Cracking Under the Pressure of War

June 21, 2006 — -- As if the prisoner abuse allegations at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were not horrific enough, there are now reports of U.S. soldiers killing innocent Iraqi civilians in the towns of Haditha, Ishaqi and now Hamdania.

The Marine Corps announced today that seven Marines and a Navy corpsman have been charged with murder in the death in April of an Iraqi civilian in Hamdania.

What is it about war that sometimes pushes soldiers to behave in such abhorrent ways? ABC News spoke to experts when it was revealed several weeks ago that U.S. Marines had been implicated in the deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in November.

While mental health experts disagree on the answer to that question, they agree that war is not a normal human experience. For soldiers and civilians in war-torn nations, the constant stress and violence is an assault on a person's emotions. That isn't an excuse for atrocious behavior, but it does, in some way, make it more likely to occur, experts say.

"War is a huge stressor," said Denisse Ambler, a child psychiatrist at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and a former Army psychiatrist who served in Afghanistan. "War rarely improves someone's mental health," she said.

Part of the problem is unavoidable -- it's a soldier's job to be prepared to kill, and witness and experience violence.

"Am I horrified by what happened? Yes. Am I surprised? I don't think so," said Melinda Koenig, clinical director of the adult outpatient unit at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York City and a former civilian psychologist for the Navy, in response to the killings in Haditha. "Think about what we train soldiers to do. In many ways it's inhumane. We train them to go to war and to kill. We tell them that it is OK, but in normal society they know it's not OK."

Atrocities committed during wartime are easy to link to post-traumatic stress disorder, but the condition generally occurs after the stressor -- as a result of it -- not during it.