Veterans ripe for road rage

Veterans ripe for road rage

My friend who was called to active duty about a year ago and served in Iraq is back in the states.

She served as a social worker with a combat stress unit. And based on her own experiences, she says she is not surprised that a Marine who returned from Iraq about a month ago was shot and killed Sunday in an altercation with another motorist.

Police responding to the report of a shooting Sunday morning on a main Atlanta street found Jack R. Snook, 24, of Cumming dead from a gunshot wound to the face.

Charles Anthony Key, 23, surrendered Wednesday morning at his home and was charged with murder. Police say the impetus…

“The road rage — on some levels doesn’t surprise me,” she says. “Over there, the United States owns the roads. When we come in our Humvees, people pull over. It’s like get out of our way or get run over. We go up on sidewalks. We squeeze between traffic. Police will halt traffic jams or whatever so that we can drive down the opposite side of the street. The concept is you never stop moving because it makes you a target.

“So, we drive fast, we drive wherever we want to whenever we want to, and there is really nobody there to challenge us. We will hit you, slam your vehicle or whatever.”

Serving in a combat zone is a life-altering experience. So, the person who goes to Iraq is not the same person who comes home.

Service members are under various forms of stress in Iraq, then they come home to a different set of stressors — stressors they have not necessarily learned how to deal with. And the stress of traffic, traffic jams, being cut-off can touch nerves, she said.

“Even when I came back,” she said, “my husband had to get on me… . I wasn’t driving fast, but I would get aggravated with people in front of me. It was move because that is what I had gotten used to. When I traveled, we waved people off and they got out of our way. I was there eight months, and I drove once. I actually rode most of the time. And I had been on less than a dozen convoys. So for me to have that reaction, and I was just a passenger… and the type of unit they were in.

“The Marine killed in Atlanta may have had road rage, or he may have had a personality disorder before he went to Iraq, and he came back and still had one,” she said.

 may have been a road-rage incident.

Road rage is the psychological disorder that causes drivers to manifest their anger in a hostile and aggressive way toward other drivers.

Even though the degrees of agitation vary from individual to individual, studies have shown that the outcome is non-conducive to a friendly driving atmosphere. For some, the disorder can result in unfriendly hand gestures, and for others, it can result in physical harm.

For example, past cases in aggressive driving have documented that drivers suffering from road rage have run other vehicles off the road, have used their cars as weapons and have shot at and killed other drivers.

Recently the New York Times conducted a poll in the Washington, D.C., area that concluded about 42 percent of Americans think aggressive driving poses more of a threat than drunk drivers.

Additionally, the Aggressive Driving Study from the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety in New York concluded that the biggest contributors to road rage are males ages 18 to 26.