to death and killed himself.
“It was sheer terror,” McDowell said of the improvised explosive devices that guerrillas hid along roadways. “They’d strap gasoline cans to IEDs. Our soldiers burned alive. You’d hear them screaming, and you couldn’t do anything.”
Now he is “watching the primaries very closely to see who will be the least careless with soldiers and their families.”
