PTSD: Doing Right by the Army and Wrong by the Boys

Daniel Zwerdling didn't know it when he broadcast his story on returning soldiers suffering from PTSD, Soldiers Say Army Ignores, Punishes Mental Anguish, but he hit my trigger.  Hard.

You should listen to it.  Zwerdling did a masterful, understated job, speaking in that pleasant unhurried voice with just the tiniest suggestion of incredulity.  He spoke with soldiers stationed at Ft. Collins who have been kicked out of the army for "patterns of misconduct."  And he spoke with the sergeants who supervise them.

Almost all of the soldiers said that their worst problem is that their supervisors and friends turned them into pariahs when they learned that they were having an emotional crisis. Supervisors said it's true: They are giving some soldiers with problems a hard time, because they don't belong in the Army.

And the truth is they don't.  These boys who faced danger and boredom and desert heat without breaking came home to find that time in that kiln did not bake them as hard and smooth as their muscled limbs.  They cracked on exposure to the cool, disinterested air of home.  They shouldn't be in the army.  They aren't what the army needs.  They can't sublimate the horror.  They can't benefit from the rigid rules of the trained berserker.  After the moon wanes and they shed their wereskin, they can't shed the images of four year olds with blown off limbs, of their buddies putting guns in their mouths and pulling the trigger.  They can't remain good soldiers.  The training didn't take.

My father was a World War II vet who lied about his age and enlisted at 17 with the Foriegn Legion.  He served in North Africa before the United States joined the war and came home a month or two before D day with a million dollar wound.

My memories are fragmented, illusiory.  Perhaps spun up out of whole cloth.  But I remember my grandmother telling me he wouldn't sleep in his bed when he came home.  He went to the basement and slept on the cold cement floor.  The image that evoked has haunted me my entire adult life.  I see a cold dark and wet basement and a green army blanket.  

He couldn't remain a good soldier.  The training didn't take.  He got 30% disability for the rest of his abbreviated life.  For the scrapnel in his arm.  Not for the nightmares he expurgated in poetry, short stories and plays.

BY SOME HILL
Here
In the old scars
Of cannon wheels locked in anger
Let them dig graves

Men who are dead in the ground
Do not sleep

Here
When the spring rains
Whisper to the wooden crosses
Only remember
Men who are dead in the ground
Do not dream

Here
If children come with broken flowers
Build no iron fences

Men who are dead in the ground
Are not afraid

At night, he would tuck us in.  Sometimes he was the "pounding man" who pounded us into the bed.  But what we loved, what we begged for was this one:

LINES TO A BURNING TANK
Big tank clankin' down the road
Stand too... Stand too
Rolling heavy, rolling through
waitin' for the big review
And feeling mighty lonely

I heard a whisper over the hill
Singing the song of an 88 shell.

Blew that tank right square to hell...
    "...No, sonny. Just outa here."

That was our favorite lullaby.  "Say it again, Daddy," his voice was low and gravelly. "Say it again."   His hands were large and warm and gentle, so gentle.  He showed us the grave of a soldier he shot in a forest in Belguim, once.  We brought home the helmet with its hole through and through.  I lost it in a move.

He took his own life when I was 16.  Hung himself with his belt in his apartment in Dallas.  His marriage to my mother already lost.

Sgt. Martin Smith, USMC (ret.) talks about recruiting in an article in CounterPunch. "The Department of Defense structures basic training with the goal of molding a singular and uniform killing machine," he says.  "Not all troops accept the indoctrination of basic training whole-heartedly. Some bring a questioning attitude into the military that no amount of 'training' can erase. Still others become bitter at the military as a result of the harsh treatment, enforced regulations, and military discipline imposed by drill instructors."

Others crack under the pressure, pushed beyond their nature.  They suffer nightmares, beat their partners, drug themselves.  They give up bathing, cut themselves, cry out for help.

But the army, so willing to pour millions and billions in recruiting and training and feeding a soldier, can't tolerate the broken.  It's like they have cooties, empathy cooties, unmanly cooties, crazy cooties.

Again from Zwerdling:

Sergeant Nathan Towsley told NPR, "When I'm dealing with [a soldier's]personal problems on a daily basis, I don't have time to train soldiers to fight in Iraq. I have to get rid of him, because he is a detriment to the rest of the soldiers."

And he's right.  They shouldn't be in the army.  They should never have been in the army.  Their compassion broke them, made them unfit for service.  They humanized the enemy and their fellows.  They were less than efficient killing machines.  

The sergeants use incredible language.  "Be a man," they say.  "Suck it up," they say, or something like it. "I was there.  I lived through it.  If I can do it, they should be able to." No one at a higher level will talk at all, except some mind numbing political appointee who doesn't know anything about anything and who likes the sound of his own voice.

These sergeants speak nonchalantly about cleaning up the brains of their best friends.  They admit to ostracizing the PTSD victims in their midst.  They casually speak of the abuse. And we know when we hear them that they, too are broken, shards of glass wrapped more or less tightly in a well pressed uniform, balancing carefully in well maintained boots.  

Balancing at the edge of the precipice.  Staring down the possibility of another Mai Lai, another Abu Ghraib, another atrocity.  Staving off the day someone wants to kick them out for "patterns of misconduct," or for being a bad apple.  Fed to the void one way or another.

"...No, sonny. Just outa here."