Fighting spirit

Julian Evans

16 April 2011

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The US Army is inventing its own faith

How does the army of a liberal, multicultural and often secular society develop in its soldiers the spiritual resilience to cope with war, to face trauma, death and bereavement, and to fight opponents who have the advantage of a strong and common religious faith?

That’s the question the Pentagon has been grappling with, as it confronts the apparent epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder affecting a fifth of its troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Its response is a new psychological training programme called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, which aims to strengthen the emotional, psychological and, yes, spiritual resilience of each of the 1.1 million soldiers serving in the US Army.

The person in charge of the $125 million programme is Brigadier-General Rhonda Cornum, herself an unusually resilient person. Cornum was a flight surgeon on board a Black Hawk helicopter in the first Iraq war. The helicopter was shot down. Cornum was taken prisoner and sexually assaulted in the back of a truck on the way to an Iraqi prison compound. Her capture and assault led to a fierce debate about whether female troops should be deployed in conflict zones.

But she managed to face her ordeal with resilience. She says: ‘Being a POW is the rape of your entire life. When you’re a POW, your captors control everything about your life: when you get up, when you go to sleep, what you eat, if you eat. I realised the only thing I had left that I could control was how I thought. I had absolute control over that, and was not going to let them take that too.’

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David Jones

April 20th, 2011 9:59am Report this comment

A seven-point questionnaire? Can anyone think of an idea more self-evidently charlatan? Long ago, working for a major UK company, I ahd to fill in a self-knowledge questionnaire with several dozen questions. Really deep stuff like "Are you introvert or extravert?" and "Do you prefer the word 'hard' or soft'?". The results were then used to "reveal" things about my personality which were obviously, screamingly, in-your-facily untrue. The idea that my career was in the hands of peple who beleived such twaddle was too frightening. I left.

Yam Yam

April 26th, 2011 10:52am Report this comment

The fact that British soldiers have proved more resilient to combat stress may also derive from the fact that the British Army's regimental system has traditionally offered a far higher degree of unit cohesion and esprit-de-corps than existed in the US Army.

For example, a British soldier joined a regionally-based regiment and usually stayed with it throughout his service career, fostering a high degree of loyalty and mutual support.

In contrast, US soldiers often found themselves assigned to regiments with few local affiliations and were frequently swapped and switched between regiments.

Following on from problems of poor morale highlighted during the Vietnam War, since the early 1980s the US has endeavoured to revert back to the 'British' system in order to better foster this same esprit-de-corps.

That said, it will be interesting to see how the British squaddie fares now that defence cuts have resulted in ever more frequent regimental mergers and disbandments.

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