Book Review: A look at human tragedy following detainee abuse - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Book Review: A look at human tragedy following detainee abuse

In the opening chapter, Sgt. Adam Gray, 24, dies an “accidental” death (the Army’s term) three weeks after a suicide attempt. At the end of the book, former Spc. Jonathan Millantz, 27, dies from an overdose of painkillers. In between, the author — who spoke with medic Millantz a week before he died — shows that the pair personifies a puzzling predicament of war.

“They were both traumatized by abusing prisoners” at the jail at Forward Operating Base Lion in Balad, Iraq, when they were with the Army’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, in 2003.

Author Joshua E.S. Phillips admits his reporting “does not wholly explain the disparate factors that led U.S. forces to engage in detainee abuse and torture.

“But it does help illuminate many critical issues that have been overlooked in the discourse about U.S. torture — some of which involved enormous human tragedies.”

The book, which follows Phillips’ and Michael Montgomery’s 2008 American Radio Network documentary, “What Killed Sergeant Gray,” tries to explain and explore rather than judge and condemn.

And indeed, “Most soldiers who handled detainees served with distinction and never tortured,” Phillips writes.

Phillips allows soldiers to speak, including Spc. Tony Lagournis, the linguist who exposes interrogation practices in his sadly memorable 2007 book, “Fear Up Harsh.”

Lagournis is not alone.

“My violence [as a prison guard] robbed me,” says former Spc. Daniel Keller, who is sorry for “the terrible things that I did. I’m still paying the price for it. A lot of your emotional ramifications come from these feelings of guilt.”

Dr. Richard Kulka, the chief author of a four-year congressional study of post-traumatic stress disorder among Vietnam veterans, concurs.

“We can go into long philosophical discussion of torture,” he says. “But the one thing the research has shown is that it’s not good for the people doing it.”

Just ask Millantz’s mother. Her explanation of how — and why — U.S. soldiers turned to torture stands out among many theories in the book:

“The abuse occurred” because of the soldiers “rage” and the fact that they were given too much power, and the detainees were powerless, and the fact that there was no one to protect them.

“People might think, ‘Oh, I would never do anything like that.’ Wrong. It takes a very, very mature, moral strong person to not abuse power,” she said.

“They [soldiers] are very young and they make very unwise choices, which they regret.”