The sheriff got him on the phone and said, “We’d prefer to have you come in, but if not, we are going to have to come and get you. There’s a warrant for you, okay? And your dad is here. He wants to talk to you.”
They put me on the phone, and he started on me. Oh, Jesus, it was bad—“You Judas, how could you do this to me?” I listened and I said, “Well, what are you going to do?” He says, “I’m coming in tomorrow. I got a lawyer and I’ve already got it set up.” I said, “Hang on, wait a minute. Would it be okay if I came?” There was a pause and he said, “Sure, why not.” And he hung up.
The next morning, I was there at the courthouse. He looked like a zombie, and when he came into court, he walked right up to me and kissed me on the lips. He knew what had happened, and why it happened. He knew that after that morning when he was sixteen, I would never hurt him again, and that was the difference. That was the most important moment in my life because it took someone that I adored to show me myself. What have I done to these kids all these years?
The difference between despair and hope, I think, is a flash. It could be a stranger’s smile, or somebody stopping to let you by, or just some measure of human kindness. Oscar Wilde wrote about being brought down to court and the huge crowd that gathered, a mob. He was a celebrated figure, and now he’s being publicly humiliated for being gay and so forth. He saw his lover, Bosie, in the crowd, and they made eye contact, and then Bosie turned away. Wilde wrote about it and he said the most extraordinary thing: “There had been men who did less that were allowed into heaven as an act of mercy, and you refused it to me.”
I think it’s that kind of natural—and I do think it’s natural—human expression of kindness and generosity that can make all the difference. One of the best lessons of recovery is the lesson that you need to do something for someone. Do something nice for someone, and don’t tell anybody. That’s the hardest thing, because our ego wants credit, we want people to talk about us in a good way, and I think that’s what drives away the spirit.
Einstein’s lesson, the reason he did all his work, was he wanted to know if it’s a friendly universe. That’s the bottom line of all his study—is it friendly out there? He did his work and he said yes, it is friendly, and I do believe it is. There is a future. There’s a future, but we foreclose it with our fear. I think fear is some measure of despair, fear of being human and being vulnerable. But it’s only when you allow that, when you allow yourself to be vulnerable, to get broken, even—that’s the only time the spirit can get in. It’s that thing Hemingway talks about. “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
That morning when I hit my son, I was broken. I was totally broken. I don’t know if I spoke for a week. I got very reflective. I saw myself really clearly and didn’t like what I had seen, and that was a blow to the ego. But more than that, I realized that my life was at stake and maybe the lives of my children. My spiritual life was at stake. It took a long time, but I started to make the changes I needed to make. I realized that it’s a pro cess, and my world started to change.
Whether we’re conscious or unconscious of it, the world is exactly the way it is because we made it that way, and we are equally capable of changing it. But we have to see it first. You have to realize you’re looking at the problem, you’re a part of this horrible problem. You can’t do anything until you change yourself, and you’re the only one you can change. I’ve never changed anyone. Everything I do, I do it for myself.
Max Cleland
Georgia native Max Cleland was an only child, and his childhood hero was the Lone Ranger, yet he’s lived a life of service to others. He enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War and reached the rank of captain. Four days after actions that earned him the Silver Star and the Bronze Star, a battlefield accident changed his life. After he returned home, no one would hire him. He won a seat in the Georgia State Senate and became such a strong advocate for veterans’ issues that Jimmy Carter named him head of the Veterans Administration. After Reagan took office, Max returned home and served as Georgia’s secretary of state until 1996, when he successfully ran for the U.S. Senate. In 2002 Max lost to his Republican challenger after a nasty campaign that included television ads pairing Cleland with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Since then, he’s advised other politicians, but he says he’ll never run for office again. Max’s story shows the profound power of fellowship to heal wounds of all kinds. Max is the only person in this book who doesn’t identify as an alcoholic or addict. He quit drinking in 1975 when he realized he could too easily hide behind the bottle. His story may illuminate different circumstances from the others in this book, but his struggle resonates powerfully.
