Supersurvivors

by David B Feldman

  Now, on the LaGuardia tarmac, Senator Kerry, tall and lean, the Democratic nominee for president, emerged from the plane’s passenger compartment. Paul had never met a senator before, let alone a presidential candidate, and he was nervous. As Kerry proceeded down the row of veterans, stopping for handshakes and photographs, Paul straightened his back and drew in a breath of air. Kerry approached, noted that Paul was an Iraq War vet, and asked him simply, “How is it?”

  Paul started in on a methodical, impassioned response. “I wanted this man to know that my guys and thousands like them had gotten screwed. I wanted him to know that America was not better off as a result of the Iraq War. I wanted him to know the truth about Iraq from a man who had served. I wanted him to understand why the war was keeping me up at night. I wanted him to feel the urgency. And I wanted him to tell the world.” Despite his conscious statements to the contrary, on some very real level, Paul believed Kerry would listen. Perhaps his words would trigger the senator’s personal sense of social accountability—his own values of duty and justice. Maybe then the world would return to normal.

  The senator stood silently and responded with little more than a favorable nod. Much to Paul’s surprise, however, several days after this brief meeting, the Kerry campaign called. The president was going to be giving an address on the anniversary of his now-infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech. The Kerry campaign wanted Paul to give the formal rebuttal directly after the address. The speech would catapult Paul onto the national stage. He was used to taking fire, but this was going to put him in the crosshairs of the national political machine. His stomach hurt. Yet Senator Kerry had answered his call for social accountability. Paul gave the address.

  The next day, national television and radio were all over him. “People said I was the voice of dissent on the Iraq War. They said I might be the next John Kerry,” writes Paul. “The next John Kerry? A week ago I had been an ordinary guy just back from Iraq, sitting across from a hairy, fat blackjack dealer named Chi Chi, debating whether to split a pair of fours. Now people were calling me a hero or a traitor.” And he was just getting started.

  At first blush, Paul seems to have dramatically changed his views of his country. After all, this once-stalwart soldier suddenly became a rebel. Many of his closest friends were mystified by the transformation. People who didn’t know him were quick to brand him a traitor and accuse him of discarding everything he once believed in. When people stand up to the authority they once supported, we tend to see them as abandoning their previous principles. Terms such as traitor and hypocrite are often brandished against them like weapons by people who once were their closest allies. How could Paul so easily check his values at the door? His sense of duty? His belief in the goodness of his country?

  A closer look at Paul’s story reveals that he may not have changed as much as it seems. “I still believe in this country, its tremendous history, its example, and its potential,” he says. “America is in a constant state of beta. It’s always getting better, and there are people who are always trying to improve it, especially in these challenging times.”

  Paul hadn’t abandoned his worldview, at least not wholesale. He still believed in the basic principles on which he saw his country as being based—goodness, fairness, and duty—and felt strongly committed to that country. His rebellious behavior was not hypocritical or an abandonment of those principles; it was an attempt to integrate them with the realities he had witnessed in Iraq. Perhaps the United States still stood for those values, even though it hadn’t quite fulfilled them yet.

  According to psychologists, the technical term for what was happening to Paul’s worldview is accommodation. Researchers Stephen Joseph of the University of Warwick and P. Alex Linley of the University of Leicester have studied in detail the process of making sense of traumatic experiences. According to Joseph and Linley, people have a natural desire to be consistent—or, as the researchers call it, a completion tendency. We’re happy when our most cherished beliefs about the world actually line up with the way the world is. When things are otherwise, as often happens when trauma challenges our worldview, we feel a strong emotional pull to settle the conflict.

  In his book What Doesn’t Kill Us, Joseph offers an intriguing analogy. Imagine you own an expensive porcelain vase, one you dearly love, and one day you stumble and accidentally knock the vase to the floor, shattering it. What’s your initial impulse? If you’re like most people, you want to repair it. This means supergluing the vase together, attempting to make it look exactly as it did before. But no matter how hard you try, this often isn’t feasible. Some pieces may be lost; others may be too small to glue. So, if you can’t put everything back the way it was, the best you may be able to do is assemble the pieces in a new way that is functional and still beautiful.

  Trauma shatters our assumptive worldview. After facing serious traumas such as combat, assault, natural disaster, or life-threatening illness, it’s often impossible for people simply to push the Reset button and return to their previous rosy beliefs. Continuing to believe that the world is safe and that good things happen to good people requires victims to overlook the reality of the trauma, or at least fool themselves into thinking the trauma wasn’t so bad. For many people, such a convenient solution isn’t possible. So they have to do their best to accommodate what has happened.

  Paul hadn’t abandoned his country and he hadn’t abandoned his beliefs. He was merely trying to piece them back together given what he had experienced. But life isn’t always as easy to reassemble as porcelain.

