You’ve all heard me rant and rave about how we should regard combat veterans who suicide as “died of wounds” and I’ll spare you a repetition. However, I shall repeat my impression that the ٭families٭ of veterans who have killed themselves are mostly sitting alone with this in pain and shame and the cruel notion that they themselves have fucked up or their son or daughter has fucked up—no other choices. Their surviving comrades sometimes find themselves in the same box. The IN TOUCH program is up and running and I believe is superbly suited to helping the families of these veterans to be in contact with each other if they are willing (IN TOUCH is ٭always٭ extremely protective of everyone’s right to be in control of who they speak to).
I am sending a check for $200 to the Friends of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial today, earmarked for IN MEMORY/IN TOUCH—as soon as Corkster posts the address (I have handed out the hundred or so fliers she sent me and forgot to keep one for myself!). I’ll also spare you ranting and raving about the importance of ٭preventionʅ in general—but I must remind everyone that the children of a veteran who kills him or herself are at ٭greatly٭ increased risk of suicide themselves, so keep in mind that fostering systems of mutual support among the families of veterans who have died of wounds by suicide is crucially important “secondary prevention” (please forgive the public health jargon) of suicide in their children.
٭Much٭ love to you all,
Jonathan
I first developed the habit of signing my correspondence with veterans “Much love,” while active on VWAR, without understanding why I was doing it. I have continued this habit—with more self-awareness and mindfulness—when corresponding today with active duty military service members (only after we have developed a relationship of trust and friendship, of course), knowing that it pushes the envelope of their culture. In Part Three, I address the importance of the love that military people develop for each other in protecting them from psychological injury.19
Partners have their demons too. Bailing out may have felt like their kind of suicide … couldn’t do it anymore. I still say God bless Toddy. She did hang in there for 25 or so years. Lew made a choice about his life just as Toddy did. Who are we to say what was highest and best for each of them.
Sally
Sally Griffis is a Vietnam War widow.20
I read the book the way you did, Polecat.
It could be that after all those years she left him—someone said they read/heard that. It could be that that was a final wound that Lewis Puller couldn’t deal with; I don’t think anyone can know that. Even if that’s true, the guy whose book I read would take responsibility for her departure and not lay the blame on the woman who kept him going for so long.
But what do I know, anyhow? (ans.: As much as the rest of you.)
FNG
Jim Lynch writes, “Jim Lynch served as a platoon leader and company commander with the 48th Transportation Group from early February, 1969-early February, 1970. His units ran line-haul truck convoys throughout III and IV Corps; the southern half of South Viet Nam.”21
Veewees,
I didn’t see the NightLine program, but even the ٭suggestion٭ that Lew Puller’s suicide is Toddy’s fault is disgusting.
In Lew’s own words, in his book “Fortunate Son,” his wife is the hero. She is the one who suffered with him every day. She also came from a military family, and married him in spite of knowing that he would be going to Vietnam, and what could happen. What did happen.
She was the faithful wife who got into the hospital bed with him when he needed to affirm his masculinity after his terrible injuries. She bore his children facing an uncertain future.
She stuck with him for 25 years, most filled with turmoil and pain; some filled with the joy and excitement of winning a Pulitzer Prize. She drove him to hospitals hundreds of times: for surgery, physical therapy, counseling, or alcohol addiction.
She raised the kids during the years that he was depressed and went into rage and self-pity. I have no doubt that there were times that Toddy felt that she should leave him in order to save the children. She was probably frequently torn by having to consider that decision.
Toddy remained sober, facing the problems alone, while Lew drank to escape. I think Lew intended to show that alcoholism was his problem; it pervades his book, from times before he went to Vietnam. One review that I read said that Puller may have been saying that alcoholism was a bigger problem than the loss of his limbs.
If you disagree with what I have said, but have not yet read his book, please go read it.
I am not trying to degrade Lew Puller’s memory, but Toddy went through a hell that she could have escaped from for 25 years.
But she stayed with him all those years. Now she has even more pain to carry. She has my deepest respect and sympathy.
for Lew:
Day is done,
Gone the sun,
From the land,
From the sea,
From the sky.
All is well,
Rest in peace,
God is nigh.
Much love,
Polecat (aka Jim Schueckler)
You can see even from this fragment, edited from a much longer dialogue, that extremely important themes came up in this discussion, including veterans’ suicides,22 veterans’ spouses and the toll exacted from them, the relationship of veterans to nonveterans, and the Wall. It is immediately evident that this cybercommunity’s members were already doing many of the things that veterans do with and for each other in our VIP community-building treatment program. VWAR veterans provided each other with the various forms of validation. They expressed a wide range of emotions that relate complexly to their military traumas, to the aftermath, and to other people’s reactions to their emotions. They realized that they have something to give to others. And while they discovered that others are enough like themselves that they have no reason to feel like freaks, they also discovered that other respect-worthy veterans hold disparate and even contradictory views on many things.23 They created all of these benefits for themselves, without mental health professionals. They were doing this before I came and continued to do so after I left.
