by Larry Minear
Veterans returned to families that, with varying degrees of success, had functioned while they were gone. Spouses had taken over the management of household finances, children had assumed greater responsibilities, and new divisions of labor had been put in place. Spec. 5 Jack C. Van Zanten, who served two rotations with the Army in Iraq, observed on returning that “the dynamics of the family change.” He saw his own reentry confirming the need to “reunite slowly and work through things carefully.”44
Families soon begin to realize that their soldiers may have difficulty unpacking the experiences and resist pressure, even from loved ones, to get the necessary help. Returning from a year in Iraq, California Guardsman Sgt. Michael Durand wrote about his encounter with a mental health worker whose help he had sought out after a month of languishing at home. “What I didn’t want was this to be another bullshit-feel-good-I-have-problems-please-feel-sorry-for-me headshrinker deal. I have had enough of those. Look,” Durand said, “I have shot more goddamn people than you ever have. So don’t bullshit me about ‘Duty, Honor, and Country.’ Been there, done that…. And you know what? It ain’t there, man. It’s just War, and War don’t give a good Goddamn what the fuck.”45 Soldiers reported with great remorse their often unsuccessful attempts to persuade others to seek professional help, especially when suicide resulted.
Participants in a Vermont focus group described a range of reentry reactions. One woman reported that her husband, mild-mannered when he left, had returned hating the world and “angry at everybody.” Another’s spouse, once mellow and easy going, had turned into someone with “an attitude.” One wife who had struggled to reestablish communication following her husband’s return was pleased when he had agreed to attend a “marriage enrichment weekend” sponsored by the military, only to have the retreat cancelled at the last minute. She doubted their marriage would survive a then-rumored second deployment, which she suspected he would not discuss.46 A woman who had found her spouse maddeningly uncommunicative since his return described herself as “ready to walk out” of their marriage. “God bless the wives,” says Dax Carpenter, “because it takes a real woman to be able to deal with someone that can get angrier faster than you can ever imagine.”
When Specialist Ferretti returned from Iraq, “it seemed like the only stable thing I had was my family, so I chose to move back home with my dad and my stepmom, and still it was a little different.” While she was away, her two sisters had moved out. “It seemed like everyone’s lives had continued to progress and mine had come to a halt. It seemed like I was in a totally different world. It’s like I wasn’t in my own life anymore.” Now twenty-six (she had enlisted at twenty-one), she said, “I’m trying to get back in the rhythm of my life as I used to know it and it’s just never happened. My life is so different now.”47 Many veterans found themselves estranged from their spouses. War and absence, said Army Spec. Nicholas Fosholdt, contributed to his divorce six months after returning home. “We just grew apart, being away for so long.”48
For the mother of a young person who had deployed to Iraq just after high school graduation, the change had been more positive. Directionless before his military service, he now took greater interest in family and community events, reflecting the upswing in community involvement among veterans noted earlier. Deployment, observed another participant of the Vermont focus group, represented “a new experience for Vermont and the Vermont National Guard and everyone here.” The fact that the focus group met regularly while family members were away had provided a source of strength and solidarity. Their comments, however, seemed to confirm the view expressed by a military chaplain that “the whole shape of the family has changed as a result of deployment.”49
In reconnecting with family and friends, veterans often found it hard to convey the intensity and of what they had experienced. “My frustration coming back is, I go to work and I talk to guys and they don’t care,” said Sergeant Moriarty, recalling an explosive scene during a ceremony in which his company president and coworkers had gathered to welcome him back. “Somebody will even ask me a question: ‘Jeez, do you have any pictures?’” Moriarty continued. “And I will say ‘Sure’ and I’ll take out some pictures and start to show them and they’re like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ and I want to grab them by the throat and say, ‘You look at my f-ing pictures. You asked me to look at ’em. Okay, I’m not going around showing ’em off to everybody. You asked to look at them. Give me the goddamned respect of looking at my pictures. Do you have any idea of what I’ve done?”50
Even before New Hampshire Guardsman Pink returned to the Granite State, he had been aware that a new normal would be hard to establish. “Every once in a while as we’re driving down the road or creeping along in a patrol, I have a recurring epiphany: this is happening and will have a lasting impact on me for the rest of my life.”51 But the full extent of the change foreshadowed would become apparent only as veterans sought to reconnect with families and friends, jobs and pastimes. For some, the reconnecting process would take years, if it happened at all. In fact, mental health professionals themselves comment on the widely varying timing and triggers of the process from one veteran to the next.
A SENSE OF HUMANITY
The challenge of the reentry process, as veterans present it, is to reverse the toll taken by their steady diet of danger and violence in Afghanistan and Iraq on their sense of humanity and well-being. Judging from the interviews, the process of reconnecting has different dynamics, contours, and timing depending on the person involved and their experiences of war. Coming to terms with it all seems to involve finding effective ways of moving past the violence and affirming some sort of new future for themselves.
