The Purple Heart: Not for psychic wounds

Is psychological trauma as important as a physical wound? The Pentagon has weighed that question over the past year, said William Saletan in Slate.com, and it has decided that soldiers afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder are not eligible for a Purple Heart. It’s not an abstract issue, since a RAND Corp. study has estimated that a staggering 300,000 soldiers have come back from the chaotic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with recurring nightmares, depression, persistent rage, and other symptoms of PTSD. The Pentagon, though, reasoned that psychic wounds are hard to diagnose and define, making it impossible to draw a distinct line; giving out Purple Hearts to hundreds of thousands, it decided, would cheapen the honor. The decision sounds sensible—but it’s actually an evasion of responsibility. We’ve learned in recent years that the psychological damage some soldiers suffer is real, often debilitating, and sometimes long-lasting. “There’s nothing inherently more sacred about being wounded in your backside than in your brain.”

True enough, said The New York Times in an editorial, but the time to give Purple Hearts for psychic trauma has not yet come. “PTSD can be difficult to diagnose,” and it sometimes doesn’t show up until a soldier has been home for years. Until medical science can objectively confirm PTSD, giving out this treasured national honor to everyone who claims it would change its prestige “in unwelcome ways.” Even now, not every injured solider gets the award, said the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Soldiers who contract disease or get frostbite while serving the country, for example, don’t qualify. If we don’t honor all those who come home physically damaged, it would be “illogical” to honor those with ambiguous psychological damage.

There’s plenty of logic in the Pentagon’s decision, said Dan Rodricks in the Baltimore Sun, but it’s not about preserving the prestige of the Purple Heart. Ever eager to hide the costs of an unpopular war, the military and the Bush administration both want no part in admitting that the real U.S. casualties of Iraq “run into the hundreds of thousands.” The Pentagon barely treats these victims’ mental health problems, let alone honors them. In fact, the Defense Department often rejects PTSD claims on the grounds that it’s a pre-existing condition—that these soldiers had a “personality disorder” when they enlisted. Having fed our young to the war machine, “we declare them damaged goods and send them home—no medals for their nightmares.”

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