[>] A practitioner of an unorthodox academic field: Lifton, Home from the War, 15.
[>] “I was opposed to the Vietnam War”: Robert Lifton interview with Gerald Nicosia, April 20, 1988, BCAH.
[>] The change for Lifton came in November 1969: Lifton, Home from the War, 16.
[>] In November 1970, Lifton received a letter from Jan Barry: Nicosia, Home to War, 158; Lifton, Home from the War, 75.
[>] “there is no anti-war or even anti-establishment group”: Thompson, Fear and Loathing, 369.
[>] “the severe psychological problems of many”: Lifton, Home from the War, 75.
[>] Barry saw the politics of the war and the psychological problems: Nicosia, Home to War, 161. See also ibid., 173; Lifton, Home from the War, 75.
[>] Some VVAWers, like Joe Urgo, an air force veteran: Nicosia, Home to War, 86–87; Scott, Politics of Readjustment, 17; Shephard, War of Nerves, 356–357.
[>] They didn’t belong anywhere: Nicosia, Home to War, 164.
[>] “I want to scream at friends and relatives”: See Sarah Haley, “When the Patient Reports Atrocities: Specific Treatment Considerations of the Vietnam Veteran.” Archives of General Psychiatry 30 (1974): 195. Haley’s article is one of the most important documents in the history of PTSD as a formal diagnosis. For a deeper (if skeptical) discussion of Haley’s legacy, see Shephard, War of Nerves, 369–375.
[>] “Guys are hurting. They’re opposed to the war”: Robert Lifton interview (BCAH); Nicosia, Home to War, 161.
[>] Along with Chaim Shatan, a New York University: Lifton, Home from the War, 75–77; Nicosia, Home to War, 161.
[>] In Shatan, Lifton had, by sheer accident: Nicosia, Home to War, 160–161; Chaim Shatan interview, April 14, 1988 (BCAH).
[>] The first “rap group” met on Saturday, December 12, 1970: Nicosia, Home to War, 162. Nicosia’s account of this time period is superlative.
[>] “about twelve guys, most of them in fatigue shirts”: Egendorf, Healing from the War, 90.
[>] “The explosion of feeling that occurred”: Nicosia, Home to War, 163; Lifton, Home from the War, 76.
[>] Shatan recalled one early meeting: Shephard, War of Nerves, 356.
[>] Egendorf, who was an outlier in the group: Nicosia, Home to War, 169.
[>] For Egendorf, the rap groups represented: Ibid., 165–169. See also Egendorf, Healing from the War, 84–85.
[>] One night, atop his hotel in Saigon: Egendorf, Healing from the War, 67. See also Nicosia, Home to War, 166.
[>] Lifton’s suggestion that they take place on the veterans’: Lifton, Home from the War, 76.
[>] “The VVAW crew, like many of their Vietnam veteran”: Shephard, War of Nerves, 362.
[>] Part of this was due to the fact that in 1966: Shephard, War of Nerves, 340; Nicosia, Home to War, 170, 175–176. Nicosia: “Lifton went on to denounce the Army’s use of ‘ostensibly brilliant psychiatric statistics’ as a form of ‘psychiatric technicism,’ the professional equivalent of [a] ‘body count’” (177).
[>] At ease in their own territory: Lifton, Home from the War, 77.
[>] In fact, what the VVAWers were doing: Egendorf, Healing from the War, 130; Egendorf interview, October 3, 1988 (BCAH); see also Schulman, Seventies, 159–169. Personal communication with Christine Eubank.
[>] “The idea for rap groups came from”: Egendorf interview, November 3, 1988 (BCAH). See also Allen, Free Space, 5–8.
[>] “we had the women’s movement as a constant example”: Egendorf, Healing from the War, 130.
[>] The women’s movement of the 1970s: See Schulman, Seventies, 167–168.
[>] In 1971, the first rape crisis center opened: Meredith May, “Oleta Adams—Co-founder of Rape Crisis Center.” San Francisco Chronicle, January 16, 2005.
[>] Around the same time, Ann Burgess: Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 31; Burgess and Holmstrom, “Rape Trauma Syndrome.” American Journal of Psychiatry 131 (1974): 981–986.
[>] “One vet would usually begin the conversation by talking”: Egendorf interview, October 3, 1988 (BCAH).
[>] One problem that emerged early on: Nicosia, Home to War, 162.
