Trauma, Coping and Parenting 10:29 AM

In which Justin starts talking about PTSD and ends up talking about parenting… yeah, you’ve been warned.

The other day I read an interesting blog post by mil-fantasy author and Coast Guard veteran Myke Cole regarding PTSD. In the post, Coyle challenges the classical violent nightmares/flashbacks/delusions perception of PTSD. He posits that PTSD isn’t as much a somehow curable disorder, but rather a world view that results from experiencing elevated danger for extended periods of time, or abuse, or excessive hardship, etc. For those of you interested you can find it on his blog here: http://mykecole.com/category/blog

I’ve been wrestling with the notion of PTSD since it started garnering significant public attention early in the war. Like most veterans, I know many fine soldiers, courageous, switched on, bad ass motherfuckers, who have needed help dealing with the stresses of not just combat but multiple 12-15 month tours away from their families. Unfortunately, I know many more irresponsible and spoiled overgrown children who end up in trouble due to their own weakness of character. Yet these individuals are often the first to claim they have been traumatized by the Army, even without having experienced combat, or having had only one relatively tame deployment. Keep in mind that just because one deploys does not mean one experiences combat trauma, mentally or physically. I can actually count the times I felt I was in immediate danger without exhausting my fingers; the number of experiences I would consider actual combat are even fewer. There are soldiers out there who spent months in the shit, but a lot more who spent months on the FOB punctuated by a couple hairy days, and still more who ain’t ever seen the elephant at all.

Naturally, one type of patient garners my sympathy more readily than the other. I’m told by a psychologist friend that I shouldn’t judge, that stresses affect different individuals differently and I can’t know what goes on in someone else’s head. Logical, but speaking as an officer, we can’t have soldiers who crumble at the first major stress. And, as a soldier, I have a hard time respecting someone who succumbs to pressure too easily- what constitutes too easily? Well, as a Supreme Court justice once said famously, I know it when I see it.

As an aside, I’m addressing the form of trauma with which I’m most familiar. I know there are countless legitimate tragedies that could cause a person PTSD that have nothing to do with combat. I’m not seeking to discount any of these and, in fact, I’m trying to be respectful by staying on a topic I know something about rather than offering dime store psychoanalysis for traumas I’ve never suffered.

There are many comrades who have had a rougher go of it than I have. Some were maimed, some suffered impairing brain injury, some witnessed legitimate horrors and some never came home at all. Whenever this topic comes up I always feel the need to establish up front that I got off light. I’m still converting oxygen to carbon dioxide, I still have all appendages where they are supposed to be and I’m still making babies with Michele, all of which constitutes a not so minor miracle. I do not feel sorry for myself in the least.

But I did suffer significant trauma; bad enough that I was in the hospital for a month and in physical therapy for a year. By societal expectation, I should be a ticking time bomb, ready to snap on friend or foe alike. I should at least be on a steady cocktail of mood enhancers or anti-depressants or whatever. Yet, I’ve never felt the need. It’s not that I don’t get angry and sad over everything that’s happened in the war, I do. And I feel irrationally guilty as hell every day of my life that two good men are dead and I, after all the dust settled, came through the same blast with relatively minor wounds. On a philosophical level, you could say I stay angry about the war.

But that’s how you’re supposed to feel. I don’t want the pain and sorrow and anger or even the guilt dulled. Those emotions are appropriate reactions to horrible events. They give me focus and remind me why what I do is important, even when it feels like I’m just a cubicle monkey in a uniform. Why would I try to escape that?

I understand for some folks, it gets overwhelming. They do abuse alcohol or drugs. They do take out their pain on the wrong people. I would never begrudge someone who has been through something like what I’ve been through or worse psychological help. It’s far better to get treatment than to lay hands on your spouse or take it out on your kids, or off yourself.

I can’t help but wonder, though, why some of us need the help and some don’t. Why some folks do their duty in an exemplary manner but then fall apart, why some fall apart before the battle even starts.

In the here and now, I credit most of my stability to Michele. I have a fantastic internal support mechanism in the form of my family. I know how lucky I am in that. But I know guys who had loving wives and seemingly happy marriages and families who still ended up breaking down.

