The Collective Trauma of America’s Twenty-First Century Wars

America’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been receiving lots of scrutiny right now from journalists and ordinary citizens like me — and for good reason! Detaining people en route to their kids’ schools, in hospitals, or at work shouldn’t be the first thing that comes to mind these days when I think of “freedom,” “civil rights,” or “America.” Nor should spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to rebuild warehouses so that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, can hold people without charges in subhuman conditions. What do you think?

In all of this mayhem, it’s easy to overlook new human rights violations because there are so many each day. Violations of the rule of law have become the air Americans breathe.

In a matter of months, ICE has leaped far from its mandate as the Department of Homeland Security’s civilian investigative arm — not its muscle. Note its agents’ forced-entry tactics, its recent 40% shorter training protocols that stress the use of force over knowledge of our Constitution, and a dramatic rise in use-of-force incidents and deaths in custody. And it has more than doubled in size!

Instead of a workaday force that makes sure the rules are followed, it’s become an internal police force that bears increasing resemblance to what the United States military has been doing in dozens of other countries around the world as part of the never-ending Global War on Terror (GWOT) that this country has been waging for almost a quarter-century now in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks. America’s wars are indeed coming home.

Our Wars, Ourselves

The War on Terror has been notable for its heavy reliance on special forces operations like nighttime raids on civilian homes and incursions into mosques, schools, and marketplaces to search for enemy combatants or information. In particular, the U.S. scaled back large troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan after its failed wars in those countries, and yet, by 2016, about 70% of the world’s nations had U.S. special operations forces deployed in them. At the height of the Afghanistan war in 2010-2011, U.S. special operations forces were conducting thousands of nighttime raids into Afghan homes in search of suspected terrorists.

Since those special forces operate outside of conventional battlefield settings, often with little planning and without embedded journalists, the public has had few chances to scrutinize their activities. Not surprisingly, then, we haven’t paid much attention to the civilian deaths that resulted. Roughly 40% — or close to half a million — of those killed directly in our wars have been civilians, an unnerving number of them children. Our military’s reliance on special operations, urban warfare, and proximity-based ways of identifying suspected terrorists (more on that later) means that many people with no connection whatsoever to the warring parties have been shot down or bombed out in their homes, markets, or schools, among other places.

And that’s because the U.S. military has come to rely on a form of targeting called “pattern-of-life surveillance,” whereby they look for suspected opposition leaders by using what they know of their daily routines to aid with target identification. This approach holds some serious implications for the safety of civilians and has arguably led to extra anger and so the ability of armed opposition groups to recruit new members more easily.

The intimacy of death in our wars, combined with an increasingly unaccountable Pentagon that has isolated itself from journalists, while using its own secretive “justice” system, means that knowledge of civilian deaths often emerges only months or even years after the original events (if and when journalists find eyewitnesses willing to provide their accounts). As a result, the collective lack of awareness of most Americans has been striking and, in recent years, has been increased by the misconception that drone warfare — an ever more prominent part of our wars — is more “precise” at targeting enemy combatants than boots-on-the-ground combat.

Twenty-First Century Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

One thing is certain: U.S. military servicemembers who have fought in those wars do know what they entail (and many carry that intimate knowledge with them in particularly haunting ways). As a clinician, I specialize in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which you’ve likely heard of by now. It’s a condition characterized by flashbacks, a desire to avoid anything that reminds you of what happened, and a deep sense of anger or ongoing edginess, anxiety, depression, and mistrust.

For people who have fought in such foreign wars and manage to make it back, everyday life in America can be riddled with imagery that triggers painful memories. For this generation of veterans, among whom are those who were charged with kicking down family doors on night raids, a child’s playful scream on a playground might trigger memories of the boy who screamed in horror when you rammed down the door of his home in Kabul, Afghanistan. The sight of a discarded doll on the ground at that same playground might trigger a flashback to the market in Iraq where a little girl dropped everything as she fled the explosion of an improvised explosive device (IED) with her mother. A cornfield in the town where you grew up could transport you back to the rural Afghan village where you shot a farmer you thought was a terrorist.

There’s a reason why events like the infamous rampage of American troops through the village of My Lai in 1968 during the Vietnam War and the massacre that followed (when they killed hundreds of unarmed civilians) still remain etched in the memories of many Americans of a certain age, whereas I’d bet that most of us would be hard pressed these days to name particular instances when U.S. troops murdered civilians in our contemporary wars. Perhaps there are simply too many such murders, or maybe killing has been in the collective air for so long — in our video games, in Hollywood films, in our militarized police force — that we don’t care as much anymore.

The Fog of War

Were we, however, to pay more attention and look more closely, the violence our troops have used in our names should not be easy to stomach, even from afar. Take the story of the 2005 shooting of 24 civilians in the small city of Haditha, Iraq. Once a peaceful, shade-dappled middle-class residential area, Haditha was occupied by American troops who conducted nighttime raids on civilian homes in search of “enemy combatants.”

