| brucekluger.com |
USA Today, May 12, 2004 Vilified soldier shouldn't be prejudged— just ask her mom By Bruce Kluger Last month, my 5-year-old, Audrey, raised eyebrows in school when she scribbled on a classmate's drawing, then cut it with scissors and crumpled it into a ball. When her teacher presented the evidence to me, I was astonished. "That's simply not my kid," I said. "I know," she responded. "That's why I'm showing it to you." That evening, Audrey told me the back-story—a saga that began as a misunderstanding, then escalated into an argument, hurt feelings and the aforementioned arts-and-crafts desecration. Even so, I'd never known Audrey to be capable of such fury. Thankfully, the incident was an anomaly. But multiply my alarm by several hundred thousand, and we might begin to understand the shock and incredulity of Terrie England, whose daughter, Pfc. Lynndie England, appears in the shameful scrapbook of photos documenting the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. "Everyone we know is being supportive because they know Lynndie, and this is not Lynndie that they are showing," her mother told The (Baltimore) Sun. Despite the damning photos, how can we ignore Terrie England's only-a-mother- knows defense of her child? In this way, the mystery of Lynndie England personifies the nation's bewilderment over the whole Abu Ghraib mess. The dichotomy was never more apparent than last weekend. CNN chronicled friends' description of England as a good-hearted American, while Saturday Night Live named her "Dirtbag of the Week." Why the confusion? Because again, the media are fulfilling the maddening mandate of modern-day broadcasting by playing fill-in-the-blanks on developing stories. Like the rest of the U.S., reporters lack concrete facts (thanks largely to the Bush administration's chronic addiction to secrecy). Yet the images of abuse are evidently too compelling to pass up. And who can resist the ironic tug of painting Lynndie England as the evil twin of Jessica Lynch, that other West Virginia soldier whose actions in Iraq were inflated by reporters in search of the perfect war story? In the coming weeks, the drama promises to mutate into a perverse reality show with tangled plot lines and a villainous cast—notably, Pfc. England as the Omarosa of the torture set. Yet rather than program my TiVo to keep atop the latest episodes, I find it more instructive to ask: What could cause a decent kid to become an international symbol of cruelty? Psychology scholar Philip Zimbardo discovered the answer in 1971. He conducted a mock prison incarceration in the basement of Stanford University's psychology building. So quickly did the student-guards transform into sadistic tormentors— forcing captives to strip naked, wear bags on their heads and perform sexual acts— that Zimbardo cut short the experiment by a week. "It's not that we put bad apples in a good barrel," he recalls. "We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything it touches." That warfare can poison otherwise healthy minds is not new. Eric Dean Jr., whose 1997 book, Shook Over Hell, explored the psychological suffering of Civil War and Vietnam combatants, says the Iraqi prison fiasco was inevitable. "War is so uniquely horrible that citizens cannot comprehend the brutality of it," Dean says. "So governments must create fictions to justify it. In this case, the administration says most soldiers are honorable, then it heaps brutality charges on the few. "That's unfair and inaccurate," Dean continues. "This is a systemic problem that began with the denial of legal and human rights at Guantanamo Bay (Cuba). The administration created a green light for what we see in these photos, and they're scapegoating Lynndie England and the others." Whatever the real story, one thing is certain: Lynndie England is now a changed person. Her mom says Lynndie, who dreamed of becoming a "storm chaser," recently ducked for cover at the sound of lightning, fearing it was mortar fire. Lynndie is now at Ft. Bragg, N.C., pregnant and facing court-martial. Until the truth is known, this soldier deserves better than the obfuscation of information by the government and a rush to judgment by the media. Her mother deserves better, too.
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