Trauma destroys the normal narrative of life, and trying to put the pieces together into a story is, in many ways, the ultimate act of healing, the way we know that a certain perspective has been achieved. Some artificial intelligence researchers even think that this ability to create and learn from stories is what ultimately divides us from machines. One Iraq veteran I spoke to, who refuses to do traditional talk therapy but maintains an online blog, told me, “EMDR helped a little bit but there was a phase I went through where I just didn’t want to let go of the memories, I didn’t know how to describe it, really, but I was afraid I would forget, so I tried to write it down. Writing has been great because I’m not saying it, I’m writing it and by writing it out, I’ve been able to say things in the blog that I’ve never said out loud to people. It’s easier because it’s a bunch of people that I can’t see. I don’t have to see them every day. I just said to myself, ‘I’m gonna get it up, and then it’ll be out of my head.’”
I can’t say that writing has ever helped me put something out of my head, in the way it did for Ford Madox Ford, but it has helped me to better understand my life. Writing is a form of concentrated thinking, a type of directed meditation, and it can serve as a powerful way of reclaiming and asserting control over one’s past, of locating and processing emotions in a way that risks no embarrassment or shame. The act of writing, especially of putting pen to paper, has always had a sacred quality. The process by which one creates a paragraph—of conceptualizing, framing, and sequencing a moment in time—is the same process that governs some of the most sophisticated psychotherapies.
Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, argues for something similar to this in his book Strangers to Ourselves. Wilson thinks emotional learning takes place when we step back and look at our lives almost as a literary critic might, placing each incident in the larger sweep of narrative. Wilson writes that “the point is that we should not analyze the information [about our feelings] in an overly deliberate, conscious manner, constantly making explicit lists of pluses and minuses. We should let our adaptive unconscious do the job of finding reliable feelings and then trust those feelings, even if we cannot explain them entirely.”
One of my personal favorite therapies for combat PTSD comes from New Zealand. An ancient tradition within Polynesian cultures, the haka was originally an ancestral war cry performed before battle. Designed to intimidate the enemy, in recent times the rite has been adopted by Kiwi sports teams like the “All Blacks” rugby squad as well as by the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment. The regimental haka is performed at a number of ceremonial occasions, including funeral services, sometimes beginning as the casket of a fallen soldier is borne toward the gravesite. The dance, as it is typically interpreted, involves making a set of intense facial gestures, slapping the thighs, and stomping the feet, all while yelling a fierce Maori war cry. Sometimes, a new chant will be written by a member of the regiment to commemorate the end of a long deployment or the return of a unit from combat.
As a tool to aid the work of mourning, the haka seems incredibly powerful and cathartic to me. The footage I’ve seen of the regimental haka is beautiful and moving. I have never been to New Zealand, but the literature on the ritual suggests that it allows people to honor the dead in a dramatic and emotionally resonant manner that provides a kind of closure and marks the passage from the realm of war to the realm of peace. In North America, we have no rituals governing the return of warriors from battle, nor do we have any traditions to guide survivors of trauma back into society. Instead, we leave them in a state of liminality, home from the horror but in body only, and sometimes not even that. This perhaps helps explain why the PTSD diagnosis is so popular—it’s a medical concept that serves (however crudely) a deeper mythic need.
Rituals are difficult to invent, and invented rituals are nearly impossible to pull off with any kind of authenticity. Still, it can be done. In the mid-nineties, a group of clinicians at the VA in West Haven, Connecticut, led by David Read Johnson, began experimenting with rituals as therapy. The technique involved a symbolic reenactment of the departure of the veterans from the family with a series of church-like call-and-response readings. A subsequent ceremony to honor the dead involved the veterans, families, and the VA staff. According to a paper published by Johnson in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, the response by veterans and their families was very positive, with all of the family members who attended rating it as “extremely helpful.”