[>] This phenomenon is most easily seen: See Ambrose, Band of Brothers, 16–17. The relationship between the Great Depression and the World War II generation’s view of trauma is an area that needs to be explored. Ambrose, who was opposed to the Vietnam War, describes the Great Depression in almost positive terms, as if it had the effect of hardening and preparing people for the trials of World War II. Describing the paratroopers of Easy Company, Ambrose said: “They came out of the Depression with many positive features. They were self-reliant, accustomed to hard work and to taking orders” (17). Interestingly, a number of World War II veterans have retroactively embraced the PTSD diagnosis, including some members of Easy Company, 506th PIR, made famous by Stephen Ambrose. One such veteran, Edward “Babe” Heffron, said, “I hear Vietnam vets say they suffer from flashbacks and I think, ‘Hey, I’ve been having them since 1944, I have seniority!’” (Philipps, Lethal Warriors, 77). See also Shephard, War of Nerves, 356.
[>] One person who was very concerned about where: See Wells, Battle Within, 315–317, 489. The Chuck Colson files at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library are filled with memos between Colson and the other members of the White House staff detailing ways to discredit the VVAW, including one undated memo titled “Plan to Counteract Viet Nam Veterans Against the War” (Colson Box 117). Tellingly, Colson and Nixon were both convinced that many of the VVAWers weren’t actual U.S. military veterans.
[>] One statement from a VA psychologist in the Capital Times: Jim Hougan, “Madison’s Vietnam Veterans: A Different Breed—Part One: Alienation Follows the Horrors of Asia.” Capital Times, February 22, 1971.
[>] The man who forwarded the article to Colson: Memorandum to Colson dated March 9, 1971. Nixon Library, Colson Box 21.
[>] Two months later, soon after the VVAW’s highly publicized “Dewey Canyon III”: Nicosia: “According to Vietnam veteran and historian Rusty Lindley, Dewey Canyon III had had a profound effect on the Nixon White House and its policies toward Vietnam veterans. Nixon and White House hatchet man Charles Colson became obsessed with the VVAW and its impact on public opinion. The White House launched a concerted effort to discredit not only VVAW, but also the problems the war was creating among returning soldiers. Their position was that ‘the Vietnam veteran was too busy in school or on the job to have any readjustment problems’ . . . The Nixon administration was adamantly opposed to the provision of any assistance that would indicate that the war was adversely affecting veterans” (200). See also Wells, Battle Within, 579–580.
Prior to Dewey Canyon III, members of the Nixon administration had puzzled over the motivations of the antiwar movement besides communist subversion. As Wells put it: “Henry Kissinger felt permissive child-rearing practices were partially responsible for the dissension. Explaining the ‘special feeling’ he had for antiwar students, Kissinger writes in his memoirs: ‘They had been brought up by skeptics, relativists, and psychiatrists; now they were rudderless in a world from which they demanded certainty without sacrifice. My generation had failed them by encouraging self-indulgence and neglecting to provide roots.’ [National Security Council staffer Roger] Morris recalled a ‘collection of acid Kissinger observations to his staff on the neurotic character of the demonstrators’ that fall. ‘“They don’t know who they are,” Kissinger said. “They need fathers, not brothers.” “They are going through an identity crisis.” “This is like dealing with thumb-sucking.”’ Kissinger’s aide Anthony Lake remembered, ‘He saw them as spoiled children’” (Home to War, 315).
[>] At Colson’s request, Herbert Rainwater, head of the VFW: Wells, Battle Within, 489.
[>] The effort to undermine the group went well beyond: Nicosia, Home to War, 249–254.
[>] Soon after Chaim Shatan began working with the VVAW: Shatan, “Grief of Soldiers,” 652–653. See also the Nicosia int
erview with Shatan, April 14, 1988, found at BCAH.
[>] By Lifton’s count, around 115 veterans eventually: Nicosia, Home to War, 163.
[>] On April 30, 1971, Dwight Johnson, a recently discharged army: See Jon Nordheimer, “From Dakto to Detroit: Death of a Troubled Hero.” New York Times, May 25, 1971. See also Shephard, War of Nerves, 357.
[>] In it, Shatan described the work of the rap groups: Shatan, “Post-Vietnam Syndrome.”
[>] According to Shatan, once the op-ed hit newsstands: See Nicosia, Home to War, 180. See also Scott, Politics of Readjustment.
[>] In April 1973, just as the Watergate scandal: See Nicosia, Home to War, 195; see also Shorter, History of Psychiatry, 304. See also Scott, Politics of Readjustment.
