Preliminary Thoughts on a Civilians' Project: Coming Home from Our War

I live in Chicago in the 48th Ward, a liberal and diverse community. During a recent aldermanic election, I attended a get together with the candidate I was supporting—a community-minded, caring, progressive politician. In the question and answer period, I asked him what was being done in the 48th for veterans. He looked at me blankly and admitted he had no idea. Neither he nor those of us in the audience knew who the veterans in the 48th Ward were, where they were, whether they were getting the services they needed, or whether they felt reconnected to civilian life. In the 48th Ward, at least, the veterans of Chicago are invisible.

Soldiers, marines and sailors do not have policy reasons to kill. We civilians do, we have reasons to ask them to kill for us. We need resources, or feel unprotected, or want to defeat an enemy. Every time we think of vets as an “other,” as “them,” with pity and fear, we are betraying the truth that puts us squarely in a position of responsibility for the murder and death of war.

I have been thinking about the civilian-military disconnect from a psychoanalytic and large group psychology perspective and have come up with a couple of possible formulations. I hope others will join me in trying to more deeply understand the dynamic and unconscious civilian experience in wartime, especially in this particular time of war when forces of technology and even modern military strategy reinforce that disconnect.

Here is one idea. It is a dangerous world out there. We need people to protect us, even if we do not want to face what delivering that protection really means or think too much about the dangers we are being protected from. In the popular film American Sniper, Chris Kyle's father delivers a speech that has become famously known as the “wolves, sheep and sheepdogs” speech, based on an essay by Lt. Col. David Grossman. Sheepdogs are capable of violence and patriotism, and protect their fellow citizens. The analogy has itself become a focus of cultural conflict. It is seen by some as a right-wing rallying cry, a justification for violence, a proud statement of patriotic duty as understood by the military class.

From a dynamic point of view, could this be true? Military personnel face dangers on behalf of civilians. Is it possible we project our vulnerability and the danger we fear and know exists onto those who have actually traveled to war to face it? And then when they come home, we are content to see them as both dangerous and vulnerable. And as “others.”

A colleague who works with veterans tells me children of service members often say, “My Mom (or Dad) is protecting us from the bad guys.” Don't we all want that? But can we stay humanly connected to those who face the bad guys, with all the moral complexity and inelegance that encounter engenders?

Another underlying dynamic I find compelling might be that we civilians project our murderous aggression into and onto the military, split it off, and then wall it off, separating ourselves from them as if they are strangers; we believe they have experiences we cannot fathom. They suffer, but we do not. At best we offer pity or awkward gratitude—“Thank you for your service”—but not shared experience, not responsibility. Ending the draft and changing to an all-volunteer military furthers this divide.

In a New York Times OpEd piece, “How We Learned to Kill” (March 4, 2015), Marine Captain Timothy Kudo writes about the moral ambiguities a fighter has to live with. “When I returned home,” Kudo writes, “this group absolution was supposed to take the form of a welcoming society, unlike the one Vietnam veterans returned to. But the only affirmation of my actions came through the ubiquitous ‘Thank you for your service.‘ Beyond that, nobody wanted to, or wants to, talk about what occurred overseas.” (emphasis added)

Judith Broder, founder of The Soldiers Project () has written:

It is a challenge for each of us to be able to bear the awareness that WE (not THEM) have sent our young men and women into war …Most of us live lives divorced from the realities of war…. Killing makes us all uneasy. We are repulsed, frightened and turn away from people who kill—maybe especially those who kill in our name. As mental health professionals, we need to help others understand that we all possess a “killer within us,” so that we can become truly empathic with those who serve in our armed forces.

Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom (the military's official names for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars respectively—did you know them?) may be the most isolated and unexperienced wars a country has ever fought. The decision to prevent press coverage of the dead coming home to Dover, Delaware, was a mere part of this.

Broder uses the W. B. Yeats phrase, “things fall apart,” to describe the experience of combat troops when their belief that the world is a stable and predictable place shatters. Analysts like Broder and psychiatrist Jonathan Shay tell us troops suffer a massive loss of innocence and are forced to encounter their own aggression and vulnerability.

I think the problem for the civilian population is things do not fall apart enough. Our belief systems need to fall apart for us too, we need to lose our innocence. We need to be willing to let ourselves become part of the experience of war and its damage.

Arnold Goldberg's concept of the vertical split in Being of Two Minds, in 1999, and other writings seem to me invaluable here, where instead of a patient splitting off and disavowing perverse behavior, we, the civilian population, split off our destructive and disintegrative behavior. For over four decades, I have kept a now tattered collection of poems, Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans, published by 1st Casualty Press, given to me by a marine back from Vietnam in 1972 One poem, by Stan Platke, describes in a chillingly matter of fact voice how horrific are the experiences we civilians put into motion and desperately want to disavow and split off. Most of the poems in the book are so gruesome I did not feel I could include them here. This is called “The Gut Catcher.”

Do veterans want us to know about these experiences they had? Do they want us really to know the reality of the war we sent them to? Judging from the book of poems I have kept with me, the answer is yes. In their introduction, the editors of the volume ask the readers to read the poems aloud, to copy them, dramatize them, share them, sing them, and use them in practical ways. So at least that group of warriors, in that generation, wanted us to know.

Back to the 48th Ward in Chicago, where I spend my time: With the exception of Veterans Day and Memorial Day, the only place I have seen any recognition during this long military conflict that we are in fact a nation at war has been at the local branch of Chase Bank. Chase bankers ask everyone opening an account if he or she is a veteran. I would like to see every banker, member of the clergy, insurance agent, lawyer and teacher ask the individuals they serve the question, “Have you or someone close to you served in the military?” This mission serves two purposes: improving the service these professionals actually provide and broadening civilian awareness of and responsibility for war and our involvement in it. It would decrease the community-based split.

Martha Bragin, a psychoanalyst who has worked with soldiers and former soldiers throughout the war zones of the Near East and Africa, describes purification ceremonies in traditional African cultures that help reintegrate the warrior with the civilian world. Quoting Bragin from her article in the Clinical Social Work Journal in 2010:

It is necessary to create a process for both warrior and society to acknowledge the violence, and create opportunity for cleansing, healing, and renewal before it is possible to rejoin the community…. not only those who participated in combat but those who welcomed the combatant home …[must] participate in these experiences. Thus the community as well as the fighters were cleansed, the ex-combatant forgiven for wrongdoing toward the enemy; the community for wrongdoing toward the ex-combatant and his or her family.)

Perhaps the 48th Ward in Chicago and every other community in America need to create its own purification ceremony designed to confront the vertical split that separates civilians from war, and thereby distribute guilt, awareness, psychic injury and moral responsibility among the entire populace.