Sometimes I think that half of combat PTSD in America would disappear overnight if we required citizens to take a more active role in both war-making and welcoming warriors home. If there’s a national security measure we need to pass, maybe it’s one that forces citizens to be directly involved in the war effort, either by reinstating the draft or by making VA employment a form of national service. I firmly believe that the lack of ritual and authentic public engagement in the war-making process is a major cause of PTSD and, paradoxically, a justification for it as a diagnostic category. One unusually thoughtful therapist I interviewed went so far as to describe the advent of PTSD as a kind of mitzvah by Americans for veterans, a way of making amends for all the wars we send them to.
The industrialization of war is a relatively new phenomenon, and no other country sends as many men and women overseas to kill as we do. No other people in history has sent as many as far away with as little sacrifice demanded of the average citizen as we do. No other people in history is as disconnected from the brutality of war as the United States today. Were the truth of war to become apparent to Americans, we wouldn’t continue to train, equip, and deploy warriors the way we do. Nor would we ask them when they came home if they killed anyone.
9
GROWTH
THE CLOSEST Steve House has come to the other side, the time when death was most imminent, wasn’t the time he climbed K7, a fearsome 22,770-foot peak in Pakistan’s Karakoram Range, alone with a pack that weighed just seven pounds, nor was it the time when he and two other climbers got lost halfway up Denali with no tent, sleeping bags, or other overnight gear. Rather, it was on the north face of Mount Temple, a minor peak in Canada’s Banff National Park that is regularly climbed by tourists using a popular foot trail. In 2010, House was leading a route up the 11,627-foot mountain when a piece of rock came loose beneath him. “As I fell, I was relaxed at first. A flake had broken, not all that unexpected considering the incredibly bad rock quality on Mount Temple. Then the [protective] gear started pinging out of the partially decomposed limestone. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . the fifth piece, a large cam in a solid, but flaring, pocket of rock almost held me. But it too ripped as the rope started to slow my descent. The sudden jolting free-fall flipped me upside down and I crashed my right side into something hard, something painful, and was spun around again when I finally came to a stop half-sideways eighty feet lower than where I’d started.”
As House later explained, “I was on a sloping snow ledge with Bruce [his partner, Bruce Miller] just twenty-five feet to my right. What probably held me was a groove in a snow-mushroom that I’d stamped out with a boot.”
One of the world’s premier alpinists, House knew better than most that the mountains possess a unique ability to foil even the best-laid plans, transforming the most casual outing into a catalogue of horrors, but to die like this would be absurd. Assessing the situation, he quickly discovered that he’d broken several ribs, his pelvis, and was having trouble breathing. Between clenched breaths, he called over to Miller and told him to get out his cell phone and see if he could call 911. Deep down, House knew that he was in trouble. He figured that a rescue helicopter could probably get close to where he was, but the clock was ticking. “My chest hurt like hell and I knew I didn’t have all day. I couldn’t really move, so if the pilot came in and wasn’t able to get to me, I knew that I was going to die.”
As it happens, Steve House is my cousin. Growing up, our families spent summers backpacking together
in the mountains of Eastern Oregon. My cousin “Stevie” had always been strong and a committed athlete, but something seemed to happen after he graduated from high school and went off to college. His junior year at Evergreen State, he decided to study abroad in Slovenia, immersing himself in the vibrant climbing club culture there, eventually taking part in several major climbs, including an ascent of Triglav, Slovenia’s highest peak.
When I finally caught up with him years later, it was like the story they used to tell about bluesman Robert Johnson going out to the crossroads and making a deal with the devil, trading his soul for mastery of the guitar. Steve wasn’t “Stevie” anymore, nor was he a mere mortal once his feet touched granite. During the years I was sweating my way up the hills of Camp Pendleton, Steve was working his way up the loftiest peaks of the Himalayas and steadily rising in mountaineering’s ranks as a leading proponent of a “fast and light” school of climbing, a philosophy that held that the less gear carried, the better. A man held in awe by the best in the sport, during the 1990s, other climbers began half-jokingly referring to him as the “Great White Hope” of North American alpinism.
