I often bemoan how the the media’s policy of sanitizing combat images and its failure to report what the true face of war looks like have caused the public to be detached from the carnage wrought by the occupation of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.

For nearly a decade, both wars have largely been reported by the media and explained to the public by lawmakers in statistical terms; thousands of U.S. soldiers killed in combat, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead, and three-quarters of a million veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress

Perhaps the media is not entirely at fault for failing to provide deeper insight into the psychological impact the wars have had on more than one million U.S. veterans and their families.

Until recently, the press has been prohibited from photographing veterans returning from combat in flag-draped coffins, and funerals for the fallen were likewise off-limits.

But by relying heavily on numbers and press releases as a way of covering both conflicts, the public has been rendered incapable of experiencing or feeling any dramatic element associated with the devastation. It’s a sad truth that the average person is unable to accurately say how many U.S soldiers have been killed and wounded since the wars began (4,257 dead, more than 31,000 wounded, 320,000 diagnosed with brain injuries).

That’s how far removed from reality our society has become in the eight years since the fighting first began. We know the U.S. is currently engaged in two wars; we just have no idea what impact those wars have had on the soldiers and veterans who have bravely served our country.

These are the conclusions I arrived at after reading Marine Capt. Tyler E. Boudreau’s first-person exposé of the time he spent in Iraq and the struggles he and his comrades faced in the aftermath of their deployment.

If Boudreau’s brutally honest, devastatingly accurate, hard-hitting memoir, Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine, were read by the powers that be in Washington, D.C. and by the journalists assigned to cover both military conflicts, there is absolutely no way in hell the plight of our nation’s veterans would take a backseat to the issues currently dominating the evening news coverage or the topics of conversations at dinner tables throughout the country.

Boudreau’s book is so powerful and so superbly written that I found myself reading whole chapters twice just so I could study his writing style and ensure that the graphic imagery he describes is forever seared into my consciousness.

What makes Boudreau’s account such a page-turner is the descriptive nature of his prose. Reading it made me feel like I was embedded with the Marine Corps veteran. There were many instances in which I felt my heart beat faster, my eyes well up with tears, my adrenaline pump through my veins.

Describing an oncoming vehicle that may or may not be a suicide bomber, Boudreau writes:

Pulses jumped and our voices grew sharp and edgy. I leaned out the window and aimed my rifle at the truck. We struggled to see inside it, to spot some kind of clue that might tell us with any certainty whether or not the driver was a suicide bomber. My heart was racing. I was breathing hard as it drew closer and closer. Fire? Don’t fire? It was so difficult to know what to do. Will we live? Will we die? This could be it. And the truck drew closer still. And still we couldn’t seem to come up with a decision. There was no one to ask. There was no manual to reference. There was no time to think it over. There was only now, the moment, and we had to decide. In the end we resolved to hold our fire, and I was glad we did. The truck floated quietly past us without exploding into a million bits of fragmentation in our faces. We stared, agog, at the passengers, a family of four or maybe five crammed into the cab staring back at us, all agog as well.

You know that Boudreau was forced to relive his harrowing experience in Iraq in order to write a book as disturbing and heartwrenching as Packing Inferno.

The “story of Packing Inferno was conceived under fire,” exactly five years ago this month, Boudreau writes in the preface to his book. He eloquently describes how before he was sent to Iraq he had packed dozens of books into his “sea-bag,” one of which was Dante’s Inferno, which he said he didn’t recall taking, but nonetheless gave him a title for his memoir.

I began writing it in Iraq with the war raging around me. When I got home, I found the war was still raging, but it was not outside me anymore, not to touch, or to see, or to hear, or to smell. It was within me. I was no longer packing inferno in my sea-bag, but in my head.

My wife will sometimes catch a shift in my eyes, while we’re talking about groceries, or the kids’ school, or the weather, and she’ll ask me, “What are you thinking about?” She can see I’ve drifted off. But she doesn’t need me to answer, because she knows, and because the answer is always the same.

And therein lies one of the central themes of Boudreau’s 222-page book: the images of the war he has heroically fought have been implanted inside of his mind and are on a permanent loop.

“To say I was duped is not sufficient to lighten the load,” he writes.

The post-traumatic stress of the war in Iraq will forever be a part of Boudreau’s identity and it will be a lifelong battle to keep it in check. For some soldiers, post-traumatic stress is the precursor to suicide, for others it leads to a life of drug abuse, alcoholism, or crime.

Although the word “disorder” usually follows post-traumatic stress, Boudreau objects to the verbiage, calling it an “antiquated” term.

“While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) still uses this term, it is widely rejected by those who work in the field of mental health,” Boudreau wrote in an Author’s Note to his book. “I reject it too… I do not consider the psychological struggle of returning veterans a ‘disorder’ and so I will only refer to this injury as ‘combat stress’ or post-traumatic stress.”

Removing the word “disorder” has helped to eliminate the stigma some veterans say persists when they are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress or the ridicule they endure after seeking help for their deteriorating mental state.

