I can just hear Country Joe, now.
I am amazed at the lengths
to which some Mental Health professionals are still willing to go to demonize
the Viet Nam Veteran. Their insulting, and uneducated, view of Veterans in
general has to be very troublesome to Veterans of all our Wars. Do we, as a
Nation, need to be coerced, once again, into literally and figuratively
spitting on our Men and Women in uniform? Do we still have a National urge to
call all our Service Men and Women baby killers?
There isn’t a Civilian
among us who can walk in their shoes, feel their pain, and try to live life
normally, after experiencing the death and destruction of War. The proof of our
Nation’s attempt to belittle and dismiss the premise of “PTSD” is evident in
the length of time it took the Veterans Administration to recognize this very
deep seeded problem. It took them even longer still to formulate a plan to deal
with “PTSD”.
Kudos to the V.A. for
sticking with it! The necessary Programs are now in place, and not a minute too
soon. Our most recent War Veterans are coming off multiple Tours of Duty in
multiple Areas of Operation. In all too many cases, these Soldiers are
returning to a Country that has left them without a job (bad Economy), without
a house (illegal foreclosure), and families torn apart (PTSD).
I understand the “Public’s” disdain for the War Machine and the Men and Women involved, but, if that disdain is sincere, perhaps we might do something about it. Perhaps, the
“Public” could voice its opinion at the Polls in November. Just maybe, we shouldn't be
fighting everyone else’s War. Just maybe, we should give Peace a chance; what
we’re doing right now doesn’t seem to be working that well.
I recently had the
opportunity to come across three very disheartening articles regarding our
Veterans, past and present. In each case, the medical diagnosis of “PTSD” was
torn apart and reinvented by authors who simply didn’t know what they were
talking about. One of these authors highlighted the fact that he was, himself,
a Viet Nam Veteran. What I took away from these articles was the sense that
there is, once again, a movement in the Mental Health sector to diminish and
rewrite the experiential and emotional effects of traumatic stress due to War.
I am not a Mental Health
professional. I am, however, someone who has a very intimate relationship to
“PTSD” and its short and long term, ramifications. What follows, here, are
three articles that stoke the fire of disdain for all Veterans in this Country.
Vietnam:
Memory, Amnesia and Fantasy
April
30, 2000 by Jerry Lembcke. Jerry Lembcke is an associate professor of sociology
at Holy Cross College and the author of "The Spitting Image:
Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam" / newsday.com
Vietnam: Memory, Amnesia and
Fantasy
Published: April 30, 2000 8:00 PM
By Jerry Lembcke. Jerry Lembcke is an associate professor of sociology at Holy Cross College and the author of "The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam"
By Jerry Lembcke. Jerry Lembcke is an associate professor of sociology at Holy Cross College and the author of "The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam"
During this 25th anniversary week of
the Vietnam War’s end, a potent but apocryphal story continues to circulate.
It goes like this: An American
fighting man, just back from the Southeast Asia conflict
in the late
sixties or early seventies, steps off
a plane- usually in San Francisco.
Immediately he is accosted by a long-haired antiwar protester who calls him a
“baby-killer" and spits in his face. Versions of this tale have been told
over the past couple of decades at veterans' functions, in the press and
popular culture, and by supporters of Operation Desert Storm to sell Americans
on the action.
Problem is, the spitting story seems
to be fantasy. Perhaps some soldiers somewhere got spat on. Yet no reports of
such incidents ever appeared while the Vietnam war was going on. Not until
years later did the story surface.
It seems to be a species of urban
myth. But the myth, and the 25th anniversary, remind us to think carefully
about how we remember the war. Studies of popular culture, including
Washington's Vietnam Memorial Wall, note that our war recollections tend to put
Vietnam
veterans at the forefront. In many
ways, the history of the war has been rewritten as a story about the men who
fought it.
On the surface, stressing the
veterans seems appropriate. But a closer examination reveals some troublesome
implications for the nation's political culture. For one, the history of the
war itself has been lost in the coming-home narrative of the veterans. A
street-corner conversation today about the war is likely to be about "what
happened to our boys" when they returned. Screened out by these accounts
of forgotten warriors and spat-upon veterans are the politics that got us into
the war, as well as the history of the antiwar movement. Buried beneath images
of dysfunctional and deranged vets that populate Hollywood's versions of
the coming-home story is the record of
thousands of GI's who returned to
protest the war.
Much of our iconography for
remembering the war helps build an alibi for why we lost. The mistaken idea
that veterans were treated badly points blame for the nation's first lost war
at those who opposed it. We were defeated on the home front, runs the alibi, by
those who betrayed the men we sent to fight. The alibi keeps alive a dangerous
idea: that the war could have been won had it not been for treachery at home.