  Army specialist Casey Sheehan arrived in Iraq with the First Calvary Division out of Fort Hood in April of 2004, just weeks after Paul Rieckhoff left Baghdad. Casey was from a strong Catholic, blue-collar family. His parents couldn’t afford to send him to college, and joining the army meant, among other things, a twenty-thousand-dollar signing bonus that would pay for school. His family wasn’t happy about it, but they supported his decision. Besides, Casey’s recruiter promised him a post off the frontlines as a chaplain’s assistant, which would mean he’d never see combat. The recruiter broke his promise.

  As Paul Rieckhoff took to the airwaves that month, Casey joined in a rescue mission in Iraq. En route, his convoy was ambushed. Casey got off a couple of shots before he was killed. He was twenty-four years old. CNN reported the daily casualties while the Sheehan family was eating Sunday dinner. They weren’t sure, but they thought they heard Casey’s name. A few hours later, three military officers arrived at the house and told Cindy Sheehan that her oldest son was dead. “After what seemed an eternity,” she writes in her 2005 book, Not Another Mother’s Child, “I finally began to wonder who or what was making those horrible screaming noises. Then I realized it was me.” These are the sounds of someone’s world crumbling to pieces.

  Cindy Sheehan’s story follows beats similar to Paul Rieckhoff’s. Like Paul, Cindy had been raised to believe that her country was good and just, a patriotic sentiment she passed to Casey. Also like Paul, Cindy had questions for her government. She wrote letters to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in which she asked why American children were fighting a war without the proper training, equipment, or armor. She wrote to White House spokesperson Dana Perino, urging the government to bring the troops home so that no other innocent people like Casey would be killed.

  But Cindy’s and Paul’s stories diverge here. Like Paul Rieckhoff, Cindy Sheehan struggled to accommodate what had happened, to refashion her worldview into something like what it had been before her son’s untimely death. Unlike Paul, however, Cindy found this impossible to accomplish.

  When Paul’s worldview was challenged, he was able to alter it to fit his new sense of reality without abandoning it completely. He still believed in the inherent goodness and fairness of his country, yes. But he also realized that things had gone awry. So he committed himself to trying to fix them. The terrain of his beliefs had changed, but the ground beneath his feet was still fundamentally firm. For Cindy
, such smooth accommodation was impossible. Talk to her for just a few minutes and you get a sense of her desperate struggle even to find all the pieces of her shattered worldview. The shards of her once-comforting beliefs about herself, her family, and her country lay strewn, and she couldn’t figure out how to reassemble them.

  Some psychologists believe that the emotional upheaval, the nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, guilt, and fear often experienced by people suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder are precisely the result of losing these stabilizing beliefs. Although Paul’s worldview was able to accommodate his traumatic experience, there’s no guarantee that accommodation will be successful for everyone. Just as there are many ways to reassemble porcelain shards, there are limitless ways to reconstruct one’s worldview, some of which are probably more helpful than others.

  One particularly difficult outcome of worldview reconstruction is known as overaccommodation. As University of Missouri psychologists Patricia Resick and Monica Schnicke write in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, “without good social support, or guidance by a therapist, the accommodation may be maladaptive and extreme.” It’s all too easy to arrive at conclusions such as “The world is an awful place,” “No one can be trusted,” and, perhaps worst of all, “I’m a bad person.” In research published in the journal Psychological Trauma, psychologists Heather Littleton and Amie Grills-Taquechel surveyed more than three hundred and fifty college women who had been sexually assaulted. A staggering 45 percent had overaccommodated. For them, the world was a scary place and they were no longer the good people they once thought they were.

  Cindy Sheehan was raised in a fairly traditional household in Bellflower, California. Her father worked at Lockheed, at the time one of the largest U.S. defense contractors. As an adult, Cindy was a youth minister at St. Mary’s Catholic Church and organized after-school programs for at-risk middle school children.

  Prior to Casey’s death, Cindy felt she was a good mother, a good wife, and a good person who lived in a good country with good intentions. But now, inexplicably, her oldest son was dead, and Cindy blamed herself and the naïve faith in her country that she had passed to her son. There was no justification for his death, just as there now seemed to be no rationalization for her worldview. In Not Another Mother’s Child, Cindy wrote, “I was raised in a country by a public school system that taught us that America was good, that America was just. America has been killing people . . . since we first stepped on this continent; we have been responsible for death and destruction.” Of her prior belief in a good and just America, she said, “I passed on that bullshit to my son and my son enlisted.”

  Cindy’s assumptive worldview was shattered nearly beyond recognition after Casey’s death. It was painfully clear to her now that the world was not the safe place she once believed it to be. “I don’t trust anything anymore,” she says from her home in Vacaville, California. If there is a theme to her story, that’s it: loss of trust. “The army promised to take care of Casey, and now Casey was dead. The government was lying to everybody. The president misused his authority to exploit America’s resources and kill American children. I grew up in the Vietnam era, and I was a history major. History is full of stories of governments lying to their people and exploiting them. I knew that when Casey enlisted. I never trusted our government, but I thought the government had our best interest in mind. So now, eight years after Casey’s death, I know any form of trust of any institution was terrible and tragically misplaced. Now my eyes are fully opened.”