When I spoke with Boudreau recently he told me that part of the stigma has to do with the fact that Marines are supposed to be “tough” and saying that “you feel all broken up because you shot a guy” could make a soldier’s situation worse.

Boudreau said “the smallest action or phrase from a commander can influence Marines and other soldiers not to seek help.”

“I knew the day I left that I would eventually have to return in nine months and manpower is always a struggle,” Boudreau said. “My boss won’t say to deny treatment. But his outlook of me will be negative ” if most of the unit has been discharged due to post-traumatic stress.

Boudreau expanded upon this notion in a recent op-ed published in the Boston Globe.

The pressure to prepare ourselves quickly was intense. When the first Marine came to my office and asked to see the psychiatrist about some troubling issues from our time in Iraq, I was sympathetic. I said, “No problem.” When another half dozen or so Marines approached me with the same request, I was only somewhat concerned.

But when all of them and several more returned from their appointments with recommendations for discharge, I’ll admit I was alarmed. Suddenly I was not as concerned about their mental health as I was about my company’s troop strength.

As all those Marines in my company began filtering out, some from essential positions, I started to worry about the welfare of those remaining. I worried, quite naturally, that if the exodus continued, we might not have enough to accomplish our mission or to survive on the battlefield. My sympathies for those individuals claiming post-traumatic stress began to wane. A commander cannot serve in earnest both the mission and the psychologically wounded.

This underscores a larger issue, one that the U.S. government was totally unprepared to deal with as it planned for the Iraq war.

Prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, documents released by the Department of Veterans Affairs said it expected a maximum of 8,000 cases of post-traumatic stress disorder.

However, according to a study released last year by the RAND Corporation, there are more than 320,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suffering from major depression, PTSD and/or traumatic brain injury. The report found that the VA has been and continues to be ill-equipped to deal with these cases when soldiers return from combat, especially after multiple tours.

An Army task force last year also found major flaws in the way the VA treated and cared for veterans suffering from traumatic brain injuries.

Boudreau said the treatment of post-traumatic stress is antithetical to the mantra of “Mission Accomplished.”

“The mission will always supersede treatment,” Boudreau said. “And because of that the treatment will always be dubious.”

And all the talk from bureaucrats about putting an end to multiple deployments, which has been blamed on the skyrocketing cases of post-traumatic stress and suicides, is inconceivable,” Boudreau said.

“I’ve heard the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff say ‘we have to change this ethic,’” Boudreau said. “But it’s not going to happen. Why? Because the military cannot afford a 20 percent reduction in its force.”

Since writing Packing Inferno, Boudreau has become an outspoken advocate for veterans.

Over the past four months, he has penned op-eds on veterans issues that have been published in the New York Times, Boston Globe and The Progressive.

In a New York Times op-ed, Boudreau argued that the decision not to award Purple Hearts to veterans is wrong and feeds into the cultural stigma the military has for veterans who bear the psychological wounds of war.

“Why, for instance, if a veteran has been given a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress and awarded benefits, should he not also be awarded a Purple Heart?

“Perhaps a new decoration, a new medal, could be established specifically for those suffering from post-traumatic stress. It would be awarded to those whose minds and souls have been sundered by war.

“I suggest we call this medal the Black Heart. Certainly the hearts of these soldiers are black, with the terrible things they saw and did on the battlefield. Certainly the country should see these Black Hearts pinned on their chests.”

In addition to his work on behalf of veterans, Boudreau has taken on the Iraqi refugee crisis and recently traveled to Jordan to call attention to the matter. Last year, he and his colleagues formed the nonprofit organization Iraq Veterans’ Refugee Aid Association (IVRAA) in response to inadequate measures by the U.S. government to effectively deal with the crisis, he said.

This summer, Boudreau is undertaking a cross-country bicycle tour with other veterans to search for “what’s on ‘the other side’ of the battlefield.

“It is very much about veterans who have found themselves hurled suddenly to the other side of a catastrophic injury, or Post-Traumatic Stress [sic], or an inexplicably dysfunctional life in the aftermath of war. But it is also about the nature of warfare itself. There is a great mythology associated with battle. We seek ‘the other side’ of that mythology. We seek the other side of ourselves. We travel to ‘the other side’ of the country to find it,” Boudreau explains on his website.

Three years ago, Boudreau, who spent much of his entire adult life in the military, resigned his Marine Corps commission.

“In 2005, after 12 years of active service in the Marine Corps and with growing reservations about the war, I relinquished command of my rifle company and resigned my commission,” Boudreau writes in Packing Inferno. “It struck me that, in our headlong pursuit to deliver freedom and democracy and to expel an oppressive regime and combat terrorism, we had inadvertently lost sight of the very people we’d been deployed to help.”

Packing Inferno is one of the most important historical documents to come out of the Iraq war if for no other reason than it shows what the true face of the Iraq war looks like. It’s a remarkable achievement in war reportage and it deserves to be shelved next to the Great War Books and should be required reading for every lawmaker and students of American history.

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Former Vice President Dick Cheney may continue to say, as he did on Sunday, that the interrogation of “war on terror” suspects was “done legally; it was done in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles.” But those assurances ring hollow.