Not that it’s a terribly original idea, but I think it boils down to early role models, and especially parenting. Talking to guys who are on the Zoloft diet or some of the shrinking violets who break down before they ever hear a shot fired in anger, I see a common thread of issues in their childhood. Not necessarily abuse, either. While a lot of guys who just can’t cut it as soldiers are the result of abusive or neglectful parenting, another large percentage seem to have parents who convinced them they were special, beautiful snowflakes who deserved consideration over and above what the other children get because they are just so darn special.

Sigh.

Fellow parents and parents to be (which potentially encompasses all of you with fully functional reproductive systems) - we all love our children. We all want to give them the affirmation they need, develop the self-confidence that will allow them to stand up for themselves, and hopefully stand up for what is right. Here’s the thing, though; if the kid grows up with a steady diet of how awesome they are with no discipline, no expectations of performance, no adversity, they turn into one of two things; a sociopath or a god-damned sissy.

It’s a fine line. I get it. I’m not advocating the Great Santini style of parenting. I wasn’t denied paternal affection if I didn’t measure up (and believe me, I disappointed my parents plenty). My dad hugged me and told me he loved me and was okay if I broke down and cried given an adequate reason according to my age. But he expected me to make progress towards being a man who could love and provide for a family and, if necessary, successfully defend them, not a self-serving douche or a coward.

When I was older, he shared some of his war time experiences as well as those of my grandfather. He exposed me not to gratuitously violent movies (I found those on my own), but to the real and often horribly dark history of the human race. He didn’t try to hide evil and suffering from me, he tried to prepare me for it. He encouraged me towards role models, real and fictional, for appropriate behavior when the fecal matter hits the rotary air impeller. He was such a role model. And that has made all the difference. I’m not even remotely a hero by any reasonable definition of the word, but I can live with the guy I see in the mirror every morning.

I’m speaking in broad generalities here. Obviously there are people who come from great homes and still turn into serial killers. There are folks whose parents treat them like shit and who turn into heroes. Despite these exceptions, we as a society need to reemphasize parenting, and not helicopter parenting. Not one-upsmanship parenting, and not “baseball” parenting. We need good old fashioned measured discipline and affection from parents. We need kids to know they’re loved while simultaneously learning that the entire universe doesn’t revolve around them. That the world outside the house may not even give a rat’s ass about their well being and it’s up to them to take care of themselves and stay true to their principles, regardless of what feels good at the moment or what their peers think.

And we need them to be tougher. I think the situation in this country, and around the world, is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Being the children of the baby boomers, we lack grit on a grand scale. The next generation needs to be tougher, especially mentally. Physical toughness comes in mere weeks if necessary, but mental discipline and resilience take a life time to build. Children can’t build those virtues if they never have to take responsibility for a bad grade, or stand up to a bully or take orders from a parent, even when they don’t agree.

It’s not your job to make your kids like you all the time. It’s not your job to be the cool parent. It’s your job to provide them with the basic tools to be a moral, effective human being. If you can’t handle that, for God’s sake, don’t have kids.

Merry Christmas 9:59 PM

As we come to the close of the Advent Season, I realize I have very little profound to say (well, very little relative to my normal output). I know you're all relieved :)

To my brothers and sisters in Christ; Rejoice! Emmanuel has come to ransom captive Israel.

It has been a hard year, not one given to optimism. I lose sleep over many of the problems facing our nation and often they appear insurmountable to me. But our hope rests in Him. We cannot know the hour or the day, and we can, unfortunately, be assured that many troubles lie between, but the end game is written. A light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

To my friends and loved ones who believe differently or not at all, I hope the holiday has given you respite and edification. Though you don't share my religious beliefs, do take comfort in the fact that you are where you are, doing the best you can, and that there are millions of good, decent people like you doing the best they can. Civilization will suffer setbacks, even cataclysmic defeats. Odovacer will overthrow Rome, the library at Alexandria will burn, and it will most likely remain illegal to shoot Westborough Baptists (damn it all), but the human race will continue to strive and achieve. The drive to create something better than the barbarism from which we all spring can be frustrated, but it cannot be destroyed.

