Odysseus in America

by Jonathan Shay

  when they came home from Vietnam, that year…. Well, there were many people who tried to help,

  who just were pushed away,

  many who have always cared

  and will till their dying day. It just doesn’t seem to matter to some

  that we were always here,

  they only want to hurt us,

  when they call us “ReallyCares.” It seems they’re intent on making us feel

  just like they felt back then—

  wounded in spirit and an object of scorn

  unwanted by countrymen…. When the ReallyCares are gone my friends,

  what will there be left?

  Wets with the cynical mistrust they have,

  alone again, bereft…. © 1994 by Judee Strott. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of the author.

  14 Online: lists.village. virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Humor/Weptronics/ wep_product.html.

  15 E-mail, December 8, 2001.

  16 E-mail, December 16, 2001.

  17 Used by permission. Published previously in H. Palmer Hall, From the Periphery: Poems and Essays (San Antonio: Chili Verde Press, 1994).

  18 E-mail, December 4, 2001. James Byrd, Jr., was an African-American who was murdered in Texas on June 7, 1998, by two white men who may or may not have cut his throat, but then chained him by the ankles to their pickup truck and dragged him to pieces while still alive. (Source: Roy Bragg, “Jasper Trial Defendant Says Byrd’s Throat Was Cut,” San Antonio Express-News, Friday, September 17, 1999.)

  19 Some material in Part III originated in the Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study, which can be found on the Web at www.belisarius.com/modern_business_strategy/shay/cohesion.doc. For a detailed refutation of the belief that emotion and reason are in all ways antithetical, see Antonio R. Damasio, Decartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994). The philosophic controversy, dating back to Plato’s time, has been taken up with great cogency and power by philosopher Martha Nussbaum in The Fragility of Goodness. The footprints of Professor Nussbaum’s philosophizing are all over my own work. In my view she has nailed the emotion-reason controversy once and for all in Upheavals of Thought.

  20 E-mail, December 13, 2001.

  21 E-mail, December 12, 2001.

  22 You would not believe the vehemence of the controversy that this subject has aroused. Veterans have reacted as though their personal honor hinges on the empirical question of whether the suicide rate among veterans is smaller, the same as, or greater than the rate among demographically matched civilians. John Tegtmeier has assembled a specialized bibliography of publications related to suicide and mortality from all causes of American Vietnam vets: www.vwip.org/articles/T/Tegtmeier-John_USVeteranPost-ServiceMortalityAndSuicidesBibliography.htm. Readers should be aware of the following, not included in Tegtmeier’s bibliography: Mortality of Vietnam Veterans—The Veteran Cohort Study 1997, Australian Department of Veterans Affairs, 1997, on the Web at www.dva.gov.au/media/publicat/mortall.htm; T. A. Bullman and H. K. Kang, “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and the Risk of Traumatic Deaths Among Vietnam Veterans,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 182:604-10 (1994); and P. Arhaud, L. Weisaeth, L. Mehlum, and S. Larsenn, The UNIFIL Study 1991-1992, Report: I. Results and Recommendations (Oslo: HQ Defense Command Norway, Joint Medical Service, 1993). The definitive methodology applied in the Australian mortality study has never been tried in the United States. The Australian study found a cumulative mortality from all causes of the Australian Vietnam Veteran cohort as of December 31, 1994, to be 6.5 percent, including combat deaths. I share the widespread belief that there has been a very large number of suicides among Vietnam veterans. Michael Kelley, a vocal critic of this belief, estimates the cumulative mortality from all causes among American Vietnam theater vets to be 10.16 percent (Michael Kelley, “The Three Walls Behind the Wall: The Myth of Vietnam Veteran Suicide,” www.vwam.com/vets/suicide.html). Kelley proclaimed the Australian study to be “perhaps the most important study of Vietnam veteran mortality to date.” When it suits his rhetorical purpose, he cites and applies the Australian estimates. But apparently he is neither shocked nor curious that the cumulative mortality from all causes was 56 percent higher among American Vietnam Vets than among Australian Vietnam Vets, according to his own numbers. He sets up an estimate of “150,000 [American Vietnam vet] suicides” as a straw man to knock down and ridicule the whole idea that there was a significant “excess” of suicides. The most commonly heard guess, “as many [suicides] as there are [KIAs] on the Wall,” is one I readily believe. This number would not be astonishing in the total 300,000 cumulative, all-causes cohort deaths by 1994 that Kelley uses, especially in light of being more than twice the Australian mortality. I believe that until the definitive methodology used by the Australians is used in the United States, we simply will not know how many Vietnam vets have killed themselves.

