I Don't Know Why You Ran This Piece, NPR

       My dad texted me this morning saying that I should listen to NPR Morning Edition because there was a piece about Twentynine Palms, the base where my brother is stationed. I finally got around to listening to the short piece that afternoon while waiting to board a plane home. Now, as a lot of you may know, I do a lot of reading about the military specifically PTSD, suicide, and transitioning back from a deployment. This started with Jacob but has evolved into my own thing over the past couple years. 


       "'Desert Sun' Probes Marine Deaths On Highway Near Calif. Base" was the title of the piece. Listen here, read here (It's less than five minutes long.) It begins with the statistic that at the remote Twentynine Palms Marine base in the Mojave desert of California, sixty-four Marines have been killed in what they call "non-hostile situations" like car accidents or suicides since 2007. This is less than died at war from the base at that time. A few quick things before I get further in: First, I'm not sure that death by car accident and death by suicide can be categorized together. Second, I have a problem with calling suicide a "non-hostile situation" of death. Third, this article focuses on car accidents, with no other talk about suicides so that mention is misleading. 

       When my dad sends me something to read or write it's usually because he liked it which means I went in to this with high expectations and was prepared to be more impressed with what followed. 

       I was not. 

       Desert Sun reporter Brett Kelman believes Twentynine Palms to be "an especially dangerous combination of a lot of different things." This next part is where I became especially perplexed.

Kelman says, "One: you have this isolation in an environment that encourages people to drive fast; two: it's a bunch of young people in an area where there's really not much to do, which encourages them to travel further during their off-hours; three: because of the lack of things to do, I feel like there is a larger issue with alcohol at the base. I think the fourth one is where the military is now. We have millions of troops transitioning back from a decade of war, and what that's created is hundreds of thousands of people who are starting to lose their purpose and could be coping with the incredible implications of post-traumatic stress disorder."

       I'm with him for the first part. I was at Twentynine Palms two weeks ago and it's out in the sticks. Picture tumbleweed. So, yes, isolation and yes, people probably drive faster when there are no cars around. And the highway they are referring to, Route 62, is four lanes across with no barrier between oncoming traffic, has a 70 mph speed limit, and has occasional red light intersections. So it is a dangerous road by nature. I track with him on the second part as well: isolation leads to added commute distance to go anywhere, which leads to more time in a car, which statistically leads to a better chance of getting in an accident. The third part is probably true too. Boredom and drinking have a close relationship. But I lose him completely on number four. I highly doubt that these Marines are dying because they have PTSD and are therefore driving too fast. I do not think that this base is a microcosm for the United States military. This is a jump I'm not willing to make. Kelman is making a causal relationship from an already shaky correlational one.

       It seems from this information you have a concentration of 18-30 something men (mostly), a statistically high risk age group who already likes to engage in high risk behavior as seen by their choice of joining the military, driving in the middle of the desert with few cars around them, and perhaps excessive alcohol consumption. I don't have the facts for that but Kelman doesn't either. He never says that Corporal Donald Fowler, whose fatal accident he cites in the piece, had PTSD or traumatic brain injury. Instead, he makes a lofty claim of a connection between PTSD and the accidents, and NPR goes along with it because PTSD is a buzzword. It's mainstream. There's an NYT article on veterans once every ten days or so. He gets coverage because he says "PTSD" and because veterans have died in tragic, non-war ways. I'm not saying it shouldn't be talked about, but when we talk about PTSD can we actually talk about PTSD? Can we have data that proves that these people suffered from PTSD and not speculate on their deaths?

       Kelman's piece is dishonest. Not purposefully, but he hasn't finished the investigation. He might be getting at something: maybe it's not the best thing that Twentynine Palms is so isolated and maybe Marines drive recklessly. But don't say it's because of PTSD unless it is.