The veterans in the group unquestionably grieved together and helped each other construct cohesive narratives of what they had experienced. Safety and self-care were openly supported. Sobriety was another matter. I recall on and off discussions about whether the bar and lounge metaphor for VWAR was a healthy one. Occasionally, messages had a strong smell of liquor on their breath, as though the writer was sitting at his computer getting progressively drunker as the message traffic passed back and forth on the screen.
One member of VWAR voiced the sense of merging of place and identity,
… We be here for the duration, a period of existence.
Our existence.
We will stay for as long as Lydia keeps the doors to the bar open.
I ain’t goin’ nowhere.
Got nowhere else to go.
“The Lounge: We Can Never Leave,” by Michael W. Rodriguez.24 (Michael Rodriguez is a Marine Corps combat veteran of the Vietnam War. He has an eloquent Web site called Humidity Moon: mikerod.home.texas.net/. His collection of short narratives is published under the same name by Pecan Grove Press, San Antonio.)
… You fuckers ain’t much, but I know every one of you.
You be my Bros.
I shared your chow and my last cigarette;
You called in my medevac,
And I helped burn your “Dear John” letter.
… We can never leave.
I was witness to a number of occasions when the social contract of VWAR was debated or was severely tested by threats of violence or by abuse. In the social contract debates, Lydia Fish, the list owner, acted much like a constitutional monarch and aimed to make VWAR a safe place to struggle over these perennial questions. When violence was threatened, she moved swiftly and firmly like an absolute monarch to exile any member who compromised safety. As li
st owner, she had the power to cut someone off from receiving e-mail from the community or from sending messages to it. The social contract established by the VIP veterans is much stricter than that of “Lydia’s Lounge,” but on the point of safety, they were in accord.
“Pissing contests”—denigration of the importance of others’ experience compared to one’s own—were perennial problems. At one point a schism took place, and a group of combat veterans who were dissatisfied with the presence of nonveterans and noncombat veterans on VWAR left to form a combat-veterans-only “closed” discussion list. The “bar and lounge” metaphor for VWAR captured its openness—anyone could walk in and pull up a stool at the bar—but also captured the necessity for the newcomer to get comfortable and establish himself or herself with the regulars, to learn its customs and mores. The breakaway group established something along the lines of a members-only private club. A stranger would find the door locked. However, many members of this private club continued to belong to VWAR in addition.
The Internet discussion technology has certain advantages over traditional face-to-face group therapy or support group. Among these are the obvious ones: its open 24/7, which no group therapy is; you can think about what something means and what you want to say at your own pace—you don’t lose out to members with a quicker tongue; several people can talk at once without interfering with each other; if you raise an issue or mention something that’s bothering you, you don’t have to worry about whether it’s off the theme that the group is pursuing at this moment—there’s likely to be someone else who wants to respond.25
In a certain sense, VIP’s veteran community is open 24/7. The veterans in it have each other’s telephone numbers and most know where the others live. There is a fair amount of visiting back and forth by phone and in person—and increasingly via e-mail—and they do call upon each other when they feel desperate. Among the team members, I am the only one who has given them my home telephone number.26 I do this with the periodic reminder that they are not only permitted, but also invited, to call me if they need assistance in getting into a hospital because they are in danger of hurting themselves or someone else. I make it clear that calls at home for other purposes are not welcome, because I need my sleep, my time with my family, and for the missionary work that I do on their behalf to the armed services. In fourteen years as the psychiatrist for VIP, not one veteran has abused my privacy. I am certain that if anyone did the other veterans would not tolerate it.
From time to time, the VWAR cybercommunity seemed sorely in need of the VIP rules that work together to prevent the veterans from wearing each other out or bringing each other down:
Any vet who is jeopardizing his or her own health and safety, or that of others, authorizes other vets to bring this to the Team, rather than be burdened by it. Any vet who is suicidal or homicidal authorizes anyone in the VIP to take emergency measures to prevent this from occurring.
No bringing other vets down. Some examples are: calling for rescue when none is needed, borrowing money from another vet beyond the lender’s means, offering street drugs or alcohol to someone who is trying to stay clean, involving other VIP vets in illegal activities, or making excessive phone calls.
Whoever feels they are being taken advantage of should speak up. Don’t get carried away rescuing others.
Lydia Fish neither wished, nor had the resources, to play the role toward the VWAR community that the VIP clinical team does toward its veterans.
I have been away from VWAR for about five years. No doubt it is very different today than it was then, if only because every human community changes constantly, even when it has a strong commitment to imagining itself eternally the same. I am almost afraid to rejoin it for fear that it no longer offers its members what it did when I happened to be there to witness it in the mid-1990s.