  23 My colleague Dr. James Munroe, whom we met in the last chapter, calls this the four Vs offered by communities of veterans: validation, venting, value, and views. “The loss and Restoration of Community: The Treatment of Severe War Trauma,” Journal of Personal and Interpersonal Loss 1:393-409 (1996).

  24 faculty.buffalostate.edu/fishlm/folksongs/nvrleave.htm.

  25 Discussion list courtesies call for members to indicate in the “subject” line what the new subject is that’s on their mind, rather than just hit the “reply” button with the old subject line and start writing about the new one.

  26 The other members of the VIP team are well aware that the veterans are resourceful and have most likely gotten their home phone numbers anyway.

  19. Introduction

  1 F. D. Jones, “Psychiatric Lessons of War,” in Jones et al., eds., War Psychiatry (a volume of the new Textbook of Military Medicine) (Washington: Office of the Surgeon General, Borden Institute, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, 1995), p. 13. These graphs are extremely faint and require strong light and close inspection to see the two curves on each chart. Reuven Gal, A Portrait of the Israeli Soldier (Westport: Greenwood, 1986), p. 214.

  2 I examine the reasons that trust is a combat strength multiplier in “Trust: Touchstone for a Practical Military Ethos,” in Donald Vandergriff, ed., Spirit, Blood, and Treasure: The American Cost of Battle in the 21st Century (Novato, Calif: Presidio, 2001). These reasons can be summarized into two headings: Trust reduces the impact of “external” or Clausewitzian “friction,” and lubricates the “internal” or self-generated forms of friction analyzed by the late Colonel John R. Boyd, USAF, in his famous Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action formulation. For a comprehensive introduction to Boyd’s thought, see his writings, commentaries, and links to published and forthcoming books on Boyd in www.belisarius.com.

  3 The two traditional topics in military ethics, jus ad helium (lightness in the aims and circumstances of war) and jus in bello (lightness in the conduct of war), are much in need of enhancement by a third, jus in militaribus (lightness in the policies and practices of military institutions), which interacts in numerous ways with the first two.

  4 Possibly in response to the chorus of criticism, the Department of Defense has adopted for 2000 and 2001 images that do include service members. In 2002, however, the Department of Defense reverted to type. See www.d-n-i.net/fcs/comments/c443.htm#afd for images of the 1987-2002 Armed Forces Day posters.

  20. Preventing Psychological and Moral Injury in Military Service

  1 This chapter is greatly indebted to and inspired by the late Faris R. Kirkland, Ph.D., a Korean War and Vietnam War combat officer, who in retirement from the U.S. Army made himself the leading historian of Army leadership doctrine and practice. As a senior social scientist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, he played key roles in the field studies of COHORT (COHesion, Operational Readiness, Training) in the 1980s and was lead author on many of the reports of this effort. He was a generous mentor and teacher on military institutions and became a treasured frie
nd and critic. His last completed work will appear posthumously as “Honor, Combat Ethics, and Military Culture” in T. E. Beam et al., eds. Military Medical Ethics, vol 1, in Textbook of Military Medicine (Washington: Office of the Surgeon General, U.S. Department of the Army and Borden Institute, 2001), Chapter 6. In press. His friends, fellow reformers, co-workers, and admirers are working to bring to publication a small fraction of the innovative and valuable work he left unfinished when he died at the age of sixty-eight. This chapter is a shortened version of a paper by the same title, which formed part of the Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study, 2000, and is available in its entirety on the Web at www.belisarius.com/author_index.htm.

  2 E-mail, January 21 and 22, 2002. Dennis Spector writes further about himself: “I did nothing to be ashamed of in Vietnam and I was not going to be condemned by people who knew nothing about it and I had become against the war myself. So I buried everything deeply and got on with my life. The trauma eventually won. Ten years later, I had to be treated to understand and overcome it. When I read ‘Odysseus in America’ [in manuscript], I finally understood the universally unavoidable human call combat made on my psyche. Trust was broken, no matter what, and we have trouble ever again trusting and relaxing—our ready-to-fight level of awareness is always there. I have seen from the story told in your book, how so many of my characteristics and beliefs center around ‘TRUST,’ the search for ‘TRUST,’ the need for ‘TRUST,’ the refusal to live my life without ‘TRUST,’ and the violent reactions and hatred I develop for those who ‘BREAK TRUST,’” Quoted by permission.

