War on a Sunny Afternoon  –  page 2

Sam Osherson

The level of feeling came up quickly in our seminar room. The tears were unexpected. “I hadn’t realized the impact of this on me,” one student observed, referring to having a relative in the combat. I thought of my uncle who’d been in the Seabees during WWII and was part of one of the first units involved in the occupation of Japan in 1945. He never talked about what he saw there. My father, in contrast, taught navigation to Army pilots stateside during the war and told me the thing he was proudest about was “teaching men how to survive: to get themselves and their planes back to base.” He never mentioned, and I never asked, how he felt about the bombs the pilots were dropping on the enemy.

 

By one estimate, taking into account extended family networks and Milgram’s famous six degrees of separation between people (grandparents, aunt and uncles, etc.), over 42 million people may know a vet directly.[4] We encounter vets every day in our lives, walk past them on the street. Some live there: current estimates are that one- third of the homeless are vets.[5]

 

The heartfelt “go-around” in the seminar room led us to contemplate “the unspoken” in the lives of vets and their families. We discussed what vets cannot say and what they do not say about their experiences when they return, and how this silence maintains and protects whatever trauma may have been experienced. One of Shay’s central points is that character is a community of values and there is a shrinkage in the social horizon for vets who have experienced what their loved one back home cannot know, may not be able even to imagine. How to talk about war experiences that are beyond comprehension?

“Picture this scene: A Vietnam combat veteran goes to a family wedding some ten years after his service….The band plays a Jimi Hendrix piece that reminds him of a dead friend, blindsiding him with emotion. He tries to conceal his tears, but a rich relative notices and says, ‘Why aren’t you over that Vietnam stuff yet?’ Anyway, that war was all about oil—and damn right, too, or we’d be paying $5 a gallon for gas.’

“Saying that to one of the veterans I worked with at such an emotional moment would provoke an explosion of rage. He might tip the table over in the man’s lap. The veteran’s relative is intimidated, stammers an inaudible apology and rushes away. The veteran looks around feeling like someone has just peeled his skin and every nerve ending is naked and exposed. Everyone in the church hall is silent; everyone is watching him….He walks slowly from the room and out of the church. His wife is weeping with mortification, fury, and self-blame that she didn’t catch this in time. She is torn between her love for and loyalty to her husband and the ten-year family consensus that the veteran is a dangerous psycho.” [6]

 

A student points out Shay’s observation that one impact of learning to become a soldier does not exactly prepare you to return to a peacetime civilian life. “A career that war exactly prepares veterans for upon return to civilian life is a criminal career…” [7]One line of contemporary psychological work on soldiers has discussed the increasing and practiced de-humanization of the enemy necessary to convert men and women into soldiers willing to kill others in contraction of their own moral standards. The act of shooting a rifle at another person counters the ways in which many have learned to think of ourselves as “good people.” Several of the students in the seminar presented for discussion studies of the ways in which the army has used psychologists and psychological research to train soldiers.[8]

 

The morning discussion had left us now in a precarious position in our seminar. We understood that the experience of combat leads to shattered assumptions about the world, particularly beliefs about the fairness of the world, about ourself as a “good person,” and the trustworthiness of others. Shay and others who write about PTSD discuss the maladaptive ways vets develop to handle the breakdown of basic trust in the world.

 

In the seminar now, though, we were struggling now to acknowledgement challenges to our trusted assumptions about ourselves and the world we lived in.