Being in the wrong place at the wrong time took on urgent meaning for Haditha’s residents, even as being seen around the U.S. military base nearby could mean risking decapitation by enemy troops, since members of al-Qaeda were also watching. One day, an IED blew up a Marine Humvee (an all-terrain military vehicle), killing one American soldier and injuring two more. In the hours that followed, Marines entered three homes and shot almost everyone inside, nearly wiping out three families and 24 civilians, including at least 10 young children. The head of that Marine unit claimed that the victims were somehow responsible for that IED explosion (because they had not stopped it), though the only link was that they happened to live in the neighborhood where it took place. In its award-winning coverage of the incident 19 years later, the New Yorker offered this quote from the letter of the lawyer for the Marines: “I trust you have no sense of… the stress of combat or the fog of war that precedes from that.”

Though that grim incident stands out in my mind because of the vivid coverage it finally received, what came to be known as the Haditha massacre was anything but the only one in which civilians became direct targets of American forces in this country’s War on Terror. Take the multiple incidents in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2010 and the years that followed, when U.S. and Afghan forces killed farmers and day laborers they misidentified as enemy Taliban fighters. Or consider the 2010 nighttime raid by U.S. special operations forces in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, when troops attacked the home of a family gathering to celebrate a child’s birth, killing two pregnant women, a teenage girl, and two male relatives (though the U.S./NATO forces involved initially claimed that the women had been killed prior to their assault).

There are far too many incidents to name here, but I think you get the picture of a war in which scenes that you and I might otherwise normally relate to became enmired with violence for no obvious reason.

The Ripple Effects at Home

There are many parallels that can be drawn between the U.S. War on Terror and the Department of Homeland Security’s current immigration crackdown here in the U.S., and you’ve probably noticed some of them. Take the reliance of DHS and ICE on patterns of movement among targeted populations to sweep up large numbers of “illegal aliens,” a tendency to detain (or even shoot) first and ask questions later (if at all), and something we haven’t even talked about yet — the deportation of detainees to countries where they are likely to be mistreated or even tortured in prisons with far laxer human rights standards than we have (much like the Central Intelligence Agency’s grim global “black sites” in the Global War on Terror). This points to the sort of operational flexibility that military commanders and many Americans troublingly accept as part of our present national security operations.

Most troubling to me is that in May 2025, DHS issued an internal memo authorizing its agents to enter people’s homes without a warrant signed by a judge. Instead, those agents only need an administrative warrant signed by another immigration official (based on a suspicion that they have reason to remove someone living in the home). A handful of high-profile incidents since then show that ICE agents are indeed entering homes forcibly.

According to a New York advocacy group, in November 2025, ICE agents knocked down a family’s door in the borough of Queens in New York City and pointed a gun at a mother and four children before forcibly removing her from her bed. They did not produce a warrant and alleged that they were looking for someone who turned out not even to live at that address. Similarly, in September of that year, hundreds of armed federal agents descended on a Chicago apartment building at night in search of members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, some landing in Black Hawk helicopters on the roof. They detained dozens of residents, including children whom they took from their beds, zip-tied, and held for hours, some separated from their parents or guardians.

If the administration can violate constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure when it comes to people in their homes, then it’s your guess or mine who will next end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, their fates shaped by President Donald Trump’s choice of an enemy of the day or the urges of stressed-out ICE agents.

Trauma and the Everyday

Counterinsurgency wars are often the bloodiest types because troops attempt to root out the enemy in the general population. Our twenty-first-century War on Terror has shown that this country remains more than capable of fighting like that today.

One of my favorite anthropologists, Begoña Aretxaga, drove home the horror of such combat. She documented political violence against Basque nationalists in late twentieth-century Spain. State officials raided homes and communities, planted car bombs, and kidnapped activists. As she pointed out, such trauma is “horror cropping up in the routines of ordinary life.” In the cities where she did research, people watched their neighbors and relatives being “disappeared” or getting killed, while fear permeated everyday events like taking a walk through their neighborhood.

Today, none of us should be surprised that the Trump administration is conducting its own homegrown version of counterinsurgency warfare right here in the United States of America. Tactics once used abroad are increasingly our new normal. I don’t think it helps that each new development shocks so many of us more than the last, making it hard (for me at least) to look at what DHS and ICE are doing with fresh surprise each time such actions prove to be distinctly so far beyond the pale of what the founders laid out in our Constitution.

Yet understanding the costs of war also offers us an opportunity. We can look at our military’s actions as well as ICE’s in detail and refuse to accept “terror” among us (however the government conceptualizes that elusive term!) as a reason to mistreat others. We can denounce atrocities ranging from that Chicago raid to possible future versions of the Haditha massacre.

We can also think more clearly about the root causes of why our war on terror has indeed been coming home — literally. (It should be no surprise that about a third of ICE officers reportedly have had some kind of experience in the U.S. military.) While we’re protesting what the Trump administration is doing, we should also think about the way it’s been slashing the mental health staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Veterans need our help, too, rather than being left in isolation and shame.

After all, even those who break and enter American homes aren’t aberrations. They are not just among us, they are us: For years, they have acted in our names, including abroad, when all too many of us were barely paying attention. And when we ignore what they did over there, we allow the same things to happen here.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post The Collective Trauma of America’s Twenty-First Century Wars appeared first on CounterPunch.org.