That idea fed the vengeful politics of the ultra-Right and paramilitary
movements of the 1980s and 1990s.
This falsified history also squelches
the political instincts of today's college-age generation. To dissuade would-be
activists, conservatives associate political dissent with "the
sixties" and invoke fictive tales of veteran disparagement. You don't want
to be like "them"-the long-haired spitters -is the message.
The mythology built up around the
U.S. vet has also effectively written the Vietnamese out of their own history.
The war has become an American story, a time when we fought and defeated each
other. In the meantime, what's been erased is the real war in which 50
Vietnamese died for every American, about 3 million in all, while fighting for
national independence. Wiped away is the history of Vietnam's victory over the
French at Dien Bien Phu, its admiration for America's own war of independence,
its frustration with the American subversion of Vietnamese democracy during the
1950s, the resourceful guerrilla war it waged against U.S. forces'
technological superiority, the suffering of the people in the South under
savage Saigon dictatorships propped up by the United States, and the
dedication to defense of their homeland shown by the North Vietnamese women on
the Ho Chi Minh trail.
For most Americans, there is a blank
space where the Vietnamese story should be. Blank spaces can be filled by those
with a story to their liking. And so it is now. U.S. veterans' voices still
dominate media documentaries, but the 25th anniversary also seems to be the
occasion for debut of a "new history" that is filling empty space
where the Vietnamese story should be. There is a troubling revisionism to the
story being written, however- one that amplifies the North Vietnamese role in
the war and obscures the grassroots struggle of the people in the South. In
this story, the North invaded them South, and the legacy is a country divided
at the 17th parallel. The southern National Liberation Front (a.k.a. the Viet
Cong) is erased, and the people of the South are lumped as embittered
losers who now resist the Communist domination of the North. Those who know
history recognize this revisionism as an attempt to revive the war-time U.S.
propaganda line that we were there to save the South from communism. But the amnesia left by our
own mythologizing means that very few Americans know that history. Now,
reclaiming our memory entails a struggle against some very powerful forces that
toy with our imaginings for monetary, political or personal gain.
That struggle again implicates the
future of Vietnam. Like Yugoslavia, Vietnam
seems resistant to a neo-liberal future of privatization and to becoming an
open door to western capitalism. Disguised as recovery of the Vietnamese side
of the war's history, the revisionist effort to fill in our memory will also
prepare Americans to demonize -to truly spit on-the Vietnamese government. If
we allow this sort of myth making, it will be at the Vietnamese people's peril
, as well as our own.
Source:
Lembcke:
Was Sgt. Bales “broken”?
March
30, 2012 by Jerry Lembcke / newsday.com
Published: March 30, 2012 5:42 PM
/ By Jerry Lembcke
"Cool." That's the way Sgt. Robert Bales described his combat encounter in Iraq in 2007. Bales is now charged in the March 11 killing of 17 Afghan civilians, nine of them children. As we search for ways to understand this horrific event, we need to look beyond the character of Sgt. Bales, and even his record of military service, to the culture of American masculinity.
Photo credit: Illustration by Janet Hamlin
The "cool" comment should
slow the rush to a post-traumatic stress disorder explanation for Bales'
killing spree. With few facts at hand, reporters and commentators have
speculated that injuries during prior deployments to Iraq or the sight of a fellow soldier losing a leg the day
before his rampage may have traumatized Bales. Writing in a New York Times opinion piece on March 18,
playwright Kate Wenner suggested that "seeing his buddy's leg blown off
may have unleashed a PTSD episode his damaged brain could not stop."
Bales' "cool" doesn't
disqualify the PTSD explanation, but it does hang an asterisk on it.
Surprising. Threatening. Unsought. Those are some of the conditions associated
with traumatic experiences. Experiences remembered as "cool," on the
other hand, are less likely to have left the mind and emotions disturbed; credentialed with the
"cool" of previous combat, the GI on his fourth trip to a combat
zone, as was Bales, is unlikely to have been taken by surprise by the wounding
of a buddy.
Bales, it appears, was unhappy about
being redeployed to Afghanistan after three trips to Iraq, but there is no indication that he feared going. The
war-trauma narrative isn't the only one at work among pundits spinning for
story-traction on Bales. A failed business in stock trading drove him to enlist
after 9/11, according to news reports. His wife, at home with two kids, is said
to have put the family home up for sale to avoid bankruptcy. Meanwhile, darker
stories about prior charges of assault and mandated anger-management classes
have led to headlines like this in the Worcester, Mass., Telegram and Gazette:
"Sgt. Bales: Someone profoundly broken?"