The true story is coming into ever-sharper focus: high-ranking U.S. officials turning to what Cheney called “the dark side” after the 9/11 attacks and ordering the CIA to create a network of secret prisons. Determined to extract information from suspected terrorists, the White House then collaborated with Justice Department lawyers to find ways around anti-torture laws and American traditions.

Though the outlines of this story have been sketched out over several years, many chilling details are now getting filled in, including an article by author Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books about an ICRC report concluding that the abuse of 14 “high-value” detainees “constituted torture.”

“In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” according to the ICRC report cited by Danner. Since the ICRC’s responsibilities involve ensuring compliance with the Geneva Conventions and supervising the treatment of prisoners of war, the organization’s findings carry legal weight.

The ICRC report also found that there was a consistency in many details from the detainees who were interviewed separately and that the first “high-value” detainee to be captured, Abu Zubaydah, appeared to have been used as something of a test case by his interrogators. According to various accounts, he was transferred to a secret prison in Thailand and possibly elsewhere to be brutally questioned.

According to Zubaydah’s account to the ICRC:

Two black wooden boxes were brought into the room outside my cell. One was tall, slightly higher than me and narrow. Measuring perhaps in area [3 1/2 by 2 1/2 feet by 6 1/2 feet high]. The other was shorter, perhaps only [3 1/2 feet] in height. I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck, they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room. I was also repeatedly slapped in the face….

I was then put into the tall black box for what I think was about one and a half to two hours. The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside…. They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe.

When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.

Zubaydah told the ICRC that CIA interrogators told him he was the first prisoner to be tortured in this way, “so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.”

Zubaydah also told the ICRC representatives that he was subjected to the drowning sensation of waterboarding, a practice that has been considered torture since the Inquisition. Zubaydah and other detainees added that they were kept naked, placed in frigid rooms and forced to spend long hours in painful “stress” positions.

Danner said the chapter headings of the ICRC report listed some of the torture techniques reported by the detainees to ICRC personnel: “suffocation by water,” “prolonged stress standing,” “beatings by use of a collar,” “confinement in a box.”

Some of these techniques, such as the use of waterboarding on three detainees, have been acknowledged by senior Bush administration officials, including Cheney who has said he approved of specific harsh tactics applied during the interrogations.

Legal Debate

The abuse of Zubaydah paralleled an internal debate at senior levels of the Bush administration over how to provide legal justification for the brutal interrogations. Zubaydah was captured in a raid on a safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002, that left him badly wounded from three gunshots.

In July 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his legal counsel, William Haynes, solicited input from military psychologists about developing harsh methods that interrogators could use against detainees, according to a report released last year by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“Mr. Haynes was not the only senior official considering new interrogation techniques for use against detainees,” the report said. “Members of the President’s Cabinet and other senior officials attended meetings in the White House where specific interrogation techniques were discussed.”

President George W. Bush became obsessed with Zubaydah and the information he might have about terrorist plots against the United States, according to Ron Suskind’s book, The One Percent Doctrine.

“Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind wrote, adding that Bush questioned one CIA briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”

Meanwhile, senior Bush aides were meeting with deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo and other Justice Department lawyers from the powerful Office of Legal Counsel to discuss how anti-torture and other laws applied to interrogation of prisoners in the “war on terror.”

Yoo developed novel theories that defined torture narrowly, permitting acts short of pain associated with “death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions.” In devising this standard, Yoo relied on an obscure 2000 health benefits statute.

A report prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility determined that Yoo blurred the lines between an attorney charged with providing independent legal advice to the White House and a policy advocate who was working to advance the administration’s goals, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the contents of the report are still classified.

As evidence of Bush’s torture policies began to build — especially after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004 — Bush and Cheney built a line of defense, insisting that they had not committed war crimes because they were operating under legal guidance from the Justice Department.

However, that argument could collapse if it were determined that the lawyers were colluding with administration officials in setting policy, rather than providing professional legal advice. Already, extensive evidence exists, including Yoo’s own writings, showing that he participated in high-level administration meetings to discuss and set policy.

Other evidence on the public record suggests that the Bush administration’s intent to use brutal interrogations pre-dated the legal discussions with Yoo.

Cheney helped set the administration on a lawless course only days after the 9/11 attacks. On Sept. 16, 2001, he told NBC’s Tim Russert that “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world.

“A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

The next day, Sept. 17. 2001, President Bush signed a “memorandum of understanding” that authorized the CIA to establish a “hidden global internment network” for the secret detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists, Danner reported in his article.

On Monday, CIA Director Leon Panetta enlisted the help of former Republican Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire to assist him with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe of the agency’s Bush-era interrogation and detention practices, Panetta’s office said

Rudman will work as Panetta’s “special adviser” assisting the CIA in dealing with inquiries from the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Intelligence Committee, announced earlier this month that her committee will conduct a year-long secret investigation into the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” and detention practices and whether the methods resulted in actionable intelligence.

Panetta said he does not support any inquiry that would lead to the prosecution of CIA personnel who carried out the interrogations, such as those used against Zubaydah.

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