Those we sent to war are coming home, and we as a society, having embraced them as our best and brightest, are discovering that there is something wrong. The boy – and with increasing frequency, the girl – next door who looked so sharp in their dress uniforms upon graduation from basic training, have returned from war. Some of them bear the physical consequences of that experience, having been wounded or injured. As a society we have developed a coping mechanism for these damaged or ruined bodies, telling ourselves that what they did was honorable, and these are the sacrifices upon which our nation’s freedoms and liberties are built. But having so freely embraced the concept of service to country in supporting and admiring from afar those who wear the uniform of the United States Armed Forces, we behold our troops with idealized honor and dignity when, because of the horrors of war, such qualities may no longer exist in them. Or if they do exist, they are tainted by the depravity of combat.
War is a force without reason or comprehension. Unless you’ve been there, it is difficult (and perhaps impossible) to fully explain. It is a primal energy driven by a mixture of fear and anger that results in behavior not accepted in normal society. We have police patrolling the toughest streets in America today. They are engaged in actions that oftentimes replicate combat. But there is a framework of law and societal structures which governs how the police operate, and it is recognized that if an officer is called upon to discharge his or her weapon in the course of their duties, it is an abnormal action. The officer in question is pulled off line, and the incident is fully investigated. The entire police force is conditioned to understand that shooting a fellow human being, even if justified under criminal law, is bad. The mindset that exists when a police officer pulls the trigger has to be examined (and is examined) by psychologists who are looking to see if what occurred was a conditioned response, or if the officer had succumbed to the more animalistic urges that rise up in people placed in a life or death situation. Police psychologists are on guard, because they know that the human being can learn to love to kill. The psychologists are also on watch for other patterns of behavior which emerge in the aftermath of a shooting, the self-destructive forces that take over when a person has been confronted with a situation, like a shooting or stabbing (or abuse, or worse) which has stuck in their minds and won’t leave, no matter how much beer you drink, how many drugs you use, or how many people you beat up in frustration.
The police analogy, while accurate, doesn’t resonate with most of society, because most of society has no clue about what it means to be a police officer and deal with the dregs of society on a daily basis. And because society associates the police with things of a negative nature (i.e., being ticketed for going 38 in a 35 mph zone), we don’t ordinarily identify – physically or psychologically – with police.
On the other hand, we love our firefighters. When we need help, they arrive, whether to provide emergency medical assistance, or to pull us out of a car wreck, or to put out the fires that threaten our lives, our homes and our work. Because we associate firefighters with “doing good,” we are more inclined to view ourselves as one with the firefighters. We all believe, in our hearts, that we are capable of doing “good.” (Full disclosure: For the past eight years I have had the honor of serving my community as a firefighter, the last three as a fire officer.)
But we also recognize fire as a destructive force, and know that, on occasion, bad things happen to those firefighters we send in to protect us. Firefighters are killed and injured on the job. And firefighters see some fairly horrible things, and feel the frustration of not having been able to save some people they thought could have been saved. Two things emerge from this. First, we can identify with the firefighters because we associate the work they do with positive emotion, even though it often involves very negative events. And because we can associate with the firefighters, we understand when a firefighter needs help because of what he or she has experienced. After each response where something traumatic has occurred, firefighters go through a mandatory Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, where they are encouraged to talk about what happened, and if needed, seek assistance without prejudice.
Each fire department is mandated to have in place an employee assistance plan, which provides a safety net of support programs to help firefighters deal with the myriad of problems that might arise because of stress derived from work, whether with substance abuse, family matters, or even financial issues. This process is made easier because of the brotherhood (and sisterhood) of shared experience among firefighters, and the bond firefighters share with society. There is a support network in place. If a firefighter is injured, his or her fellow firefighters will step in and help in any way possible. If a firefighter dies in the line of duty, his or her family will be looked after by fellow firefighters. “Gone but not forgotten” is not a phrase lightly used in the fire service.
But what if firefighting wasn’t so accepted by society or by those who engage in it? As firefighters, we are always told, in the aftermath of a particularly bad scene, “You didn’t set that fire” or “You didn’t cause that accident.” We cope with the horrors of what we experience by reminding ourselves that our job is to provide assistance to those in need, and if someone doesn’t make it, we are not to be blamed.
This would all change if we were responsible for the tragedies we responded to. What if, as a department, we set those houses on fire, we caused those cars to crash into one another, or we made those people sick? What if each morning we went to work, and our bosses handed out a list of assignments which made fire, death and disease a part of our daily existence, not as an emergency responder, but rather as those who delivered these horrors as part of our daily job? Society might not be so supportive of our work if they knew that the family we rescued from a burning structure was in that predicament because we had deliberately set their house on fire. Or we went about cutting the brake lines of cars during the night, just to watch them crash during the day. Our efforts to provide emergency care to those mangled in the resulting wrecks would not seen so noble. Society would not be so inclined to embrace us, and we would not be so inclined to celebrate ourselves.