A week after the shootings, though,
even those human-failure lines were being shuffled into the PTSD explanation.
It was a logical progression. Beginning with the return of soldiers from the Persian Gulf War in 1991, press reports,
television specials and popular culture almost uniformly played up the
coming-home-hurt theme. That portrayal of returning soldiers
was a legacy of the news media's turn away from the images of Vietnam veterans
empowered and politicized by their time at war, and toward a psychological portrait of veterans as traumatized. Even as troops boarded flights for Baghdad in 2003, reporters speculated about
how many would come home emotionally damaged.
With news coverage having prepped
public expectations that soldiers would return mentally injured by the war, it
should have surprised no one that PTSD would frame the news about the troops'
return in the coming years. The head wound suffered by ABC News Anchor Bob Woodruff while reporting from Iraq in 2006, and the media fascination with his recovery,
drilled traumatic injury into the PTSD discourse, giving it dramatically
new imagery and bringing larger numbers of veterans under the diagnostic tent.
By 2008, most major news
organizations had done feature stories or specials on the mental health status
of veterans. The most gripping was a New York Times series begun in January of that year.
According to the Times, 121 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan were charged with homicide for
killings committed after their return home. About a third of the victims were
spouses, girlfriends and children. Some of the veterans' lawyers successfully
cobbled war-trauma defenses, an injection of PTSD-as-alibi thinking into the
culture.
Writing about Bales four years later,
Associated Press reporter Allen G. Breed observed that some Americans seem
willing to believe that a U.S. veteran "worn down by four tours of combat
and perhaps suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, simply snapped."
For many Americans, speculated Breed, the war-trauma diagnosis is an
explanation, if not an excuse.
For still others, the atrocity may
substantiate PTSD as a war wound, making it a de facto Purple Heart signaling
Bales must have seen some bad stuff to be driven to this -- he must be a
real-deal combat veteran. In any case, it may be the way Bales wanted his
resume to read.
With PTSD dominating the conversation
surrounding Bales' motives, the other image in his memory of war as
"cool" has been obscured: the trenches. Bales said that the cool part
about his brush with combat in Iraq was its "World War II style -- you dug in."
Leaving aside the fact that trench-style combat is emblematic of the first World War, not the second -- and that the
kill-ratio for the skirmish he was in was reportedly enemy dead = 250, U.S.
dead = 0 -- veterans' exaggerated memories of battle experience are in many
cases essentially imagined experiences of what they wanted to have been part
of, but weren't.
There are stones yet to be turned
over in Bales' case. In the matter of his buddy's leg being blown off, for
instance, what did he actually see? But for now, it seems too simple to merge
his murderous outburst into the "profoundly broken" and
failed-at-life narrative. The thought that he may have killed in order to
establish his combat bona fides is unsettling but more suggestive of what else
is broken. It isn't the Robert Baleses of America that need fixing so much as
the America that expects from its men what they can't possibly deliver.
The high regard many Americans have
for principled pacifism notwithstanding, the martial roles for men modeled in
film, athletics and history books still rule the culture. The default
occupation for measuring the mettle of the man remains the military, a fact
that helps explain why some white collar and semiprofessional men, like Bales,
found their ways into uniform following 9/11.
The problem comes with finding glory
in inglorious wars. Coming home with honor is hard when the mission is to
invade and occupy someone else's homeland; it's still harder when the war is
lost. In the wake of the war in Vietnam, PTSD morphed from a diagnostic
category into a badge of honor -- the credential that certified the recipient
as the real deal and labeled the atrocity he committed abroad or at home
evidence of his having experienced war's hell.
Robert Bales isn't the problem but,
interpreted as a social and cultural matter, his alleged crimes abroad and
perhaps at home point us to problems in American life for men that need to be
addressed. Those problems begin with the conflation of masculinity with martial
accomplishment -- and the nature of the wars we send our soldiers off to fight.
Jerry
Lembcke, an associate professor of sociology at the College of the Holy
Cross in Worcester, Mass., is author of
the forthcoming, "PTSD: Diagnosis or Identity in Post-empire
America?" In 1969, he was a chaplain's assistant in the 41st Artillery
Group in Vietnam.
The Postwar Attitude
Adjustment
By JIM RENDON, Published: March 25, 2012, / N.Y. Times Magazine, 4/8/2012 / nytimes.com
By JIM RENDON, Published: March 25, 2012, / N.Y. Times Magazine, 4/8/2012 / nytimes.com
Post-Traumatic
Stress’s Surprisingly Positive Flip Side
Stephanie Sinclair/VII, for The New York Times
Sgt. Jeffrey Beltran near Fort Sill, in Lawton,
Okla., where he was stationed after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among
other injuries, Beltran suffered a mild traumatic brain injury in an I.E.D.
attack in Iraq in 2005 and can no longer rely on his short-term memory.