T
homas Jefferson described the presidency as “a splendid misery.” That’s what politics has been for me—a splendid misery. In over forty years of public service, I’ve had powerful splendor, powerful
achievements, powerful ups and downs; and along with that, I’ve had powerful physical, mental, and emotional misery. Hemingway wrote about his war, World War I, in A Farewell to Arms, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. used a quote from the book to introduce A Thousand Days, about Kennedy’s presidency: “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good, and the very gentle, and the very brave impartially.”
Hemingway was right. The world breaks us all. If you haven’t been broken by life, just wait a while. All of us get broken one way or another, at some time or another. And many people do grow strong at the broken places, but many do not, and that’s the mystery.
How do you recover from being blown the hell up? How do you recover from losing both legs and your right arm? I was always the tallest guy in my class, and I was right-handed. I shot basketball right-handed, and I was honorable mention All-County Basketball. I batted right-handed, I threw a baseball right-handed, and I lettered four years in baseball. I was second in the state in my class in tennis singles. So running with a ball was my life. Then I joined the U.S. Army and jumped out of airplanes in airborne training. I really was feeling my oats when I was a young man. At the age of twenty-five, all that ended.*
I’m not sure how I missed becoming one of the fifty-eight thousand dead listed on the wall. There are some physical answers. I was so close to the grenade that the flesh was burned so much that I didn’t bleed to death right there. There was an immediate helicop ter medevac to the division aid station and then a field hospital where they did surgery. Five hours and five doctors and forty-two pints of blood later, I woke up.
Then came a powerful struggle, an uphill battle, clawing my way back to some sense of dignity. Struggling through days and months of not knowing what in the world I was going to do in life. Was I going to be able to walk on artificial legs? Drive a car? Was I going to be able to date or dance or anything? Nobody could tell me.
* Max was injured during the Battle of Khe Sanh. He’d just disembarked from a helicop ter on a mission to set up a radio relay station. He bent down to pick up a grenade he assumed had dropped off his flak jacket. The grenade exploded, destroying his lower legs and right arm. Thirty years later, one of the men who’d been on the scene revealed that the grenade had belonged to another of the soldiers on the helicop ter, a young private who’d loosened the grenade pins on his own flak jacket.
All my life I’ve had fixed goals, stars to steer by. I’ve had worthy things to do—serve my country, join in the military, become an officer, go to jump school, volunteer for Vietnam, whatever. When I came back, I focused all that into a different kind of service by running for office and serving in government. I wanted to be proud of myself, and I wanted other people to be proud of me too. I tried to live a good life. I tried to do well, and do good.
When I lost that election in 2002, I went into a massive depression, a deep
misery. I had never struggled with my own emotional health, my own mental capacity, my ability to think and make decisions. But that was gone. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t function mentally anymore, and I had always depended on my mind to bail me out. I wound up before a psychiatrist and counselors, and they started talking to me about brain chemicals. Recovering from this meant I had to do stuff I had never done before in my entire life. I was on all kinds of medication, which I had never experienced before in my life. I was struggling to recover my sense of self, my sense of identity and all that. It’s one thing to recover physically. It’s another thing to recover from absolute total hopelessness and despair.
I felt like my life had been worthless. Going to Vietnam had ended in a terrible tragedy—for me and for the country. Then, thirty years of politics ended for me with a massive, sudden-death experience on election night. I was thrown out of office and on the street and back again where I was before—no money, no future, no hope.
That loss triggered the initial experience of life blowing up in my face, instantly. I felt again the sense of being totally helpless and totally vulnerable. That fear is lodged in the base of my brain. My body knows it. I know it. That’s my greatest source of panic and anxiety. Fighting that kind of deep fear has its own consequences. It sucks up all the brain chemicals that make you feel good and comfortable and let you have fun. I dropped like a rock because of massive anxiety and fear.
