Sunday, May 6, 2012

“Well, its 1-2-3, what are we fightin’ 4……..”

 “Well, its 1-2-3, what are we fightin’ 4……..”
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" 

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
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
·                  The 6th Floor Blog: P.T.S.D. Can Yield Positive, Yet Sometimes Deadly, Results (March 22, 2012)
Related in Opinion
·                  Room for Debate: Save a Mind, Draft a Body (March 20, 2012)

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.
Editor: Vera Titunik
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.’’