However, I never worry that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—the Wall—is morphing into something less profound. Like Homer’s great poems, every truly great work of art, which the Wall is, constantly refreshes itself, goes on giving and giving as circumstances change.
PART III PREVENTION
19 Introduction
In Part One we saw the enormous price that veterans and those around them pay when their capacity for social trust has been diminished or destroyed. In Part Two we examined various spontaneous and intentional practices that can restore social trust. In this section I address those things that our armed services can do to protect the capacity for social trust and to prevent psychological and moral injury in military service. This is the fire in my belly stemming from a passionate commitment of the men that I work with as patients in the VA. They don’t want other kids to be wrecked the way they were wrecked. My passion about this comes from theirs.
The best approach is to reduce all casualties, not just psychiatric casualties. Psychiatric and physical battle casualties rise and fall together. The more war wounds in the body, the more mind wounds. This has been observed among American troops in World War II and among Israelis in the Yom Kippur War.1 Reducing casualties overall will reduce psychiatric casualties. Is there any way to do this? The answer is neither new nor surprising: the surest path to casualty reduction is swiftly and skillfully to win the fights that the nation sends our troops into. The three protective factors that this section emphasizes—cohesion, leadership, and training—are combat strength multipliers that produce this outcome.2
Combat soldiers at war struggle with the enemy in a two-dimensional world. Those two dimensions are biē, violent force, and mētis, cunning tricks and strategy. The Iliad and the Odyssey are equally powerful and equally convincing accounts of which of these military capacities is most important to vanquish the enemy, and to win the war. Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, embodies biē, while Odysseus, the hero of the Odyssey, embodies mētis. When I finish reading the Iliad, I am certain that the superiority of Achilles’ straight-up-the-middle fighting strength has won the Trojan War for the Greeks by bringing down the Trojans’ main man, Hector. And when I have finished reading the Odyssey I am equally certain that Odysseus won the war by pulling off the trick of the hollow Horse, filled with elite fighters.
Biē or mētis, which is more important in war? This is not an academic question about long-dead antiquity. It is a subject of ongoing struggle within our own armed services today. What is more important, fire superiority or information dominance? Attrition or maneuver? “Heavy” armored forces or “light” infantry? Huge, survivable-through-redundancy air and missile fleets, or stealth technology? Crushing the enemy or surprising the enemy? Read both of Homer’s epics and you’ll find that the answer to this generic military question, “biē or mētis, which one?” is “Uh—yes! Both!”
For things to go well for a soldier, a third dimension must be added to his own army’s biē and mētis: trust that those people who wield official power will do it in accordance with themis, “what’s right.” The catastrophic operational failure that the Greek army suffered in the Iliad flowed directly from betrayal of “what’s right” by its commander, Agamemnon. The trustworthy structure of “what’s right” in a military organization—horizontally with peers, vertically in the chain of command, and personally in the training and equipment the military service has supplied—is what allows that armed service’s force and cunning strategy to be put into effect against the enemy.3
The keys to preventing psychological and moral injury are in the hands of uniformed and civilian military leaders and of their civilian bosses in the executive branch and the Congress. In this section I shall explain the measures that can protect our troops, in the hope that readers of this book will intelligently and passionately support reforms. First and foremost, I will argue that we must demand that our top military and civilian policymakers replace the existing institutional ethos of “scientific management” with a new military ethic that creates and maintains well-founded trust.
Every year the Department of Defense distributes posters in honor of Armed Forces Day.
Look at this image and answer the question, “What’s wrong with this picture?” Uniformed and civilian defense leaders consistently say that people are the Defense Department’s top priority, but in 1997, 1998, 1999, and again in 2002, the Department approved Armed Forces Day posters that celebrated only weapons.4 The retired officer who sent me this poster called it “an insult [to] the valor, sacrifices, and patriotism of the American soldiers, sailors, and airmen who have spilled blood in the service of our country since the American Revolution.”
CELEBRATE ARMED FORCES DAY
20 Preventing Psychological and Moral Injury in Military Service1
“Mom. Dad, Brother, Sister, Grandma, Grandpa, you’ve seen and felt how hard it is for a soldier to come home. If even one man goes to combat why not make it easier for him to come home? And at the same time make our soldiers better. After all they are your loved ones and they are you.” And, to the men and women who have fought in Vietnam, Korea, and WW II, “What did you experience—Don’t you want to change it? Write to your Congressman about what you think.”
—Dennis Spector, 101st Airborne and 1st Infantry Division veteran of Vietnam, 19682
Try to imagine going to war with strangers at your side! Do they know what they’re doing? Can you trust them? Will they care what happens to you? Do you speak the same language, figuratively speaking, or even literally?3
COHESION—THE HUMAN ELEMENT IN COMBAT4
In a famous and oft-quoted passage, the nineteenth-century French infantry colonel Ardant du Picq wrote:
Four brave men who do not know each other will not dare to attack a lion. Four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely.5
Odysseus in America Page 25
