A new series of articles from The New York Times focuses on veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have been charged with killings after returning home.

The most recent installment of the series, which is called "War Torn,"  appeared in this past Sunday's paper. It told the story of Lance Cpl. Walter Rollo Smith, an Iraq veteran who drowned the mother of his twin children in a bathtub. Smith, who was discharged from the Marines for post-traumatic stress disorder, has confessed to the killing. The story of his mental decline after returning home from the war, as told by Deborah Sontag, is harrowing. But Chris Blattman worries that the "War Torn" series risks painting a distorted picture of how the trauma and violence of war typically affects young combatants. 

"For every youth traumatized by war, there are more that are instead activated, mobilized, and empowered," Blattman writes on his blog. Blattman, an assistant professor of political science and economics at Yale University, has been studying child and young-adult soldiers in northern Uganda to gauge the long-term impact that armed conflict has had on their lives.

In a recent paper Blattman argues that in northern Uganda "former child and adult recruits are a fifth more likely to vote, are more than twice as likely to be community leaders, and are no more violent than their peers....Violence, it seems, activates and empowers youth as or more often than it defeats them."

Blattman also points out the work of other scholars that shows how the war-time death of a family member in Sierra Leone leads to greater political interest and activity. In addition, psychologists have found increased levels of political activism among Jewish Holocaust survivors.

"Those who do return traumatized need our help and support," Blattman concludes, "but let us not tar all ex-soldiers with the same brush."