I’m coming out of it by the grace of God and the help of friends. I’m working through it. I have been broken every way you can be broken. But I’m still here. I’m still alive. That’s the mystery and the miracle. Somehow, life can heal us—if we allow it to, and if we live that long. God can heal us. A power greater than myself helped restore me to health and some sense of sanity. The Good Lord pulled me out of my pit rather than me pushing my way out. Now my job is to try to show up and be still and try to be led.
I realized in 1975 that alcohol and I were never going to mix. I was dating an alcoholic, and it caused me so much pain to see somebody I cared for in this out-of-control situation. I had never known anybody who just couldn’t control their drinking. God knows, I’ve been in the military, and I knew what getting drunk was. I knew what raising hell was. I had done it. I knew that I myself could become an alcoholic. But in 1975 I realized I didn’t want any part of alcohol, ever again. I quit drinking. I’ve had to fight so hard for a life of dignity and respect; fight so hard to function as a “normal” human being—have a job, drive a car, live independently, communicate with people, function and be relevant in society. All that has taken powerful amounts of energy and struggle. I think I knew I wouldn’t have enough energy to fight alcohol and my normal battles too. I had to let that go.
Viktor Frankl was an eminent psychiatrist in Vienna who was sent to concentration camps in World War II. Talk about odds—he was the one in twenty-eight that survived. He came out of that experience and he wrote about what he saw, saying, “To live is to suffer. To survive is to find meaning in suffering.” The book is called Man’s Search for Meaning, and that’s what life itself is—man’s search for meaning, for purpose and direction and guidance. My toughest times in life are when I don’t have a sense of purpose, when I don’t have clarity, when the lights go out.
Now I’ve come to a point that I’ve never been at before. I believe that whatever happens in the future is okay. I’ve literally turned it over, as they say, to the Good Lord, to the universe. That’s surrender, which always has been tough for me because I’ve tried to control things in order to have a sense of what my trauma counselor calls SOS—safety, organization, and stability. I need safety, or ganization, and stability in my work environment, in the people around me, in my circumstances in life. If I don’t have that, I’m right back in Vietnam. I’m right back blown the hell up, fighting for my life and fighting for every breath.
But now . . . whatever happens, happens. I’m not trying to control everything anymore. My goals are more fundamental. I’m trying to get some serenity and sense of peace in the mornings so that I can handle the day and function and function well. I just try to turn the rest over to my higher power, the Good Lord or what ever.
When you go through trauma, one of the brain chemicals that’s affected is dopamine, which is one of the feel- good chemicals in the brain. When you’ve been on alert too long, on adrenaline overload, you’re low on dopamine. A swig of whisky, a shot of a drug, and you feel better until you need the next swig or the next shot. When you’re facing the aftermath of trauma, it’s easy to start down the slippery slope of self-medication. If you have PTSD, the trauma has happened and now it’s over, but your body doesn’t know it’s over. Your brain chemicals are messed up from the high adrenaline levels, from being always on the alert, fighting for your life.
I created the Vet Center program in 1980 to deal with the emotional aftermath of war for the veterans returned from Vietnam. Today, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are swamping the VA’s two hundred vet centers. The divorce rate among U.S. Army officers has more than doubled. Physical abuse among military families is dramatically on the increase. So are suicides. Being at war for so long is taking a tremendous toll on families. Even if the soldier comes back from war uninjured, they come back a different person. They’ve still got the same body, still got the same name, but they are different. They don’t know how they’re different, but they know they’ve changed, and their spouse knows they’ve changed. Many times it’s the spouse that gets this soldier into treatment. One of the guys who saved me on the battlefield forty years ago and who now is a counselor in a vet center has told me that if you can get the soldier struggling with PTSD off the drugs and off the alcohol, they can survive. Otherwise, the situation is not good. This is deadly serious stuff, not to be toyed with.
