The writing is on the wall and has been from the start of these wars!

AMY GOODMAN: Aaron Glantz, we want to thank you for being with us, Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism at the Carter Center. His book is The War Comes Home: Washingtons Battle Against Americas Veterans. And we want to thank, as well, Qaseem Uqdah, the former Marine Corps gunnery sergeant who heads the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council, speaking to us from Washington, DC.
When we come back from break, were going to go to Killeen, Texas. Were going to go to Fort Hood and find out the reaction there. And then well turn to healthcare, and well be talking with a sort of Marlboro Man, the Marlboro Man of the healthcare industry. He was the face of Blue Cross Blue Shield. Now hes criticizing his own industry. And then the famed actress, documentarian, playwright, Anna Deavere Smith, will join us live in our firehouse studio. Stay with us.

Whats different, though, again, about all of these cases are these are all people who had been deployed, and Major Hasan had not been deployed. But it is possible that having been at Walter Reed and having heard all these stories and been an Army psychiatrist and then knowing that he was going to deploy, that all of that caused him to snap.

We also need to look at incidents that happen stateside, when people involve themselves in altercations with local law enforcement and crack under post-traumatic stress disorder. We call this suicide by cop. We had a case in 2005 in California, Andres Raya, who walked up to a liquor store and tried to rob the liquor store for no apparent reason and ended up dying in a hail of bullets with local police. We saw that in Maryland, where James Dean, after serving a tour in the war in Afghanistan, was being mobilized again for another deployment and didnt want to go and barricaded himself in his fathers farmhouse out in the countryside. And then the police laid siege and ultimately killed him with a snipers bullet.

AARON GLANTZ: Well, I mean, you may remember that Sergeant Russell was on—I dont remember exactly how many tours now, but he had been in Yugoslavia and was on not his first tour in Iraq and Afghanistan, when he walked into this combat stress clinic in Baghdad in May and shot it up and killed many people inside the combat stress clinic.

Are you paying ATTENTION!!!!!

AMY GOODMAN: Aaron, I wanted to ask you about a shooting the New York Times had reported October 21st, 2009. An American soldier accused of killing five other service members in a base in Iraq in May had been behaving erratically for weeks, even threatening to commit suicide, but a lack of adequate guidelines on how to handle his case allowed it to get out of control. US military investigators said this in a report. And the Times went on to say the shootings took place at Camp Liberty combat stress clinic, where the soldier, Sergeant John M. Russell, was being counseled. Can you talk about that shooting?

Its difficult to put this incident that we see now in that type of box, though. Its difficult because this major who committed the shooting spree at Fort Hood had not been deployed to the war. But I think that we can say that its yet another example of a violence that comes from the war that the Pentagon would rather not discuss openly, but will come to the surface as the war goes on and on.

AARON GLANTZ: Well, I think that theres no question that the Army is incredibly stressed and at the breaking point, after six years of war in Iraq and eight years of war in Afghanistan. And one thing that we see again and again and that I think were going to see more and more of is distressing incidents, where people have served multiple tours in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, and then they turn to violence, more likely against themselves and then occasionally against others.
I wrote a story about a guy named Specialist John Fish, who was stationed at Fort Hood, who served a tour in Iraq and then was being deployed for a second tour to Afghanistan. And he complained after his first tour to Iraq that he was suicidal, that he was thinking of taking his own life, and his command didnt believe him. And then when he was in training for the second tour, he walked out into the desert in New Mexico and shot himself in the head with a military-issued machine gun.

The harassment, yes, I have received numerous reports with respect to soldiers and various service members experiencing harassments at their commands. When Ive gotten involved with this, the command works with me to resolve it. I have not experienced any situation. Most recent cases were in Great Lakes Naval Base, we had an incident. We had an incident with the Air Force, I want to say, in Georgia. But here, the command was extremely proactive with respect to resolving it.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Aaron Glantz, we have you back on the phone now. What has been your experience in terms of those mechanisms functioning with soldiers within the military who have—who have problems in terms of their—the ability of their commands to address those?