House’s crowning achievement came in September 2005, when he and his partner Vince Anderson scaled Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth highest mountain, via the Rupal Face, an imposing and famously deadly formation considered to be the largest mountain wall in the world. Unencumbered by the heavy loads most climbers carry, the two battled up the mountain’s snowy face in a little over six days. The ascent, completed without the aid of a support crew or supplemental oxygen, won the pair the Piolet d’Or, mountaineering’s highest honor. Describing his time on the summit, House said, “The only thing I can compare it to is being on the moon. You look out and the sky isn’t blue anymore, it’s black because you’re so high up. You can see the curve of the earth. You look down and you can see thunderstorms happening ten thousand feet below you. We hadn’t spoken to anyone else in almost a week. It felt like we were the only two people in the world.”
While House considers the ascent of Nanga Parbat to be his greatest accomplishment, it was his accident on Mount Temple that would prove to be the greater turning point in his life. Talking about it years later, it was as if the peaks represented the two crucibles of his life: one was a pinnacle of outward achievement and social recognition, the other a dark buttress of fear and regret.
Trapped on the flank of Mount Temple and in great pain, House began to take stock of his situation. He could tell he’d broken some ribs. Breathing was difficult. It was all he could do to take “tiny, shallow baby breaths.” He couldn’t move. After yelling at Miller to call 911, House spent the next ten minutes trying to crawl toward him. Eventually, he was able to reach his partner but not before his right lung collapsed. Fortunately, help was on the way: a helicopter was being dispatched from nearby Canmore, though it would be a while before the rescue wardens, who were located in the town of Banff, were assembled and loaded onto the aircraft. As he explained to me years later, “The most traumatic thing, the thing I think about the most is lying there, waiting on that ledge for the helicopter.”
As W. H. R. Rivers noted shortly after World War I, immobility, powerlessness in the face of death, is often what most vexes the psyche. House was on the ledge for a long time. Looking back on it, he recalls the hours trapped on that tiny shelf of snow and ice as a time of life-altering insight. Mulling the prospect of his own demise, he began to take stock of his life, noting patterns that had seemingly been invisible before, hidden by the daily rush of events.
For most of his adult life, he had lived by the simplest of codes: to climb the greatest mountains in the world with as little baggage as possible, stripping everything away until only the absolute essentials remained—the climber, the mountain, and a few pieces of gear. It was an ethos, he saw, that had come to dominate his personal life as well, a simple unwillingness to allow either his own feelings or other “flatland” concerns to get in the way of the summit. In his zeal to climb, to explore the radical topography of the heights, to take part in what British mountaineer George Mallory called the “struggle of life itself upward and forever upward,” he had neglected the life below. “On the ledge, when I thought back on my life and all the climbing I’d done, I felt really good about that. I hadn’t done everything I wanted to, certainly, but I realized that I had done a lot and I was pretty happy about that. But there were other parts of my life where I saw that I hadn’t done everything I wanted to. I realized that the relationship I was in was not what I wanted. I knew it wasn’t healthy. And I thought about my sister and my family and I realized that I never really felt like I had been part of a family since I left home to go to college. So I was like, yeah, I want to have that, I want to be a part of nurturing a family of my own and seeing it through.”
On the ledge, House began thinking about his climbing career as well. “After Nanga Parbat, part of me was just done. And it’s hard because climbing as a sport doesn’t really have a way to retire. It doesn’t have that model. It’s not competitive like cycling or other sports, so most climbers, as they get older, don’t really retire, they just climb until they can’t walk anymore and that’s partly what’s beautiful about it but I realized that I had been banging my head against the wall trying to recapture the feeling I had gotten from Nanga and no climb was going to give me that.”
Finally, after two hours on the side of the mountain, the rescue helicopter arrived. After a quick survey of the scene, the helicopter drew closer and lowered a rescue warden. Dangling at the end of a line was a mountaineer House had climbed with a few years before. “Hey, Steve, it’s Steve Holeczi, everything’s gonna be okay,” he said.