Sgt. Jeffrey Beltran pulled
a heavily creased Post-it note from the pocket of his fatigues, unfolded it and
looked over a list he jotted down earlier that day: pick up an order of beef-lo-mein, take his dress uniform to work (jacket, pants and boots), do schoolwork.
Beltran’s Army-issue organizer is also filled with these reminders, and he
checks them every so often to jog his memory — folding and unfolding them
throughout the day. Beltran’s life is filled with sticky notes because his
short-term memory is no longer reliable, a result of what the Army calls a mild traumatic brain injury that he suffered in
an I.E.D. attack in Iraq in 2005.
Related
Related in Opinion
Sergeant Beltran’s notebook,
filled with
lists and notes to aid his
short-term memory.
Beltran and his wife, Ronda Jones-Beltran.
Brig. Gen.
Rhonda Cornum kept a
positive outlook when she was
captured in Iraq.
Cornum at her release in 1991.
“I have pictures,” said
Beltran, who is 44, as he pulled a worn Ziploc bag from his backpack and
removed a half a dozen photographs. He began laying the images on his desk. “We
were turning our vehicle around when we got hit.”
The photos, taken right
after the explosion, show a plowed field next to a road. A few palm trees frame
the horizon. In the foreground there is a deep crater. About 20 feet away, the
front half of a Humvee is turned upside down. The back half is gone — parts
were later discovered hundreds of feet away. When the bomb exploded, Beltran
was launched into the air and landed between the blast hole and the Humvee.
When he came to, he couldn’t stand up. “I knew something was wrong,” he said.
“I felt swelling inside my legs. I was hyperventilating in the heat. The dirt
was starting to settle down. I called out to my guys. I couldn’t see them.”
The blast broke Beltran’s
knee and leg, fractured his lower spine and buried shrapnel in his thigh; the
violent jolt caused his brain injury. He suffered so many wounds that he had to
pause in the retelling to make sure he hadn't left anything out. He underwent
14 operations over the next year. “I was dealing with post-traumatic stress,
anger, all the emotions, the ups and downs, the physical, emotional,
psychological pain,” he told me. “I was really angry. I wanted to get healed
and get back into the fight.”
By 2007, Beltran was on
several medications: Clonazepam and Buspirone for Anxiety,
Celebrex for pain and other
pills for depression. Yet the Army deployed him again, this time to Bagram Airfield in
Afghanistan, where he coordinated with nongovernmental organizations to clear
minefields. He saw a farmer blown up. A soldier he worked with closely was
killed. Whenever a soldier died, a memorial service was announced over the
public address system, and the base’s main road was shut down for the soldier’s
final ride to the mortuary. “That wears on you,” Beltran said. “As much as you
want to avoid it, death is always in front of you.”
After six months in
Afghanistan, Beltran was given a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder
and sent home. The Army offered him a medical discharge, but he declined.
Beltran’s father served 21 years in the Navy, and his grandfather survived the
Bataan death march. So despite all the troubles that followed — he was even
hospitalized after considering suicide — he stayed in the Army.
Slowly, though, Beltran
began noticing surprising changes. Before the blast, he drifted. He spent a lot
of his free time playing video games. Like many soldiers, he was more concerned
with figuring out how to cope from one deployment to the next than with finding
a direction. He is different now. The bombing, the P.T.S.D. and the challenges
he faced changed him. And he thinks he has changed for the better. “This whole
experience has helped me to be more open, more flexible,” he told me. “I am branching
out to activities that I was once uncomfortable with.” Beltran has taken
rigorous tests in pursuit of a promotion. He’s taking online courses toward a
bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. He discovered a sense of spirituality,
and although he and his first wife divorced, he has remarried and reconnected
with his parents, from whom he distanced himself after the explosion.
Beltran spent years in
therapy and read many books about people who surmounted adversity, all of
which, he says, helped him change. More recently, through classes and group
therapy at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, he was introduced to the science and thinking
behind this psychological change. “It’s given it a name,” Beltran said, “and
has enhanced my personal development.” The name for Beltran’s change is
post-traumatic growth. And the classes he takes are part of a $125 million
Army-wide program called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, which is intended to
help soldiers become more resilient and to help them recognize how the trauma
of combat can change them for the better. For years, Beltran carried photos of
the explosion to remind himself of what he overcame. Now, he says, he carries
those pictures to show to others. “I want to share my experience,” he told me.
“Whatever knowledge or wisdom I have.”
