The crusty critic Paul Fussell observed that war is always ironic, because things always end up so far from the glory-trailing myths that help start them. Irony, though, pales beside the fear and anger that now swirl around Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the source of many of the troops sent to Afghanistan. It was there that four soldiers recently confused their wives for the enemy and killed them. Marilyn Griffin was stabbed seventy times and her trailer set on fire, Teresa Nieves and Andrea Floyd were shot in the head, and Jennifer Wright was strangled. All four couples had children, several now orphaned because two of the men shot themselves after killing their wives.

The murders garnered wide attention because three of the soldiers served in Special Operations units that have fought in Afghanistan, and because they clustered over a five-week period in June and July. The killings have raised a host of questions--about the effect of war on the people who wage it, the spillover on civilians from training military personnel to kill, the role of military institutional values and even the possible psychiatric side-effects of an antimalarial drug the Army gives its soldiers. On the epidemic of violence against women throughout the United States and on the role of masculinity and misogyny in both military and civilian domestic violence, however, there has been a deafening silence.

Military officials have focused on marital problems and family stress, and have fiercely contested the notion that domestic violence is a more severe problem in the military than in civilian populations, although the Pentagon has not invested much in finding out what the comparison would look like. One Army-funded study that was done, however, found that reports of "severe aggression" against spouses ran more than three times higher among Army families than among civilian ones in 1998.

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