[>] By all accounts, the St. Louis summit was a huge success: See Nicosia, Home to War, 196. Author interview with Floyd “Shad” Meshad, 2013. See also Wilbur J. Scott, “PTSD in DSM-III: A Case in the Politics of Diagnosis and Disease.” Social Problems 37 (1990): 294–310.
[>] The lone exception to this was the contingent of VA people: Nicosia, Home to War, 197.
[>] Speaking of the event years later: See Scott, Politics of Readjustment, 46.
[>] As the conference drew to a close: Ibid., 46.
[>] In Detroit, a Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist: Nicosia, Home to War, 180.
[>] It would be years before the members of the VVAW: Tom Wells, speaking of the VVAW and other antiwar groups in The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam, argues, “The American movement against the Vietnam War was perhaps the most successful antiwar movement in history. The movement did not exert its influence in any neat way, but its impact was clearly considerable . . . As Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] during the Nixon administration, asserted, ‘The reaction of the noisy radical groups was considered all the time. And it served to inhibit and restrain the decision makers.’ The movement, Moorer accurately added, ‘had a major impact . . . both in the executive and legislative branches of the government’” (579). To this list of accomplishments could clearly be added the eventual creation of the PTSD diagnosis.
[>] Because of its still-speculative nature: See Lifton, Home from the War, 420.
[>] It is, perhaps, the fatal flaw of humankind: In a 2000 article, “The Collective Mind” in the Journal of Contemporary History, Catherine Merridale describes the reaction of Russian citizens to the purges and violence of the 1930s: “Time after time, respondents told me that the only way to cope with famine, arrest, hunger and bereavement was ‘to get on with our lives’” (46). As Merridale goes on to show, such willful amnesia on the part of these Soviet survivors had the effect of serving the agenda of the Soviet leadership by cultivating an ignorance of its past abuses.
[>] Randy Floyd, a former Marine attack pilot: See Peter Davis’s 1974 Academy Award–winning documentary Hearts and Minds (available on YouTube) beginning at one hour and forty-six minutes.
[>] What the movement and Shatan, in particular, hadn’t counted on: See Greenberg, Book of Woe, 36–43; Shorter, History of Psychiatry, 301; Shephard, War of Nerves, 362.
[>] “I love controversy! I love it!”: Greenberg, Book of Woe, 43.
[>] Spitzer had had a number of opportunities to indulge: Ibid., 35–36, 41–42. See also Scott, Politics of Readjustment, 39–58.
[>] “If groups of people march and raise hell”: Greenberg, Book of Woe, 36. Author interview with Greenberg, April 2013.
[>] In June 1974, Shatan got a phone call: Nicosia, Home to War, 202.
[>] Eventually, it came out that Spitzer had no plans: Ibid., 203.
[>] “Trying to understand another human being’s emotional life”: Greenberg, Book of Woe, 30.
[>] “You don’t have any evidence”: Nicosia, Home to War, 205.
[>] “these guys are all character disorders”: Ibid., 205. See also the transcript of the Nicosia interview with Sarah Haley (April 28, 1988) at BCAH.
[>] “They were reluctant to accept the idea that social”: Nicosia, Home to War, 205.
[>] Because many of the veterans were hearing voices: Author interview with Floyd “Shad” Meshad, March 2013. See also Sarah Haley, “When the Patient Reports Atrocities.” Archives of General Psychiatry (1974); Nicosia, Home to War, 182; transcript of the Nicosia interview with Sarah Haley (April 28, 1988) at BCAH. See also Holmes and Tinnin, “Problem of Auditory Hallucinations,” 1–7. According to Haley, many Vietnam veterans were misdiagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the 1970s. I know of two Iraq veterans who received similar misdiagnoses from the VA as recently as 2013.
[>] Invited to the APA’s annual convention in Toronto: Nicosia, Home to War, 207–209; Shorter, History of Psychiatry, 304; Shephard, War of Nerves, 367.
[>] When the committee finally released its findings: Nicosia, Home to War, 208.
[>] Shatan would later complain that the diagnosis: Ibid., 208.
[>] Ironically, much of what ended up in the DSM’s: Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 24.
[>] The post-1980 history of trauma has: Interview with Greenberg, April 2013. See also Shorter, History of Psychiatry, 302.
[>] a “psychological disorder, rather than a biological disorder”: Transcript of Nicosia interview with Matthew Friedman (November 12, 1988) at BCAH.