The
idea that people
grow in positive ways from hardship is so embedded in our culture that few
researchers even noticed that it was there to be studied. Richard Tedeschi, a
psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who is both a
researcher and a clinician, discovered it in a roundabout way, while he was
looking for a new research project. “I thought, who I want to know the most
about, distressed or violent or crazy people?” he told me. “Instead, I think I
want to know about wise people. Perhaps I’ll learn something myself.” He and
Lawrence Calhoun, who is also a psychologist at U.N.C., started their research
by interviewing survivors of severe injuries. He then went on to survey older
people who had lost their spouses. Person after person told them the same
thing: they wished deeply that they had not lost a spouse or been paralyzed,
but nonetheless, the experience changed them for the better.
Patterns began to emerge in
a follow-up study of more than 600 trauma survivors. People reported positive
change in five areas: they had a renewed appreciation for life; they found new
possibilities for themselves; they felt more personal strength; their
relationships improved; and they felt spiritually more satisfied. Tedeschi
developed an inventory to track and measure the phenomenon, and in 1995, he and
Calhoun coined the term “post-traumatic growth.” Experiencing growth in the
wake of trauma, Tedeschi asserts, is far more common than P.T.S.D. and can even
coexist with it.
Since P.T.S.D. was accepted
as a legitimate condition five years after the end of the Vietnam War, the
military has put vast resources into coping with it. The Department of Veterans
Affairs spent more than $5 billion on mental-health services last year.
Soldiers are screened for P.T.S.D. symptoms after deployment, and chaplains,
social workers and psychologists are trained to spot them. The disorder
combines anxiety and an inability to regulate the fear response. For some, the
symptoms never completely abate. These soldiers often relive their traumatic
experiences over and over. They have trouble sleeping. They are always on
hyper-alert. In 2010, the Army gave a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress
disorder to 10,756 troops, up from 4,967 in 2005.
With so much attention,
understandably, on the disorder, few researchers have asked soldiers about
positive changes they might have experienced. The ones that did found startling
results. One of the first studies, published in 1980, was conducted on aviators
captured during the Vietnam War. It reported that 61 percent said they had
benefited psychologically from their experience of captivity. The airmen
foreshadowed the themes that would later become the foundation of Tedeschi’s
work. Many said that they had stronger religious convictions and enjoyed life
more. They said they appreciated others more. Those treated most harshly by
their captors reported the most positive change. Perhaps it was no more than
the desire to give meaning to a horrible time in their lives, but a follow-up
study conducted 25 years later found that the soldiers remained convinced that
the captivity had changed them for the better.
Last spring, Tedeschi was
in Wilmington, N.C., to speak to about 150 veterans, military family members
and social workers. He is a tall, wiry man with deep-set eyes and a soft, even
voice. After his presentation, we had lunch in the student snack bar, where he
explained the dynamics of post-traumatic growth. Only a seismic event — not
just an upsetting experience — can lead to this kind of growth. By that
Tedeschi means an event that shakes you to your core and causes you to question
your fundamental assumptions about the world. Survivors of such severe trauma
inevitably confront questions about existence that most of us avoid, and the
potential for growth comes not from the event itself but from the struggle to
make sense of it. Tedeschi calls this rumination, and he argues that it can
happen alongside P.T.S.D., after P.T.S.D. or in its absence. “The challenge is
to see the opportunities presented by this earthquake,” Tedeschi says. “Don’t
just rebuild the same crappy building you had before. Why not build something
better?”
On
a late spring morning,
180 soldiers gathered in the basement of a Sheraton hotel in Philadelphia. Most
were sergeants who had completed at least one combat deployment. Decked out in
camouflage and desert boots, they were attending a 10-day Master Resilience
Trainer course meant to help create a more psychologically fit army.
The Army’s resilience
training program was shepherded by Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum. She is a
physician, a pilot and a competitive horseback rider. She was also a prisoner
of war. In the first gulf war, Cornum, then a flight surgeon on a Black Hawk
helicopter, was shot down during a rescue mission. She woke pinned to the
ground by wreckage. She had two broken arms and was held prisoner for eight
days. In her book about the experience, “She Went to War,” Cornum comes off as
someone with an indomitable sense of optimism.
“I was badly injured, but I
knew that I would heal eventually,” she writes. “The crash had been so
devastating that I should have died then, and I regarded every minute I was
alive as a gift. The Iraqis could have killed us easily when they found us at
the crash site, but they chose not to. Then in the circle of men a slight
pressure on a single trigger would have been enough to kill us, but we had been
spared. It was just good-enough luck for me to grab onto and to hold. I vowed
to survive.”