This is the experience of the average soldier, sailor, airman or Marine who comes home from war. They set those buildings on fire. They caused those cars to crash. They made those people sick. Not because they are arsonists or murderers by nature, but because they were at war, and that is what war brings — the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
I attended a federally sponsored firefighting school, part of a curriculum that dealt with “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) and the need to recognize its symptoms as well as deal with its consequences. The presenter, an academic with a laundry list of impressive credentials, had never served in the military or as a firefighter. Her presentation did not resonate among the audience. When she tried to draw an analogy between PTSD in the fire service and the military, I objected. “As a fire officer, I am not trained to embrace the notion of sending my firefighters into a building to die, or to terminate the occupants,” I responded. “We are trained to avoid taking unnecessary risks, and that there is nothing going on at a fire scene worth the willing sacrifice of our lives. We may die or get injured, but that is the exception, not the rule. As an Officer of Marines, I was trained to be prepared to give orders which would knowingly result in my Marines being killed or wounded, and in their knowingly taking human life. There is a world of difference between these two worlds, and the PTSD derived from each is not even comparable.”
She didn’t get it. Most Americans don’t get it either, because what we ask of our military is so far removed from what we can comprehend as normal life. War is the most destructive force known to man, because it involves humans willingly and wantonly killing other humans. War destroys the body, and even worse, war destroys the mind.
I have been fortunate to have only had to respond to a handful of fatal incidents in my time as a firefighter. They were all traumatic. I think of them to this day. But I am able to separate these memories from my daily existence because they were so infrequent, and because I can understand that they were not part of my “normal” life experience. The same can be said about what I experienced in 1991. My war experience was thankfully brief, and equally void of the kind of day-to-day violence modern war generates.
But what if I spent 365 days a year pulling dead teenagers out of wrecked vehicles that I myself caused to crash, or worse, spent 365 days straight patrolling the streets of a foreign, hostile land where people were trying to kill me, and I was trying to kill them? Where I stopped seeing the humans in my life as my equals, or even as humans. Where I viewed them as less than human, as animals. Where I learned to hate, and where I took my hatred out on these less-than-human figures, either by intimidating them, beating them, torturing them, or killing them. These memories could not so easily be set aside. They would not be the exception to my mental state, but rather the norm.
Everyone who serves in the military during a time of war has such memories. Mine are thankfully few in number. Others have their heads so full of these memories that there is no room for normal thoughts to intrude. All others operate on a sliding scale dictated by the frequency and intensity of their given set of experiences. We all have post-traumatic stress. And unlike the fire service, we don’t have a safety net there to protect and assist us in our time of need. The military is reluctant to admit it broke us, because that does not make for a good recruiting posture (“Send us your sons and daughters, and we will return them an empty shell of what they once were.”). Society, having imbued so much honor and dignity to the concept of military service (“Aren’t you so proud of your son/daughter, brother/sister, husband/wife, for serving their country?”), refuses to acknowledge that returning warriors may feel there was little or nothing honorable about their tours of duty. To them it was more about simply surviving, and now it is about trying to square the reality of the horror they experienced “over there” with the artificial expectations of glory society wants to hear about “back here.”
You can talk about building schools and helping bring about democratic elections only so much before the memory of the quick movement to your left which caused you to fire three rounds center mass into a mother who was upset because your buddy was beating her son with his rifle butt intrudes. Or you are forced to reflect on the fact that, in your effort to get the “bad guy,” you authorized the bombing of five buildings that turned out to be private homes. And that because we fight at night, the families were at home, sleeping, when you terminated their existence with a laser-guided 2,000 pound bomb. These are thoughts that stick with you for a lifetime, and no amount of talking about the “good” or “just” nature of war will make them go away.
We send Johnny and Jane off to war, fighting in conflicts we neither understand nor bother to comprehend. We support the war because it is the patriotic thing to do, and we use our patriotic embrace of war as an excuse to cover those who fight in war with the mantle of patriotic service. We create an all-too-convenient fiction to shield us from the reality of what is being done in our name, not only to the people we are fighting, but those we send to fight. And when Johnny and Jane come marching home, we give them a healthy welcome, a “hurrah” for their service, and then we want them to go away, only to be brought out on those days our society sets aside to parade them about like the toy soldiers we view them as. We see the uniforms, we see the medals, and we vicariously experience the thrill of the experiences that generated them. But too few of us look into the eyes of those wearing these uniforms, and dig deep into their minds. Because if we did, we would not like what we see. Johnny and Jane are sick. They are broken. They need help.
War is a force that impacts everyone who fights. There are no percentages that apply, other than 100 percent. Everybody we send off to fight in a war suffers from post-traumatic stress in one form or another, just like 100 percent of the firefighters who pull out a family that perished in a fire they were trying to extinguish suffer from post-traumatic stress. Some suffer with symptoms that are more severe than others. Events impact an individual in different ways, so that six people experiencing the same horror will have six different experiences in coping with it. We know this about our firefighters, and we accept it and we deal with it.
Having post-traumatic stress doesn’t mean you can’t function effectively in society. I have post-traumatic stress. And I will submit that everyone I know who ever served in the military in a time of war has post-traumatic stress. We just have different degrees of it. We each build coping mechanisms to deal with it. But it is there. Post-traumatic stress is a reality. And it won’t go away, no matter how hard society tries to ignore it. For the most part we learn to deal with it. But what happens when we can’t? If today I decided that, because of something I experienced in my service as a firefighter, I was in trouble and needed help, there are any number of venues I can turn to for assistance that are confidential and effective. It is high time we extend the same courtesy to those who serve our nation in a time of war.