For most veterans, the process of transitioning back into American society requires relearning basic instincts. “You take a tiger and you put him in the wild, and he’s happy,” Dax Carpenter observes. “He knows how to hunt. He knows how to do his job to survive. You take him and put him in a cage and part of him dies. Put a military member back into the civilian populace, it kills him, ’cause civilians don’t have that high intensity that they’re used to.” Reflecting on his own attempt to come to terms with both PTSD and TBI following three deployments, Carpenter describes being cycled through a detox center, “almost like a detox center for drug addicts, where you can get re-civilized, where you are around people again, not in a combat situation.”52
A number of veterans comment on the general dehumanization of the enemy that had taken place over time in both theaters. A case in point is the observation of MP Stephanie Corcoran, noted earlier, about the hate toward the people of Iraq expressed around her. She voiced her revulsion at “racist and ignorant views heard by people expected to promote great things like the rights of life, liberty, and property. I’ve learned that it’s very easy to hate everything about Iraqis if you let yourself.”53 Even Colorado’s Sgt. Kelly Dougherty, who criticized the racist elements she perceived in the treatment of Iraqis, particularly women, caught herself expressing hateful sentiments when at heart she believed otherwise.
“You take 150,000 U.S. soldiers out of America and transport them to Iraq for a year,” said Sergeant Moriarty, “with absolutely zero training whatsoever about the culture. It doesn’t take a shrink to tell you ignorance is one of the first steps toward prejudice.”54 Others suspected something less circumstantial and more inherent in the nature of war. “Every war has got its own little term to dehumanize the other side. And we had ‘Gooks’ in Vietnam and this war has ‘Hajjis,’” observed New Hampshire Guardsman Zach Bazzi, himself an Arabic-speaking American of Lebanese extraction. “The bad guys, or the insurgents, I’m sure they have their own derogatory term towards us. Maybe it’s just part of human affairs in war.”55
The theme that dehumanizing the enemy not only stokes the conflict but also undermines the self-respect of soldiers is elaborated by Stan Goff, an Army paratrooper who served in Vietnam. Drawing a parallel between the contemporary characterization of Iraqis as “
ragheads” or “hajjis” and the descriptions in his own day of Vietnamese as “dinks and gooks,” he wrote, “When you take away the humanity of another, you kill your own humanity. Do whatever you have to do to survive, however you define survival,” he wrote in a November 2003 letter to GIs (including his own son) in Iraq. “But don’t surrender your humanity. Not to fit in. Not to prove yourself. Not for an adrenaline rush. Not to lash out when you are angry and frustrated. Not for some ticket-punching fucking military careerist to make his bones on. Especially not for the Bush-Cheney Gas & Oil Consortium.”56
In Afghanistan and Iraq, many veterans had particular difficulty coming to terms with the violence against children. Upon returning to the United States, some experienced serious difficulties in reconnecting with their own youngsters. Army Specialist Gonzalez, who as a gunner providing escort protection during Operation Iraqi Freedom had been exposed to violence on a daily basis, credits the “critical incident debriefings” held by the Army with having played a positive role. “It’s always good to talk to people,” he says with reference to the officers, chaplains, and psychologists who were available to him. Upon returning to the States, however, he found that spending time with his family provided the essential key to getting past his anger and allowing love to resurface. “It really helped me out—just being around children.” He even arranged employment at a school “where I’m around children all the time.”57
Some veterans found the transition from toughness to tenderness particularly difficult to negotiate given the prevailing ethos of military culture. Training and discipline put a premium on toughness. “There’s tough, and there’s Army tough,” proclaim the recruiting ads. Army Sgt. Bobby Lee Lisek speaks of the transformation “from green to mean in 120 days.”58 “The armed forces can train you to do things you wouldn’t normally do,” observed the father of Josh Barber, a thirty-one-year-old veteran of Iraq who haunted by the thought of “going to hell for killing an innocent Iraqi,” took his own life. “But they’ve never been able to train people how to forget.”59
Processing the soldiering experience is the goal of The Combat Paper Project based in Burlington, Vermont, where veterans use paper made from the pulp of their own uniforms to create cathartic works of art. “The goal,” explains the group’s website, “is to use art as a means to help veterans reconcile their personal experiences as well as challenge the traditional narrative surrounding service, honor, and the military culture.”60 The fact that the resulting paper also incorporates fragments from the uniforms of veterans from earlier wars underscores the universality of the combat experience and the reintegration challenge. One art critic writes that an exhibit of the group’s work “assures that people cannot look the other way from the reality of war. The truths told in these art works,” she concludes, “are not just military truths but human truths.”61 The initiative is credited with having assisted in the transition from uniform to pulp, from battlefield to workshop, from warrior to artist.
For many—family and friends as well as veterans—efforts to reclaim a sense of humanity have not had happy endings. “I got my husband back whole physically, and I think his heart is here too,” said Stacy Bannerman, “but I’m not sure about his mind. He still checks to see where his weapon is every time we get into a vehicle. Although his body is back, there is a war that rages between us. I am left to deal with the lost years of time, the lost love of my life. I want to talk with my husband about what he’s going through, but I don’t have the words. Hell, I don’t even have the questions. What’s the conversational opener to this: ‘So you inadvertently killed Iraqi children? How’s that going for you?’”62
In fact, the struggle of individuals like Carpenter to undo the ravages of PTSD has led some soldiers and health care professionals to question the nomenclature given to the illness. The experience of alarming numbers of soldiers of being “weirded out” or feeling “numbed” upon returning to the States raises a question about the “D” for “disorder” in PTSD. Carpenter’s observation that “PTSD comes from people that are in high-stress jobs within the military that have seen more than their fair share [of] combat”63 seems to be borne out by a body of evidence from the field, as examined in Chapter 10. Perhaps, as some veterans and mental health professionals suggest, the pathology is in the violence rather than in the reactions of veterans to it.