Keep up the good fight. Whatever difference of opinion you may have with me, religious, political, whatever, we would not be friends if I didn't consider you in some way an ally in the long struggle to ensure civilization triumphs over savagery.


To Kellen, and all my other comrades spending their Christmas on the front lines of a war that most of our countrymen are all too eager to put behind them, God bless you. I get to spend this one with my family, but I'm thinking about you and praying for you. May the Lord protect and defend you.

Merry Christmas to all.

The “end” of the Iraq War kind of rolled right past me. Odd, I know, since my adult life thus far has been shaped, in large part, by my participation in that war. It affected how I view the Middle East, how I view my profession, how Michele and I have grown our marriage and raised our children. Most dramatically, from a philosophical perspective, it changed how I view my own country and my duty.

I deployed to Kuwait in late February of 2006. Shortly thereafter my unit was moved from “strategic reserve” at Camp Buehring to Southern Baghdad. For the first three months it was, to tell the truth, kind of fun. It was just dangerous enough to feel like we were doing something real, but our company wasn’t taking any casualties. I’d lived in Germany and Korea, but Iraq was something new to me, dirty and dangerous as it was. Finally I wasn’t in a classroom or going through a BS FTX run by half-baked observer-controllers, many of whom hadn’t even deployed before. I was in the shit. I was going to be a genuine veteran. When my kids asked me what I did in the Army, I wasn’t going to have to say, “well, I shoveled shit in Louisiana.”

I was an odd duck in the company. I was a brand new lieutenant of Field Artillery in an Infantry company where all the other lieutenants had been working together for well over a year. They were all pretty cool about it, I wasn’t ostracized or hazed or anything. I was just new and, being a 13A with no Ranger Tab, necessarily a different breed. All the platoon leaders and the XO were good guys, but the company commander was an outstanding officer. He was an incredibly hard worker, which in and of itself isn’t that remarkable- many career officers are super-A personalities. No, what was remarkable about him was that he pushed himself and his subordinates that hard without being a douche about it. At the time it impressed me, after experience with God-only-knows-how-many superiors in the intervening years, it now astounds me. In the short months I served under the man, I received just one ass-chewing. The Commander explained my shortcomings in performance in such a calm, professional and meticulous manner that when he was done I knew damn well that I had thoroughly deserved it.

Sadly, I never really got the chance to act on his corrections. A few days after that uncomfortable conversation we were riding back to the FOB from a council meeting when an EFP ripped our M1114 Humvee apart like a beer can. The driver and I were blown clear and wounded, me badly but not catastrophically, the driver was in much worse shape but he lived and recovered. The Commander and his gunner were killed instantly. The medics, with help from the infantrymen and God, stabilized both of us, got us on a MEDEVAC bird and my war was over. I was to go back to Iraq for another fifteen months in 2008-2009, but it was that moment in Southern Baghdad and the weeks in the hospital that followed that changed something in me.

While I was in Iraq I hadn’t worried about public opinion regarding the war. I was too preoccupied with the excitement and trepidation of finally being “at war,” and with the challenge of learning a job for which I had received almost no training. Oh, the Army trained me to be a Fire Support Officer, I could’ve integrated howitzers, mortars, attack helicopters and fixed wing close air support into the Commander’s scheme of maneuver all day long, but I hadn’t the foggiest idea then what Information Operations, PSYOP, Civil Affairs and the like were supposed to accomplish. So the protests, the recriminations, the divisions that we’re occurring back home meant little to me while I had a job to do in Baghdad.

They meant nothing to me, actually, until I found myself flat on my back in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center watching the news. Watching the protests, hearing that treasonous sack of shit Michael Moore call Al Qaeda in Iraq and Jaysh Al Mahdi, “the minutemen,” filled me with rage. Seething, poisonous rage. The 76% had sent us to war in 2003, and when things got complex, got bloody, got ambiguous, suddenly they showed up in droves to protest, comparing President Bush to Hitler, droning on about US war crimes etc, etc. I saw idiot college kids re-hash all the crap their draft dodging cowardly excuses for progenitors had taught them. All that was bad enough, but I actually found something that started pissing me off even more. It was just one phrase, bandied about by, I believe, the majority of the protest movement:

“I support the troops but not the war.”