When I visited Cornum, who
recently retired, in Virginia, and suggested that most people would be
hard-pressed to find anything resembling luck in that situation, she laughed,
acknowledging the absurdity, but then she said: “It’s the only way I would
think. I've been practicing that my whole life. If you don’t do that, why would
you ever proceed with anything?”
When she returned home,
people expected to hear anguished tales, but she had none to report. In fact,
she could come up with only positive things to say. She now empathized more
with her patients because she had been one; she became closer to her family and
a more self-confident leader. In 2006 she came across an article about
Tedeschi’s work, and she found a way to think about — and name — her own
experience.
At the time, Cornum wanted to
develop a psychological training program for the Army. In her view, today’s
soldiers are in dire need of toughening up. “This is the trophy generation,”
she said. “Kids are taken places to participate in carefully orchestrated
activities where no one is allowed to lose or have a fight.” Those people may
have trouble adjusting to the hardships and violence of war. “We have really
sanitized death,” she says. “They go to Iraq and Afghanistan, and it is not
sanitary anymore.”
Cornum’s efforts did not
gain traction, however, until 2008, when the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. George
W. Casey Jr., got behind the idea. Cornum met with Martin Seligman, a professor
at the University of Pennsylvania, a giant in the field of positive psychology,
who developed a program to help adolescents perform better in school. Cornum
worked with him to set up a series of meetings with experts in resilience,
positive psychology and growth. Then, largely under Seligman’s guidance, the
Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program came into shape.
In less than two years —
without a single pilot or study — the program has been rolled out to the Army’s
one million solders. Every soldier takes the General Assessment Tool, a
105-question survey, which asks soldiers to respond to statements like, “In
uncertain times I usually expect the best” (Cornum would score high on this),
or “If something can go wrong for me, it usually will.” Depending on how
soldiers score, they are prompted to complete online training in any of the
program’s five key areas: physical, emotional, social, family and spiritual
(which could mean either religious faith or personal reflection). The Master
Resilience Trainer program, part of this larger effort, is supposed to turn the non-commissioned officers closest to young soldiers into teachers of positive
psychology.
A week into the training
course at the Sheraton in Philadelphia, the soldiers were divided into groups
for role-playing exercises to help develop techniques for optimistic thinking.
I sat at a round table in a small basement meeting room with eight soldiers who
had been given the following situation: You are the sergeant in charge of a
unit, and a soldier shows up late for early-morning formation twice in a row.
The group had to come up with a worst-case scenario, a best case-scenario and
what was most likely to happen.
Sitting at the table was
Sgt. First Class Chris Tweedell. An Oliver Stone vision of a sergeant —
towering, broad and topped with a pale shaved head — Tweedell is blessed with a
deep, powerful voice. Tweedell and the other sergeants were supposed to be
learning how to train others to avoid catastrophic thinking. But trying to
dream up optimistic outcomes for the hypothetical situation was exasperating
him. “That is why I hate this stuff,” he said, dropping his head in his hands.
Seligman’s work suggests that if people take the time to come up with these
three possible outcomes, it allows them to assess their reaction to a situation
more clearly. That does not mean that every outcome is going to be positive —
in many cases, in war especially, something bad is going to happen.
Tweedell served in Iraq in
2003 and 2004 and completed two tours in Afghanistan. When he returned from his
first deployment, his home was broken into. He got divorced. He remarried, but coming
home from tours continues to be hard. “There are highs and lows, and you don’t
know if it is your own mood or sleep deprivation or road rage,” he says. “I've had a few episodes of P.T.S.D.” Optimistic possibilities were not coming to him
easily. (Tweedell’s group eventually came up with this best-case ending: the
soldier would get mentoring. The more realistic outcome: he would be put on an
unpleasant work detail.)
Some studies show that
optimism is linked to increased resilience and to the likelihood of
psychological growth. But it’s not clear what comes first — does optimism lead
to resilience or the other way around, or are both true? Seligman’s theory is
that if soldiers can be taught to approach a situation as General Cornum did
naturally — with gratitude for being alive rather than distress at being taken
prisoner — then they might learn to become resilient, too. A core principle of
the program is seeing an event as neutral, neither bad nor good, and focusing
instead on your reaction to the event. One exercise many soldiers told me they
like suggests that they “hunt the good stuff” by writing down three good things
that happened during the day before they go to sleep each night.