I look at the slippery slopes I’ve been down, on the battlefield and on the political battlefield. I’ve been blown up on both. I truly am lucky to be here, and I know I didn’t get here on my own. I needed the powerful help of others then, and I need the help of others now just to survive day to day. And where that takes me, I don’t know. That’s the surrender part of it, letting go of the outcomes. I’ve always worked my rear end off to either achieve the goal I set for myself or die trying. Now I don’t have any goals other than to try to get more sane and more stable and to look after myself better and look after my daddy, my only living blood relative left.
A friend of mine, a doctor, is fond of saying, “Circumstances create depression. Chemicals perpetuate it.” You’ve got to get your brain chemicals and your life balanced right. That’s my day-to-day struggle now: not to achieve some goal in the future but to survive well today. I’ve done a turnaround in what’s important to me. I’ve had to find new coping skills. It’s been a long road back. A fellow Vietnam veteran who’s also a counselor says, “People put their lives back together brick by brick by brick.” That’s what I’ve been doing. It’s clarity, not so much in one bright shining moment, but clarity that comes slowly the way the dawn comes or the fog lifts.
You can’t give others assurance unless you’ve had a little of it yourself. I have a wonderful group in Washington, a fellowship of people whose lives have crashed and burned. Some are there for alcohol problems. Some are there for drug problems. Some are there for depression problems. Some are there for life problems—loss of a family member, where their grief is just taking them over. But all of us in that room have been powerfully successful. Admirals, generals, senators, congressmen, highly achievement-oriented, highly accomplished individuals. However, back to Hemingway’s line, “the world breaks everyone.” These people, my brothers, we’ve all been shipwrecked. We all want to get back home; in order to recover, we all work to get better together, get stronger together. We do it by reaching out to others. We hold hands firmly and pray that we’re going to make it to the shore. That’s the power of the group.
Tom Daschle had a good line about when he came to the U.S. Congress, as a fr
eshman from South Dakota. He went to talk to Claude Pepper, a House leader from Florida and an eminent fighter for health care. Claude sat Tom down, as older members of Congress will do when you’re a young whippersnapper, and Claude said, “Son, there are two types of people on Capitol Hill, and they’re not Rs and Ds, Republicans and Demo crats. They’re Cs and Ds, Constructive and Destructive.”
I think that’s the demarcation, not just in Congress and the Senate but in life. That’s the plumb line. If you try to live a constructive life, for you and for others, you’ll be on the right side, the correct side of the aisle. And if you get on the destructive side . . . well, make amends for it as best you can, and fight your way back to the constructive side.
My grandfather used to say, “If somebody gets up in church and prays extra long, go home and lock the smoke house door.” Good thought. When my grandmother got criticized for not doing enough in the church, she pointed out that the Bible says, “Let your light shine,” not make it shine. So now I have to work a little bit harder to let my light shine, which is a paradox. I just do the best I can to tend my light. When and where it shines is going to be up to the Good Lord, not up to me. And that’s a relief.
There’s great power in peer- group counseling, or what they generally call support groups. Somebody who’s walked in your moccasins can talk to you in a way that’s credible. I remember lying there at Walter Reed, and people would walk in with two legs and two arms and pat me on the head and say, “You’re going to be fine,” and then they’d walk out. I’d say, “What the hell do you know?”
When I saw a double-leg above-the-knee amputee walking on artificial limbs with a beautiful woman on his arm, I thought, “Son of a bitch. If he can do it, I can do it.” He became kind of a mentor long before I knew all of these terms—support group, therapy, mentoring. Long before I knew any of that, I was thinking, “I’m pretty screwed up here. Is there anybody else in my situation who’s done well with their life, who’s making it? If so, I’ll make it. If they can do it, I’ll do it. I will do it.” When I saw that guy, that World War II veteran with this beautiful woman, that gave me hope. That gave me strength.
Moments of Clarity Page 30