I understand the good intention behind this statement, and five years hence, I’m a bit more rational about the whole matter. But that sentence, intended to allow civilians to advocate America’s surrender in Iraq while simultaneously assuaging their consciences that they weren’t stabbing the military in the back the way their worthless forefathers did during the Vietnam War, still gives me heartburn. My not so humble opinion is that once you’ve paid in blood, there are no refunds. I can’t make Specialist Blair or Captain Dicenzo or any of the other thousands of Americans killed un-die. I can’t re-grow the limbs or even stop the nightmares of those who’ve survived catastrophes far worse than what I’ve been through. So what’s the only thing to do with so much death and suffering? For FUCK’S SAKE YOU MAKE IT MEAN SOMETHING.

Protesters, pretending to be “supportive” of me, were trying to render my comrades’ deaths meaningless by conceding victory to a bunch of raggedy ass insurgents. It doesn’t matter that there were or weren’t nukes at that point. It doesn’t matter that the whole venture was a genuinely stupid idea. Once you’ve paid in American lives, you HAVE to secure a victory, otherwise you piss on the graves of those who laid down their lives in the defense of the Republic. The time to protest the war is before the first shot is fired, not while your own men and women are struggling to win it.

With the full benefit of hindsight, I freely admit that we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq when we did. We were already committed in Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea were clearly bigger threats, and our Army was NOT in proper shape to occupy (yes, occupy, let’s not mince words) a country of 30 million people. We did it anyway, but it was an unreasonable mission, and the Sec Def and Commander in Chief were irresponsible to commit us to that mission without first building our ground forces to a size commensurate with the mission. I wish it hadn’t happened but it did, and now, for the moment, it appears to be over.

So how do I feel about it?

To quote one of my favorite fictional Jews; “I’ll tell you- I don’t know.”

Despite all the divisions and recriminations surrounding the war, all the fumbles by leaders at all ranks both civilian and military, we did one hell of a job in Iraq. We stomped a multi-headed insurgency into the ground. We established, however briefly, a modicum of peace after seven years of war. And we did eliminate a family of murderous rapine lunatics that ruled absolutely over 30 million people.

On the other hand, Iraq looks about as stable as a house of cards constructed by an alcoholic with palsy once we leave. Sectarian violence simmers under the surface. There doesn’t seem to be a leader who can breach the gap between the various factions. Perhaps the last ten years have made me a pessimist, but it’s hard to believe that the current Iraqi regime will long survive without direct US military support.

I don’t know which idea depresses me more, the idea that the current Iraqi government will collapse and those who put their money on us pay a horrifying price in lives due to their “collaboration” with us, or the idea that we’re heralding the withdrawal of combat forces only to have to re invade the country two, or five, or ten years down the road. I’m not ashamed to admit that I hope it’s over. I’ve had enough of Iraq. After one very short and one very long tour I’ve no desire to ever lay eyes on that place again.

But I’ve watched the footage of Vietnamese in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) clinging to the skids of our UH-1s in 1975, and even though that war was over before I was even born, I burn with the shame of it. Will we do the same thing in Iraq? Abandon those who believed in us because it’s the easiest option? You know that’s part of the reason we’re fighting in Afghanistan still- we abandoned those we had supported during the Soviet War and, surprise, they were overpowered by those more ruthless and even less interested in anything we would recognize as civilized behavior. It’s not all pie-in-the-sky idealism when I talk about living up to our moral commitments as a nation. Inevitably you do reap what you sow.

So I can’t really celebrate. I want the war over more than any Berkley educated surrender monkey could ever dream, but I can’t escape the conclusion that either it isn’t really over, or we’re about to suffer yet another blot on our national honor which will take years to fade. God, I hope I’m wrong.