A week into the training, I
met with Tweedell for a second time. Despite his groaning over the exercise, he
was excited about the goals of Seligman’s course. “This is a holistic view of a
total soldier: mind, body, soul — a super-soldier,” he told me. “Someone has
finally understood that we need to be mentally tough.” He told me that the
course was making him think about how he communicates with peers, not to
mention his preteen stepdaughter. Seligman encourages soldiers to communicate
in what he calls an active, constructive way — drawing out others, encouraging
detailed discussions of positive events. Tweedell was realizing that he often
avoids conversation with his stepdaughter because he assumes she does not want
to talk to him. “How often do I ask her what good things happened to her
today?” he said. He told me that as a soldier, he often communicates passively
as well. “Maybe this is why I have the relationships that I have at home at and
at work,” he said.
It’s not a big leap to
imagine that Seligman’s tools could improve family or work communication. But
can positive thinking really protect against the harsh experiences of war?
Soldiers’ experiences are unique. They develop intense bonds with one another,
and all too often they see those closest to them die. Relentless boredom is
punctuated by moments of pure terror. Young men and women who have little
experience with mortality are suddenly confronted with gruesome scenes of
death. Some grapple for years with the emotional complexities of killing and watching
people die. “These programs were designed to make people happier and
healthier,” says George Bonanno, a professor at Columbia University who studies
trauma and resilience. “That is not the same thing as inoculating people for
serious urinate-in-your-clothing type stress — once-in-a-lifetime stress.”
Brett Litz, a professor at
Boston University School of Medicine and a clinical psychologist at the V.A.
Boston Healthcare System, says that there is little evidence that prevention
aimed at healthy people — as the Army’s is — has any impact on the onset of
P.T.S.D. “Whether this program can help service members when they are in the
hell of war faced with trauma and loss and the grotesque aspects of war, that
is unclear,” he says.
We may never know how
effective it is because the program, which costs about $125 million over five
years, was designed for quick implementation, not research. General Cornum
originally planned to pilot a few psychological training approaches so they
could be studied against a control group of soldiers who received no training
at all. But that would have taken years, and General Casey wanted the program
rolled out right away to everyone. The Army is conducting studies — comparing
four brigades that have resilience trainers with four that do not — and in
December it released the first results, which found small improvements in
emotional and social fitness and a small decrease in catastrophic thinking
among those soldiers whose brigades had trainers over a six-month period. Capt.
Paul Lester, the lead researcher, says that future studies will look at
disciplinary problems, illness and other more objective measures. He argues
that this initial study points to the effectiveness of the program, saying that
small changes in such a large group — there were 22,000 surveyed — are
important indicators. But he also admits that the study is imperfect. Some
brigades have deployed to combat and some have not; the individual soldiers
have varying levels and types of military experience; all the subjects have
taken the Army’s resiliency survey; and the change is entirely self-reported.
The true test of the
program is how it works in combat. Last year, resilience trainers were assigned
to the Second Stryker Cavalry regiment in Afghanistan, in which Pvt. First
Class Brian Hinkley served. Hinkley told me that children in villages would
throw rocks at the soldiers or spit at them. But advice from his resilience
trainer helped him to “hunt the good stuff” and focus on the exceptions. “The
few people that invite you in and offer you bread and chai, they make up for
the 50 that throw rocks at you and want to blow you up,” Hinkley told me. His
trainer was not trying to instill false optimism but rather a better way of
dealing with inevitable hardship. “He told us there were going to be bad days,
but also how to deal with it in a positive way,” Hinkley says. Hinkley’s story
is just an anecdote. And while he found the training valuable in the stressful
situations he was in, he doesn’t know if it would have made a difference on a
violent battlefield. And Hinkley might well have responded this way naturally,
like Cornum. But now, at least, he had a conscious frame for his response.
The
traditional view of trauma was bifurcated: you either got P.T.S.D. or you
were fine. Researchers today have a messier perspective. It is normal to have
problems following trauma. You should lose sleep, have terrible images replay
in your head, be racked by guilt or fear. Some people suffer these normal
post-trauma reactions to one degree or another and recover, returning to a
relatively normal state within weeks or months of the event. Others appear
unchanged at first, only to react months or even years later. The majority of
these people also recover. (Bonanno, the critic of the Army’s program, says his
recent study found that most soldiers are already remarkably resilient — 85
percent of them having no lasting adverse reaction from combat.) A small
percentage of people get trapped in their trauma and experience P.T.S.D.
Tedeschi and others say that the majority of people across this entire spectrum
also grow as a result of their suffering. Paradoxically, many grow even as they
suffer. The way we cope with trauma is far more complex than once thought, and
the way it molds us is similarly complex. We bend, we break, we repair and
rebuild, and often we grow, changing for the better in ways we never would have
if we had not suffered.
