I Want My War TV

The Los Angeles Times reports that, thanks to the portability and affordability of video and DVD technology, US troops in Iraq are making their own music videos of the Iraq War. Filled with images of dead, mutilated Iraqis, with the sophisticated editing on the beat that seems hard-wired into a generation raised on MTV, these DVDs document what's really going on with our troops in the Iraqi meat-grinder.

It's easy to condemn these budding auteurs, and in fact many of their fellow soldiers are appalled at the practice. But we shouldn't dismiss the practice as merely voyeurism. According to Daniel Nelson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine:

What seems disrespectful or a trivialization is also a way for soldiers to distance themselves from the trauma...which says: "I don't want to see what I've done or experienced as real."

The creation of videos resembles what Nelson has seen in his work with traumatized children and Vietnam veterans, he said.

"How do we create the story about our lives?" he asked. "Part of the healing process is for them to create a narrative, to organize an emotional story that allows them to get a handle on it."

I think this is probably true. And I think, how is it, once again, that America will have yet another generation of traumatized young people in need of emotional healing, whose only way of making sense of their lives is to set the deaths they have witnessed, the deaths they have caused, to heavy metal music?

People wonder why we have so much violence in our culture, and I'll tell you, this is one reason why. Because generation after generation, we send our kids to war. And lately, we send our kids to war for no good reason.