“When he called out to me like that, I felt this huge wave of relief. I knew I was going to be okay.” A few hours later, House was in a hospital in Banff. A week after that, he was flown to a hospital near his home in Central Oregon. It would take months of physical therapy, but eventually he would begin climbing again. During his recovery, he kept a journal, as he did on all of his expeditions, trying to make sense out of what had happened. “It was hard when I was on painkillers and most of my journal entries were like two and a half sentences long.”
Ruminating for months, House saw that his life had been changed. “The accident basically recalibrated everything about my life,” he told me. “It recalibrated my value system. I felt like, ‘Okay, this huge thing happened and rather than fight it, I’m gonna let it change my life, in fact, I’m gonna help it change my life. I’m gonna use the momentum of this event to fix things that I think are wrong and try to create things that will take me in a better direction.’”
In the wake of the accident, Steve House embarked on what amounted to a new life. After a long, painful process, he ended his relationship with his long-time girlfriend and relocated to Colorado, a move his climbing partner Vince Anderson had been urging for years. Shortly after arriving in Colorado, he met and fell in love with an Austrian woman. “That was one thing that took me by surprise,” he confessed. “Eva was the perfect thing to come into my life, but I didn’t expect her so quickly! I felt like I made the space for that inside, I understood what it was that I wanted and needed and she appeared almost instantly, within weeks. That was very reaffirming. I felt like okay, I made the right choice.”
In 2011, the two were married on a gorgeous stretch of the Oregon coast. A year later, he and Eva founded Alpine Mentors, a nonprofit organization that helps train aspiring alpinists, based on the European apprenticeship model that House had experienced in Slovenia. Inspired by the alpine club culture he’d seen and the older climbers who took notice of him when he was an up-and-coming alpinist, he looks at the group as his way of giving back to the climbing community. “It’s less about the trips that we take than about the relationships we help create,” he explains. Climbing remains the organizing principle of his life—as he puts it, “I still believe in climbing. I still believe that mountaineering is an incredible way to know yourself�
��—but House’s career has more of a service orientation to it now, in marked contrast to his earlier years as a climber, almost as if he has reached the end of one ambition and taken on another.
The idea that positive change can come from suffering is not new. Humans have long been inspired by the notion that greater perspective, even transcendence, can result from loss and privation. The Caribou shaman Igjugarjuk once said, “All true wisdom is only to be learned far from the dwellings of men, out in the great solitudes; and is only to be attained through suffering. Privation and suffering are the only things that can open the mind of man to those things which are hidden from others.” A number of world religions are built upon this idea. The core principle of Buddhism is that suffering is at the heart of human existence, a fact embodied by its founder, Siddhartha Gautama, a Nepalese prince who renounced wealth and comfort in order to seek enlightenment. Could he have found enlightenment by some other, less painful method? Perhaps. But there is something about intense suffering and rising above, even repudiating, the needs of the body that can lead to a heightened state of awareness. The philosophy of the ancient world is similarly rife with thinkers who saw misfortune as one of nature’s great teachers. Epictetus, the first-century Stoic philosopher and onetime slave, advised, “On the occasion of every accident that befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and inquire what power you have for turning it to use.”
Across the ages, societies have looked to the mystic wanderer or the prophetic martyr who emerges from the desert or the prison cell for their deepest moral insights. The list of wisdom-bearing sufferers is so long and consistent across time as to constitute an archetype. The life stories of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Gandhi, T. E. Lawrence, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela are all built around this theme. Joseph Campbell, in his influential tome The Hero with a Thousand Faces, created a vast world-encompassing theory of human myth based on this idea of a hero being drawn into the wilderness, stripped of his worldly accoutrements, transformed, and then, finally, returned to society as a wise champion. More recently, novelist Ha Jin, reflecting on this daunting theme of wisdom wrought by pain, wrote, “Some great men and women are fortified and redeemed through their suffering, and they even seek sadness instead of happiness, just as Van Gogh asserted, ‘Sorrow is better than joy,’ and Balzac declared, ‘Suffering is one’s teacher.’ But these dicta are suitable only for extraordinary souls, the select few. For ordinary people like us, too much suffering can only make us meaner, crazier, pettier, and more wretched.”
The Evil Hours Page 30