  Cindy is something of a living picket sign. She communicates with her body as much as with her voice, which is gently fierce and clear. She wears her intentions in the deep lines of her face, in a sympathetic look or a biting glare. Her strawberry blond hair is cut in a mother’s short, utilitarian style, parted to one side. She would show up at rallies dressed down in T-shirts and jeans, always with a cogent message for policy makers.

  “I wasn’t thinking so much in terms of good or bad anymore, just in terms of wrong or right,” she says. “For instance, I would have thought before Casey died that it was bad to go to jail.” She smiles. “Now it’s my duty.” Cindy’s been arrested at rallies, she estimates, fifteen or sixteen times.

  Though she often caught the attention of the police, she was finding it harder to get her message out to the public. There was no unified antiwar pro-justice voice. By this time, eighteen hundred American troops had been killed. The president, who was spending a nearly five-week-long working vacation at his Texas ranch just outside Crawford, was now arguing to stay the course in Iraq to honor the sacrifices of the ones who had fallen. “I was so full of rage and feeling so helpless and like such a failure after all the work for peace that I had done,” Cindy writes in her memoir. “Why would I want another person to go through what I’d gone through for this war?” One hot August day in 2005, Cindy had had enough.

  President Bush’s family ranch sits on fifteen hundred acres of brush-covered prairie buttressed by the Rainey Creek and the Middle Bosque River. Cattle graze on the land amid small rock outcroppings and groves of big oak. At its heart is the russet, flat limestone house where the president met with foreign leaders ranging from Russian president Vladimir Putin to British prime minister Tony Blair.

  That August, on the side of the road, just beyond the ranch, Cindy Sheehan and forty others set up base camp, soon to be dubbed Camp Casey. Here she would stay, she announced, until she was granted a face-to-face meeting with the president. Cindy and a group of mothers had met with the president once before. Her grief was fresh then, and she didn’t say much. This second meeting would be very different, though. She would demand of the president, “Every time you get out there and say that you’re going to continue the killing in Iraq to honor the fallen heroes, you say, ‘except Casey Sheehan’ . . . You don’t have my permission.”

  In the beginning, Camp Casey hosted about a hundred supporters a day. Counterprotesters shouting pro-Bush slogans sprouted up along the side of the road. In response, fifteen hundred people gathered at a park in Crawford for a peace demonstration. As support for Cindy’s cause grew, Camp Casey installed a memorial display of a thousand white crosses, stars, and crescents, bearing the names of fallen soldiers in Iraq. According to Cindy, in mid-August, sixteen hundred antiwar candlelight vigils in support of her son were held around the country. The camp was visited by such celebrities as Martin Sheen, Reverend Al Sharpton, Joan Baez, and several members of Congress. As the Camp Casey demonstration lingered on late into the month of August, Cindy appeared on nearly every major national news program with her simple message: end the war and bring our fighting sons and daughters home before it’s too late.

  The president finally responded to Cindy, but not face-to-face. Speaking to reporters, he said, “I strongly support her right to protest. There’s a lot of people protesting. And there’s a lot of points of view about the Iraq War. As you know, in Crawford last weekend, there was people from both sides of the issue or from all sides of the issue there to express their opinions . . . She expressed her opinion. I disagree with it. I think immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be a mistake. I think those who advocate immediate withdrawal from not only Iraq but the Middle East are advocating a policy that would weaken the United States. So I appreciate her right to protest. I understand her anguish. I’ve met with a lot of families. She doesn‘t represent the view of a lot of families I have met with.”

  After airing this clip of the president on MSNBC’s program Hardball, host Chris Matthews welcomed his guest panel. “It seems to me what’s happening now is not just this back-and-forth about will the president meet with Cindy Sheehan or not?” posed Matthews. “But both sides now seem to be saying, because there are casualties in this war, two thousand dead now . . . that’s proof we should not fight anymore, we should pull out. And the other side says, well, we have had casualties—that’s the president speaking—we should stay in, because we owe it to them.” He then turned to his pan
el. “Paul Rieckhoff, your view? Do you think it’s fair to use the dead . . . to make a case for a policy?”

  “I honestly don’t think so,” Paul said in the studio at MSNBC. He had long since replaced his flak jacket with the sharp suit and tie he wore for national media interviews. “I think this all stems from the president’s failure to articulate what success looks like. He has never communicated to the American public, to the Iraqi people, and to the troops on the ground what ‘right’ looks like.”

  Trauma challenged and changed Paul Rieckhoff’s worldview. Though he asked himself a lot of hard questions, to this day he still believes in his country. Though he recognizes that mistakes have been made, he hasn’t lost faith in America altogether. Though he sees clearly that the United States isn’t completely good or just, he still has confidence that it aspires to goodness and justice. As the founder and executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, he is at the helm of one of the largest nonpartisan advocacy groups in the country, with more than two hundred thousand members. He regularly appears on shows such as Meet the Press, Anderson Cooper 360, and Real Time with Bill Maher, sometimes defending and sometimes countering American policy decisions. Five years after he returned home from Iraq, GQ ranked him thirty-seven out of the fifty most powerful people in Washington, DC.