Researchers have found
evidence of post-traumatic growth in cultures across the globe. Tzipi Weiss is
an associate professor of social work at Long Island University’s C.W. Post
Campus and an author of “Post-Traumatic Growth and Culturally Competent
Practice.” She found studies that reported post-traumatic growth in Israelis
who survived terrorist attacks and in Palestinians who were held in Israeli
prisons; in Turkish earthquake survivors and Germans who survived the Dresden
bombing. In her own research, Weiss found growth in the spouses of cancer
survivors. “It’s pretty clear that post-traumatic growth is a universal
phenomenon,” she says.
But growth is not a given.
Not everyone climbs out of despair changed for the better. An over reliance on
drugs to treat P.T.S.D., some clinicians argue, might even stifle growth.
Pamela Fischer, director of primary care mental health at the Oklahoma City
Veterans Administration Medical Center, spent a dozen years working in the
P.T.S.D. unit there and cites studies suggesting that some continuing distress
from P.T.S.D. is necessary for growth to occur. Doctors should not take medication
away from patients, she says, but they can encourage them to work through the
pain, to see it as a motivation. As Weiss puts it, “Pain and suffering are the
mechanisms for growth.”
When it comes to treatment,
however, there isn’t a consensus on how, or whether, to integrate the concept
of growth. Patricia Watson, a senior education specialist for the National
Center for P.T.S.D., says studies indicate that pushing people toward growth
can be ineffective, making patients believe that they need to be strong even
when they are in mental agony. Rachel Yehuda, director of the Traumatic Stress
Studies Division at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, says that timing is
crucial. Bringing up the idea of growth before patients have completed therapy
— which often involves what is called “prolonged exposure,” or talking through
the trauma in detail again and again to help patients overcome their fear of
the event — might not be “a therapeutic thing to say to someone who is
suffering,” she says. “I don’t reject the idea; I just want to be careful to do
it right.”
Many of the V.A.
psychologists I spoke with were familiar with the idea of post-traumatic growth
— some have even done research on the subject — yet not all of them have used
it in therapy, and the V.A. has no official policy on it. Social workers at
Fort Sill, however, introduce the idea of growth right away, though as a
long-term objective. When soldiers come in shattered by a traumatic experience,
social workers explain that they will lose sleep, be angry, upset and
depressed, and that these are normal reactions. But they also tell them that
there is a chance that, given time, they may be stronger as a result of what
they went through.
Some academics question
whether post-traumatic growth is a real phenomenon, or at least one that can be
objectively defined. Nearly all studies ask people to look back and recount how
an event changed them. In the wake of trauma, people might tell themselves that
they changed for the better, if only as a way of making some sense of a
senseless tragedy. As far as friends and spouses are concerned, however, the
person might have not changed at all. “I have no doubt that there are people,
perhaps many people, who do change in positive ways, but we are not able to
measure it,” says Howard Tennen, a professor of community medicine and health
care at the University of Connecticut. And if you can’t measure it, Tennen
says, then you really have no business trying to promote it.
Tedeschi would love to see
better studies. But he also is adamant that the phenomenon is real and can be
measured, even if researchers must rely on self-reported, after-the-fact
accounts. “Virtually all psychological research relies on memory,” he told me.
“If you decide that memory is unreliable, then you have to throw out everything
that has ever been published in psychology.”
Tedeschi told me about one
of his patients whose helicopter was shot down in Vietnam. As he fell from the
sky in the midst of gunfire and explosions, a peace came over him. He saw the
jungle around him, and it was beautiful. He felt connected to everyone, even
enemy soldiers. Since then he has reflected on the experience, delving into
philosophy and religion. He has reached out to others by volunteering his time.
He has tried to remain true to that connection he felt long ago. “Maybe that
was all an illusion,” Tedeschi says. “But that became a guideline for his life,
so I don’t think you can dismiss it. People can have profound personal
experiences that directly change their perception and philosophy. That may show
up in the things they do, but it also may not.”
For most people, change
does not occur in a transcendent moment but over years of prosaic searching.
That was the case for Sergeant Beltran, whose Humvee was blown apart by the
I.E.D. in Iraq. Rebuilding his life was a struggle, but over time he became a
trainer in the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program at Fort Sill and now is
working at Fort Stewart, in Georgia, where he and his new wife, Ronda
Jones-Beltran, have bought a house. “Instead of labeling myself as a P.T.S.D.
veteran, I say that I am a post-traumatic-growth veteran,” he told me. “I am a
person looking forward.”
Jim Rendon is a freelance
writer in New York. He is working on a book about the medical-marijuana
industry.
This
article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 8, 2012
An
article on March 25 about post-traumatic growth omitted one of the authors of a
book on the subject. Besides Tzipi Weiss, Roni Berger also wrote
‘‘Post-Traumatic Growth and Culturally Competent Practice.’’