  3 One fine officer, who is currently an important armored cavalry commander, recalled a joint exercise in which the company he commanded received a radio message from a Marine unit maneuvering “jointly” with his own. He passed the message around to his staff—Can anyone make this out? The language was surely English, but no one could decipher its meaning. Perhaps the Army and Marine generals were making jointness work, he said, but the troops and subordinate leaders who actually have to achieve a common purpose were not exercising together enough to understand each other’s language.

  4 I give a more comprehensive account of cohesion in my “deliverable” for the Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study, available on the Web at www.belisarius.com/author_index.htm. The heading here is taken from the title of Colonel William Darryl Henderson’s book, Cohesion, the Human Element in Combat: Leadership and Societal Influence in the Armies of the Soviet Union, the United States, North Vietnam, and Israel (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1985). At the time of its writing, Colonel Henderson was at the U.S. Army Research Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences.

  5 Ardant DuPicq, Battle Studies, trans. J. N. Greely and R. C. Cotton, in Roots of Strategy, Book 2, 3 Military Classics (Harrisburg: Stackpole, 1987), p. 136.

  6 Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 68-69. See Major Donald Vandergriff, Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 2002).

  7 Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939-1945 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982), pp. 78-79. For a detailed and sophisticated comparison of U.S. and German performance in World War II, see Appendix E of Colonel Trevor N. Dupuy’s A Genius for War: The German Army and General Staff, 1807-1945 (McLean, Va.: Nova Publications, 1984).

  8 Stephen E. Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944-May 7, 1945 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), pp. 285-86.

  9 Jones, “Psychiatric Lessons of War,” pp. 13-14.

  10 Personal communication.

  11 Nora Kinzer Stewart, Mates and Muchachos: Unit Cohesion in the Falklands/ Malvinas War (Washington: Brasseys [U.S.], 1991), Chapter 2.

  12 Albert J. Glass, Neuropsychiatry in World War II, vol. 2 (Washington: Surgeon General of the U.S. Army, 1973), p. 995.

  13 See Jones, “Psychiatric Lessons of War,” and Reuven Gal and Franklin D. Jones, “A Psychological Model of Combat Stress,” in Jones et al., eds., War Psychiatry, pp. 133-48; Reuven Gal, A Portrait of the Israeli Soldier (Westport: Greenwood, 1986).

  14 William Ian Miller, The Mystery of Courage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), reached me too recently for me to do more than scan the table of contents. I hope to turn my parts of the Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study into a short book, and shall have a chance to digest it then.

  15 Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire (New York: Doubleday, 1998), p. 380. A real Spartan Dienikes (or Dionikes) is mentioned in ancient stories as having fallen at Thermopylae.

  16 First Friday Defense Lunch, March 1, 2002. Quoted by permission.

  17 For a detailed refutation of the belief that emotion and reason are in all ways antithetical, see Damasio, Decartes’ Error.

  18 “Cohesion,” Commandant of the Manne Corps Trust Study, p. E-5.

  19 When leadership is good, otherwise the cohesion may turn the group’s motivation and attitude against the chain of command. Cohesion and esprit de corps are related, but different, phenomena, the former being a purely face-to-face phenomenon, the latter being possible between people who have never met. See my “Cohesion” paper for the Commandant of the Manne Corps Trust Study for more extended discussion and references to the social science literature online at www.belisarius.com/author_index.htm.

  20 1 John 4:18 (KJV).

  21 Elite formations tend to be firm believers in the “right stuff” theory. They tend to overlook the fact that elite formations get the right resources—of stability, competent leadership, and prolonged, cumulative, realistic (state-dependent) training. My personal fire-in-the-belly mission is to see these good resources provided to every combat arms and direct combat support service member in all parts of the U.S. armed services.

  22 Gerald F. Linderman, The World Within War: Amenca’s Combat Experience in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 45, emphasis added.

  23 Henderson “was there” and fought and suffered, and earned the right to speak about winning or losing that war. Henderson speaks in his Preface of “the U.S. loss in Vietnam.” And yet, with some reason, many American Vietnam vets say we “won every battle.” See Achilles in Vietnam, p. 7ff, for a veteran becoming enraged with me for referring to the Vietnam War as a defeat.

  24 Retired marine H. John Poole has just brought out an enormously illuminating and valuable book that addresses this very question, Phantom Soldier: The Enemy’s Answer to U.S. Firepower (Emerald Isle, N.C.: Posterity Press, 2001).

