Part 1 of 3

@bbstl,
I’ve known a few vets (Vietnam era and a couple of younger Navy Seals) who have suffered greatly. Yes, they really do deserve a whole lot better. Nowadays trauma medicine saves the lives of soldiers who would have died of their wounds in earlier wars. Alas, the psychic toll has still not received the effective care and therapy it demands. One size does not fit all, and various approaches may be needed to find the key that unshackles a particular individual from war-torn misery.

Owing to the painkillers so many are exposed to in the course of reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation, they are at tremendous risk of prescription opioid addiction. As if self-medication with alcohol and street drugs is not bad enough. For those with inborn metabolic susceptibility to depression, alcoholism, and addiction, it is a double whammy that is often ultimately fatal, especially when high-powered and extremely addictive painkillers such as oxycodone and fentanyl are involved.

There are various approaches to dealing with combat trauma. The writer Maxine Hong Kingston used to conduct writing retreats for Vietnam vets. I once attended a walking meditation retreat facilitated by several of Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s senior American students at a center where MHK simultaneously held a veterans’ writing weekend. Our group was invited to sit and listen to the vets read their compositions without commenting. It was an incredible honor to bear witness to their efforts to heal from what they had experienced in Vietnam. Sometimes just showing up and listening with an open heart is the best medicine a person can offer.

As a female civilian, I could never identify with their war experiences. But I could recognize the human courage it took to face their inner demons. It was only natural to give them a chance to speak and be heard. It was a far cry from the reception so many of them faced when they returned from their tours of duty. Being attentively listened to is the ultimate gift. I have experienced it myself. It is the exact opposite of the shunning – wangtta – that so many of them were subjected to.

– Continued –

Part 2 of 3

What is really sobering is how many walking wounded fathers and grandfathers of Baby Boomers were deeply affected by what they had experienced in both world wars and Korea. Throw in the economic rigors of the Depression they endured in childhood, and it’s no wonder that so many of our elders drank as much as they did. Many of The Greatest Generation never spoke about their wartime experiences, or did so only many years later – but the trauma ran in the background the whole time. Their children picked up on it, and blamed themselves for being the cause of nameless grief and existential despair.

I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression by Terrence Real is an eye-opener in this regard. I’ve concluded that the drug and alcohol addiction that has afflicted successive generations of Americans since the 50s and 60s has its roots in the unrecognized and untreated wholesale PTSD that two generations of American soldiers brought back with them from the mechanized wholesale slaughter “over there.” The second-hand effects on their wives and children have been every bit as malign as garden-variety addictions, but with an added degree of silence and compartmentalization akin to that of Holocaust survivors.

If you really want to trace it back, the roots lay in the ferocious fighting of the fratricidal War Between the States, when Gatling guns, predecessors of machine guns, and high-explosive munitions were just coming into use. It was the first step in the “mass production” of warfare. The ferocity of the fighting resulted in “soldier’s sickness”: addiction to painkillers such as laudanum – tincture of opium – which was also a remedy for diarrhea from poor sanitation. Dysentery and other intestinal diseases carried off huge numbers of troops, including one of my forebears before he even left Massachusetts. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laudanum.

Opioid Crisis Has Frightening Parallels to Drug Epidemic of Late 1800s
by Stephanie Pappas, September 29, 2017
https://www.livescience.com/60559-opioid-crisis-echoes-epidemic-of-1800s.html

– Continued –

Part 3 of 3

The following New Yorker article is an excellent discussion of the toll that military service takes on families. I’ve read many of the linked articles, and there is plenty of food for thought. Highly recommended.

The “Soldier’s Disease”
by Amy Davidson Sorkin, November 11, 2010
https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/the-soldiers-disease

Quoted in the above, this piece gives background on Civil War veterans and the difficulties they faced with their families after the war ended:

Lest We Forget, Marriage Is Often a Forgotten Casualty of War
by Elizabeth Abbott, Contributor
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lest-we-forget-marriage-i_b_782279

As we saw only too clearly in MR. SUNSHINE and NOKDU FLOWER, the high-tech mechanized weaponry adopted by Japan when it modernized its military along the Prussian model in the late 1800s resulted in wholesale slaughter of a kind that had not been seen before. Infantry charges across no man’s land swept by machine guns guaranteed as much carnage as the charge of the Light Brigade into the teeth of cannon during the Crimean War. Dong-hak foot soldiers armed with bamboo spears swarming uphill against rifles, artillery, and machine guns on the heights didn’t stand a chance. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Military technology continued to advance during the Spanish-American War and WWI with the emergence of aerial warfare, Big Bertha long-range cannon mounted on railroad cars, tanks, and mustard gas. Each of them caused new forms of trauma. And so it continues to the present day.

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