Army of One… Pill

Time Magazine is doing an article this week on the use of antidepressants in the US military: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1811858-1,00.html

I am reminded of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Q shows Picard what the human army of the past was: drug-enhanced androids, absolutely malleable to their commanders’ will. Not so different from the Borg, really. Unfortunately, after cruising Wikipedia and some other sites looking for a plot summary to clue me into which episode that brief event happened, I didn’t find it. Alas.

Anyway, it’s interesting to me that soldiers who would have, at one time, been removed from combat duty are now given drugs, return to “normal” (or at least combat-readiness), and then are pushed back into the front lines. Is wholesale medication of our soldiers a suitable approach in the fight to police the world? Or are we reducing our soldiers to human consumables, used to their maximum and discarded when the need has passed?

My gut reaction is that a soldier’s life is harsh. Chris once described part of his job to me. Falujah had been a hot-bed of insurgent activity. For several days prior to US cleansing of the city, it was leafleted in Arabic, indicating to the residents that any person left in the city after a certain date would be considered an insurgent, and killed on sight. Chris and his unit were required to purge the city of any remaining people once the day arrived. That kind of relentless door-to-door extermination, in my opinion, must leave a deep and lasting impression on the human psyche. If an anti-depressant can help a soldier get his job done… well, I’m in favor, though I hate the necessity of killing.

Oh, and if anybody can remember the name of that episode where Picard suddenly finds himself in a kind of rubber suit supposedly reminiscent of soldier armor of the Federation’s dark past, that would be cool.