  25 The classic discussion of this paradoxical dynamic is Edward Luttwak’s Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).

  26 Van Creveld, Fitting Power, p. 95.

  27 I am using the acronym COHORT to stand for the whole range of Army policies and practices aimed at stabilizing soldiers in their units. Sometimes these were called the “New Manning System,” sometimes the “Unit Manning System,” sometimes “OSUT” (One Station Unit Training), and sometimes COHORT. Each different name applied to a slightly different set of policies and practices, but all with the same overall objective.

  28 Explaining why the services do things this way is far beyond the scope of this book, but is thoroughly covered in Major Donald Vandergriff’s magisterial history of the American military personnel system, Path to Victory.

  29 Paris R. Kirkland et al., Unit Manning System Field Evaluation: Technical Report No. 5 (Washington: Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, September 1987), p. 24.

  30 The 11th ACR is now the dreaded OPFOR (Opposing Force) at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin.

  31 A retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel.

  32 John C. F. Tillson and Steven L. Canby, Alternative Approaches to Organizing, Training, and Assessing Army and Manne Corps Units, Part I: The Active Component. Repor
t C-MDA 909 89 C 0003/T-L6-1057 for the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Force Management and Personnel) (Alexandria: Institute for Defense Analysis, November 1992), p. III-8.

  33 Former Army Chief of Staff General Edward “Shy” Meyer, at First Friday Defense Lunch, May 7, 1999. Other guests at First Friday Defense Lunch from the Army’s reform era have been Lieutenant General Bob Elton, Lieutenant General Dick Trefry, and General Donn Starry. The leading spirit of the reforms, General Max Thurman, is no longer living. Faris Kirkland was working on a biography of Thurman at the time of his death, and faithfully attended First Friday until he was no longer physically able.

  34 The Army’s ferocious unwillingness to report any unit as unready is curiously not shared by the Navy, which unblinkingly “reports ships as unready when they return from an overseas deployment and large numbers of sailors are reassigned.” HQ U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, Assessment of the Unit Manning System, Fort Monroe, Va., March 1981, p. 1. Quoted in Tillson and Canby, Alternative Approaches, p. A-3. Confirmed as still true by Captain Michael Dunaway, USN, at First Friday Defense Lunch, May 7, 1999. The current Status of Resources and Training System (SORTS) and the unit’s condition rating (C-rating), the basic documents used by management to assess the readiness of units and thus the performance of their leaders, continue to be mainly matters of counting equipment, counting bodies (“fill”) and credentials, but blind to the stability, cohesion, and collective proficiency of the unit. Richard K. Betts, Military Readiness: Concepts, Choices, Consequences (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1995), pp. 136-39.

  35 As of 1992, when Tillson and Canby did their study, “company-sized units in the Army face turbulence of 8 to 10% per month for enlisted men, 6 to 10% for NCOs and 10% for officers. This means that the average unit changes over 100% of its personnel each year and must commence its training cycle on an annual basis.” Tillson and Canby describe the impact of the individual replacement system: Tillson and Canby, Alternative Approaches, pp. III-17, III-9f. The [individual replacement] system has a devastating impact on Army units in wartime. The wartime system treated soldiers as anonymous spare parts from the day they arrived in their replacement training centers, through their training and deployment to a combat theater, to their assignment to a unit on the line (often in contact with the enemy), during their treatment by the medical system once they became a casualty, and in reassigning them to a different unit when they returned to the combat theater. These concepts have been at the heart of Army planning since World War I … the time when large-scale casualties caused by attrition warfare and the novelty of the assembly line exercised a heavy influence on planners. In this system, men became spare parts to be produced on an assembly line. Once trained, they were to be inserted in combat units as needed. But assignment to a unit did not mean that the soldier would have the time to learn about that unit or that the unit would have the time to build its collective skills…. This system and the unanticipated demands of the war conspired to produce units of semi-trained individuals barely adequate to conduct the relatively simple tactics called for in that war…. The replacement system designed for WWII was built on the principles developed for WWI. Once again soldiers were considered interchangeable spare parts and replacements became a class of supply to be managed in the same way as any other class of supply. General Marshall believed that the success of the American Army in World War II lay in its ability to keep divisions “up to strength daily by trained men from the replacement pool.” It was this concept that led to the fundamental organizational and operational decisions that still dominate today.