RETURNING TO THE FRAY?
The question posed by some interviewers in the Veterans History Project—“Would you go back to Afghanistan or Iraq?”—elicits responses all over the psychological map. The answers convey a great deal about soldiering in the global war on terror.
A number of veterans, often quite irrespective of their personal experience on the ground, say they would go back “in a heartbeat.” “I don’t think war is fun or glorious or anything like that,” said Army Sgt. Jeremy Lima, “but I am willing to do it again. In fact, I want to do it again. I think the military services are absolutely necessary, especially with the world as it is today.” With everyone else taking freedom and leisure for granted, Lima is prepared to put his body again on the line.64
Other veterans share the reservations of Michigan Guardsman Spec. Jeffrey Bartling, who lives, he says, in perpetual fear of being redeployed. He describes his deployment to Iraq as “a good experience to do once, but it’s not something I would like to do again.”65 A good experience, it seems, was no guarantee that a person would be willing to extend a tour or willingly return for another deployment. The comment of Mike Moriarty of the New Hampshire Guard mentioned earlier deserves recall. “I’m so glad I went. I hated it with a God-awful passion and I will not go back. I have done my part and I feel like it’s someone else’s turn.”66
The decision to return to the fray, of course, is not entirely up to veterans themselves. Although they have enlisted in an all-volunteer military, they are subject to involuntary assignments. Their tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq could be, and often were, extended beyond their planned duration or contractual obligations through “stop-loss” arrangements or other unexpected events.67 Those who completed active-duty service and transferred to the inactive Reserves also remained subject to being called up for another tour. As indicated in Chapter 1, an unusually high number of persons have been deployed more than once to Afghanistan or Iraq, some of them returning as many as three or four times.68
The reluctance that many soldiers express about returning to the front lines is understandable. More difficult to comprehend is the willingness of significant numbers to go back for another tour. Their readiness to do so reflects both “push” and “pull” factors. The continuing problems of reentry and of finding a new normal exerted something of a gravitational pull back to Afghanistan or Iraq. For some, the reality that “home” is a greater “hell” than the more obvious perils of those theaters lends an additional nudge. In addition, the more difficult the problems of reentry, the more attractive appears a return to the fray. At least on the front lines veterans had a sense of playing an essential and appreciated role on a well-functioning team.
Indeed, among the pull factors for many was the sense that for all of its dangers, deployment had been meaningful—for some, the most successful and rewarding chapter of their lives. Many had surprised themselves at what they were able to accomplish and how well they were able to function under duress. The experience for many was a “confidence builder,” observed Specialist Gamblin, “Your boundaries for human tolerance are a lot higher” than you might think. “Some people are thinking, ‘That looks really hard and disgusting and I don’t think I could ever do that,’ but if you have to, you have to. It’s all possible.”69
Many veterans took great satisfaction in how well they had performed in the most difficult of situations. Even battered Sergeant Lisek, whose multiple physical and psychological wounds are described in the following chapter, intimated that he would go back, were he able. “I loved being in the army. I put my men above everything else.” He conceded, however, that in his c
ondition, redeploying is a physical impossibility. “I know that my time is done.”70
Awareness that fellow soldiers are still in harm’s way also exerts a definite pull. Capt. Lynn Wagner, pictured in Chapter 10, who served in Iraq for ten months with the Army’s 129th Transportation Company, was diagnosed with PTSD after returning from her first tour. Two years later, however, she asked to be redeployed to Iraq. She felt “incredibly guilty” that her brother, with a wife and two young children, was returning for a second tour while she herself, a single woman, was not. She was one of those who would go back “in a heartbeat,” she told an interviewer.71
That sense of solidarity led many to express willingness to return to their duty stations. In fact, solidarity often overcame any and all lingering doubts. One reporter found that “No matter how the soldiers felt about their reasons for being in Iraq, once they got there, they were there for each other.”72 As Specialist Pickett’s experience suggests “it’s easy to go back over there. There’s always the army to fall back on.” Easy? Perhaps. However, her earlier experience had included not only withering confrontation with carnage but also a personal incident of sexual harassment.
Barracks Scene
Jeffrey Lima (AFC2001/001/53039), Photographs (PH06), VHP, AFC, LOC.
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Marine Corps Sgt. Jeremy Lima, a Hispanic American, was born in Los Angeles and later moved to Colorado. He served in the Third Marine Aircraft Wing Provisional Security Wing in Iraq, following training at Fort Bliss, Texas and Camp Pendleton, California, and a tour in Okinawa. This photograph from his Veterans History Project collection shows his unit enjoying some down-time.