[>] According to Friedman, the first director: Ibid. Ben Shephard, one of PTSD’s leading critics, addressed this move toward the biological in increasingly shrill tones throughout the 2000s, at one point declaring in a Rotterdam lecture that “modern psychiatry, for reasons of medical fashion and economic survival, puts its faith in biological research. Its pride and self-respect also; it is relying on biological research to vindicate the whole PTSD project.”
[>] Covering more than one thousand male subjects: See Kulka et al., National Vietnam Veterans.
[>] In 2006, a Columbia University epidemiologist reworked the data: B. P. Dohrenwend et al., “The Psychological Risks of Vietnam for U.S. Veterans: A Revisit with New Data and Methods.” Science 313 (2006): 979–982.
[>] A subsequent reexamination by a Harvard psychologist: See McNally, What Is Mental Illness? This debate about the actual traumatic power of Vietnam (and Iraq) was covered in Scientific American and by a number of influential neurobloggers, including Jonah Lehrer. In the April 13, 2009, issue of Scientific American, David Dobbs argued for a revamped VA PTSD diagnosis system, one that included fewer incentives for a positive PTSD diagnosis, saying, “These changes will be hard to sell in a culture that resists any suggestion that PTSD is not a common, even inevitable, consequence of combat. Mistaking its horror for its prevalence, most people assume PTSD is epidemic, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.” He concludes by saying, “PTSD exists. Where it exists we must treat it. But our cultural obsession with PTSD has magnified and finally perhaps become the thing itself a prolonged failure to contextualize and accept our own collective aggression. It may be our own postwar neurosis.” See also R. J. McNally, “Progress and Controversy in the Study of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.” Annual Review of Psychology 54 (2003): 229–252.
[>] More often than not, it is the powerless: Transcript of Nicosia interview with Arthur Egendorf (November 3, 1988) at BCAH.
[>] “There are always moral questions, which are inseparable”: Quoted in Nicosia, Home to War, 173.
[>] An influential 1995 article in the American Journal of Psychiatry: R. Yehuda et al., “Conflict between Current Knowledge,” 1705–1713.
[>] And because it is instigated by an external agent: Author interview with Gaithri Fernando, May 2013.
[>] This has resulted in a clinical culture, especially within psychiatry: See Satel and Lilienfeld, Brainwashed, for more on the rise of neuroscience.
[>] “All of us have our own, distinctive mental worlds”: Sacks, Man Who Mistook, 129.
[>] In 1979, at the dawn of contemporary neuroscience: See Eric R. Kandel, “Psychotherapy and the Single Synapse.” New England Journal of Medicine 3
01 (1974): 1028–1037.
[>] In his bestselling book Listening to Prozac: Kramer, Listening to Prozac, x. In 1993, Kramer wrote that “my sense when I began my inquiries—and this is still my sense today—is that the new biological materialism is a cultural phenomenon that goes beyond the scientific evidence. There have always been observations favoring nature over nurture. What changes, in response to the spirit of the times, is the choice of evidence to which we attend” (xiv). Given the rise of the neuroculture in academe as well as in the culture generally, Kramer’s words seem prescient.
[>] Between 1987, the year Prozac was introduced: van der Kolk, unpublished manuscript, “The Body Keeps the Score.”
[>] This accidental discovery, of a drug associated: Personal communication with Dewleen Baker.
[>] This lack of a scientific basis for using SSRIs to treat PTSD: See Institute of Medicine, Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, 2008. See also Shiromani, ed., Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, 338.
[>] As one Oxford University psychiatrist put it recently: See Burns, Psychiatry, 2006.
[>] One Manchester, New Hampshire, physician and lawyer argued: Dr. Albert Drukteinis.
[>] In 1995, Cathy Caruth, a trauma scholar at Emory University: Caruth, Trauma, 9.
[>] By the 1990s, PTSD as a concept had outgrown: See Luckhurst, Trauma Question.
[>] “After the formulation and extension of PTSD in the 1980s”: Ibid., 203–209.
[>] “the timeless time of the post-traumatic condition”: Ibid., 206.
[>] By September 11, 2001, PTSD as a cultural phenomenon: See Gonzales, Surviving Survival, 7. See also Seeley, Therapy after Terror, 2008.
[>] To the dismay of infantrymen who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan: See the late Matt Power’s “Confessions of a Drone Warrior” in the October 23, 2013, issue of GQ.
[>] “Based on prior experience from other mass disasters”: Watters, Crazy Like Us, 69.
[>] Robert Gates, the secretary of defense under Presidents Bush: See Robert Gates, “The Quiet Fury of Robert Gates.” Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2014.
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