How a Story About the Purple Heart Illustrates Our Unpreparedness for Warfare Involving Lasers
According to a recent article carried by the Associated Press, pilot John Nance, a prominent safety consultant, warned that military-style lasers could be used by terrorists to blind pilots or possibly even kill them by causing a cerebral hemorrhage. Nance says it is possible that in some cases terrorists were behind the recent rash of laser incidents as they experiment with new ways to bring down planes and there human cargoes. Although there have been numerous instances of America's enemies using portable high-powered lasers in foreign combat zones, their dangerous appearance near U.S. airports has focused public attention on the proliferation of lasers and may prompt the Armed Services to rethink their criteria for awarding Purple Hearts.
The Purple Heart is awarded to wounded service members or the families of those killed in battle. But while the criteria for awarding the medal is apparently simple and straightforward, the ambiguities of modern war may increasingly cloud the perceptions of what constitutes a wound. As we recently pointed out in an article in American Heritage, the decoration has not been given to soldiers injured by lasers.
On the night of October 24, 1998 Chief Warrant Officer Steven McCoy was piloting his UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter during peacekeeping operations in Bosnia when a powerful military laser was directed at his ship for four or five seconds. Both McCoy and his crew chief, Sergeant Juan Villareal were temporarily blinded. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Army eye specialist who examined the men after their flight concluded that they had suffered "mild to moderate" burns. The newspaper also found that sergeant Villareal was still receiving treatment of topical steroids for burns a week later and had to wear sunglasses to shield his eyes. In the wake of this and another "laser incident," U.S. forces in Bosnia halted some night flights and "ordered an emergency shipment of protective anti-laser visors for helicopter pilots."
Neither soldier received a Purple Heart and when queried on the matter, an Army spokesman questioned their eligibility "partly because it isn't clear that the laser was used with hostile intent." It is not likely, however, that the question of "hostile intent" would have even come into play if the soldiers had been wounded by bullets or an RPG (rocket propelled grenade). Sergeant Martin J. Begosh of the 1st Armored Division, the first soldier in Bosnia to receive a Purple heart, got his decoration within hours of being grievously injured when his reconnaissance vehicle struck a land mine on a Serbian controlled road. There was also no ambiguity in the case of Navy Lieutenant Michael W. Watkins who was struck by ground fire when traveling in a Spanish transport aircraft flying out of Zagreb, Croatia.
The media initially speculated that the Army may have played down the laser incidents in order to avoid drawing attention to preparations to expand its presence in the Balkans to include not only Bosnia but the Serbian province of Kosovo. The office of Congressman Ike Skelton, ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, later received information indicating that the lack of an obvious wound may have been part of the problem. But while no one in McCoy and Villareal's chain of command thought to award a Purple Heart for the injuries (the Army regulation governing issuance of the decoration specifically allows commanders to issue it to "deserving personnel"), commanders in the twenty-first century may increasingly find their troops being attacked by unconventional weapons.
Various armies are increasing their experiments with blinding lasers; devises which induce severe acoustic trauma; weapons which create extreme over-pressure to crush internal organs; and even psychotropic weapons which attack mental processes or kill by shutting down bodily functions.
Perception problems are not a new phenomena and even when the injuries are clearly inflicted by an enemy, perceptions die hard. Throughout World War I and for some time thereafter, unit rosters would list all soldiers who received combat injuries as "wounded in action" no matter whether those wounds came from shrapnel, flame, bullets or barbed wire. Poison gas was another matter. All understood that gas killed or incapacitated just as surely as a machine gun, but it was, well, new and did not produce the traditional blood and gore. Soldiers who fell prey to German (or their own) gas clouds would invariably be listed in the rosters as "gassed" or "gassed, died in hospital." Soldiers' and the public's view of gas remained murky long after the war, and was so uncertain that when the Army reinstituted the Purple Heart in 1932 it had to specifically state that "disablement by gas, or gas poisoning" should be considered a wound.