FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 1, 2004

THIS WEEK IN

THE NEW YORKER

PRESS CONTACTS:
Perri Dorset, Director, Public Relations (212) 286-5898
Daniel Kile, Publicist (212) 286-5996

"As a unit of the élite 82nd Airborne Division, Bravo Company found itself in some of the fiercest fighting last year during the advance on Baghdad," Dan Baum writes, in "Two Soldiers," in the August 9 & 16, 2004, issue of The New Yorker. "Its hundred-and-thirty-odd paratroopers are among the Army's best-trained and best-equipped soldiers, and none died during formal hostilities. The dying came later, after President Bush declared the mission accomplished." The soldiers' job after the assault phase of the war was protecting an oil refinery in southern Baghdad and policing a large area around it, an area inhabited by Baathist sympathizers and radical Muslim clerics. "The postwar work was hot, nerve-racking, complicated, and dispiriting," Baum writes. He describes the death, on January 2, 2004, of two men in Bravo Company, Specialist Solomon (Kelly)Bangayan, a Philippine citizen living in Vermont who was serving in the Army in part to accelerate his citizenship application and to earn money for nursing school, and Specialist Marc Seiden, a Jewish New Jerseyan who was a post-9/11 enlistee. The two were killed by a road mine in the late morning while on a mission in their Humvees. Baum reports on the work of the Army's Mortuary Affairs unit (whose motto is "Dignity, Reverence, Respect") and how they notify the two soldiers' families and help make the arrangements for their funerals. Seiden's parents were notified the same day he was killed. A male and a female soldier, both in full dress uniform, came to their door. The woman said, "I have an important message to deliver from the Secretary of the Army. May I come in, Mr. Seiden?" Seiden's father, Jack, tells Baum, "We'd been told if one person comes to the door, he's wounded; if two people come, he's dead. I thought, If I don't let them in then it can't be happening. But she kept saying, 'Mr. Seiden, we have to come in, we have to come in.' She was crying." Bangayan's parents also received their visit the same day. "Please tell me he's only wounded," his mother, Helen, cried. Baum writes, "When he came home on leave last Thanksgiving, he told them"—his parents— "he did not want to return to Iraq. He'd seen too many terrible things, he said, and he was afraid he would die there. Vic [Bangayan's father] and Helen drove him to the tiny River of Life church, in northern New Hampshire, where Vic's sister is pastor, and Kelly accepted Jesus as his personal savior. 'We didn't know he was going back to be killed, but God knew,' Vic said." The Mortuary Affairs unit coördinated the men's funerals, and arranged to have both presided over by a general, a privilege to which all servicemen and women are, since 9/11, entitled. "At first glance, military funerals seem cold and mechanical; every service is alike and everybody moves in jerky tin-soldier fashion," Baum writes. "But in its exaggerated solemnity—the slow-motion way the general salutes the casket, the crispness with which the flag is folded into a triangle—a military funeral movingly conveys the grief of the institution."

"In recent years," Margaret Talbot writes, in "The Bad Mother," "Munchausen syndrome by proxy"—M.S.B.P., a bizarre psychological disorder in which mothers sicken their children, or subject them to unnecessary medical interventions, like surgery—"has seeped into popular culture, with a rapidity and a fervency that recall the fascination with child sexual abuse in the nineteen-eighties....Just as," Talbot continues, "in the nineteen-eigthies, satanic ritual abuse represented the worst fears of what could happen in day care, so M.S.B.P. has come to represent the danger posed by mothers who are excessively involved with their children." Talbot reports on the history of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and focusses on its most recent trend: false allegations. Talbot examines in detail the case of a Canadian woman named Nicola de Sousa, whom officials began investigating in 2002 as a possible M.S.B.P. perpetrator. De Sousa had been seeking surgery for her daughter Katerina, who was born with serious spine and liver defects. Talbot writes, "Over the years, psychologists have steadily loosened the narrow definition of an arcane syndrome—a phenomenon known as 'definitional creep.' In an effort to prevent Munchausen abuse by drawing up a standard portrait of the perpetrator, they fashioned a profile that was broad enough to cast suspicion on many mothers whose children were genuinely ill." De Sousa certainly seemed to fall into this category. Shortly after their daughter was born, she and her husband were told that she might die. They ended up seeking an experimental treatment in Boston, which the doctor who administered it said saved Katerina's life. Talbot writes, "The de Sousas, for their part, began to think of the American medical system as more responsive than the Canadian system. Some of the de Sousas' Canadian doctors, however, thought they were seeking care in the States unnecessarily and habitually—almost addictively." The de Sousas later sought a neurosurgical operation, also in the States, to correct Chiari syndrome, a brain abnormality that their Canadian doctor did not believe Katerina exhibited. Two prominent surgeons, one in Brooklyn and the other in Chicago, both concluded that she did suffer from the syndrome, and in fact the child's symptoms cleared up soon after she underwent the recommended surgery. It seemed to be Mrs. de Sousa's personality as much as her therapeutic quest that prompted health-care workers' suspicions of Munchausen by proxy. Her daughter's pediatrician wrote that the mother seemed "driven" and "anxious." Similar subjective remarks appear in other medical files. Talbot points out that "it is no accident that the rise of the Munchausen by proxy diagnosis has run parallel with the rise of aggressive behavior in medical patients....These patients, caught up in their conceptions of themselves as 'empowered advocates,' can come into conflict with doctors and caseworkers." The Canadian M.S.B.P. inquiry went on for more than a year, and the de Sousas racked up fifteen thousand dollars in legal fees; they finally received a curt letter telling them that "the Children's Aid Society of Ottawa will be closing its file....I trust the above is satisfactory." "Though the accusations against Nicola have been shelved," Talbot writes, "she is still shaken, and bewildered. She said, 'I asked them, "How could you say we put our daughter under the knife for surgeries that are unnecessary? How could you be threatening to take our child away?" We went to the ends of the earth to help her. I just hope they'd do the same if it were their child.'"

This week's issue also includes Comment by David Remnick on John Kerry's convention speech, Adam Green's portrait of conservative Christian comedianBrad Stine ("He rails against atheists, liberals, Darwinists, pro-choicers, animal-rights activists, moral relativists—pretty much anyone who doesn't believe that the Bible is the literal truth—with a vitriol that seems to tap into his audience's own resentments"), a Personal History by Roger Angell ("Getting there, becoming my adult self, was not a steady goal in my scattered youth, and changes in me, when they came, took me by surprise. Who would expect such a thing to happen on a golf course?"), a Shouts & Murmurs by Andy Borowitz, and fiction by George Saunders.

The August 9 & 16, 2004, issue of The New Yorker goes on sale for two weeks at newsstands beginning Monday, August 2nd.