The strong, violent type.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side

Here's something else to worry about as we careen into Gulf War II: More Americans may die as a result of this war than the enemy manages to kill in battle. In Gulf War I, only 146 Americans were killed by Iraqis (or, in some cases, friendly fire), while more than 180 have been killed by veterans of that war since it ended.

The breakdown is this: 168 killed by Tim McVeigh in Oklahoma City and at least nine shot dead allegedly by John Muhammad and his young helper. We might also add the three nursing school professors killed by Robert Flores last October and a mother and her three children killed by Jeffrey Hutchinson in 1998. Each one of these killers was a Gulf War veteran.

Most Gulf War vets, like my nephew, are perfectly steady, nonviolent types, and there is no clear evidence that their crime rate is higher than that of the general population. But other recent wars have produced no counterpart to mass murderer McVeigh or alleged serial killer Muhammad. In fact, as far as I can tell from my research for Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, there is no other war in human history in which the veterans caused more postwar deaths than the enemy did in wartime.

When veterans run amok, we reflexively invoke "post-traumatic stress syndrome," which was the Vietnam war's version of shell shock. But to apply this diagnosis to Gulf War vets is to degrade the notion of "trauma." True, it must have been deeply unpleasant to camp in the desert, far from loved ones, for weeks or months on end, not knowing how strong the enemy was or when the fighting would start. But this is not hardship on the scale of months of close combat in the jungles of Vietnam.

So what's going on? At least part of the answer has to lie in the despair and unfocused class resentment that pervades blue-collar America, the class that stocks our volunteer army: McVeigh, surely a highly intelligent and focused young man, returned from the Gulf to work as a security guard for $6 and change an hour. Muhammad, also bright and by all accounts personable, took off on his killing spree from a Tacoma shelter after a series of failed small business ventures. Flores was flunking his nursing school classes.

In contrast to the experience of Gulf War vets, World War II vets got government help buying houses and paying for college; Vietnam vets could at least hope for a good union job at a steel mill or auto plant. But in the last decade, after deindustrialization and the...