the things we still carry…

© peter van atgamael

The Fort Hood tragedy raises the tempo on yet another aspect to our health care debate. Mental Health. While we’re still trying to parse out the motives of the shooter (i don’t need to rehash here), it’s clear to me that mental health is at the core. It’s too critical an issue to ignore. I’m not alone. Still, our national conversation about health care has held the issue of mental health at the margins. The fringe right has held the center on demonizing Obama to such an extent that MSM has barely devoted any attention to the individual messages from the President and First Lady about veteran services, particularly treatment for PTSD.

Writers have always been sensitive to this issue. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, is a masterpiece. But it’s more than that. It’s a record. The entire collection of short stories follows a soldier in Vietnam through his return home. I don’t think I can ever really appreciate what these men and women have to endure on our behalf, whether I agree with it or not. You don’t go through an experience like that without it changing you internally.

I’ve never really been able to write in a vacuum. Looking at my own short fiction, I seem to write characters who are veterans. Below is a clip from a very, very old short story I wrote.

He still wore his medals. His Purple Heart. His Medal of Honor. This one liked to talk in fast staccato clichés, yet buried between, there was something of the truth of his horror. Why he’ll never sleep a full night. Why he’ll never be able to work. Why he was homeless. Why his skin was so ashen and colorless. How his homie split into pieces like coal cinders, almost like the big fireworks you see at the top of Reservoir Hill every Fourth of July. They open real big and fall on you like raindrops. That was how he blew up when he stepped on that mine. But it was daylight and it didn’t look purple then white. It was just red. “Man red. Man. Red man. That’s the way… the way of the world…” Behind her was the vet. To her right, through the window she could see the second floor classrooms of the elementary school, their yellow ribbons cut from construction paper hanging like paper snowflakes in the windows. Corin tried to concentrate on the light breaks streaming through the window of the bus as it made its next turning point.

Enrich Maria Remarque’s All’s Quiet on The Western Front, predates O’Brien’s book. It was the first novel I’ve ever read about the realities soldiers face in wartime and their challenges in living ‘normal’ lives in peacetime. Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, also dramatizes the difficulties for a war veteran assimilating back into civilian life. Last fall, my poet friend wondered aloud about our oncoming crisis, as more men and women return home from Iraq and Afghanistan, “They’re returning home to the worse economy since the great depression, after serving multiple tours of duty and the thanks we can give them amount to what? Health care they can barely afford, no jobs, and barely any money to send them to school so that they can work at McDonalds? These were not the ‘freedoms’ we sent them to fight for.”

The current issue of A Public Space features a story by Danielle Evans, giving us a window of the interior life of our new generation of veterans returning from Iraq and trying to recreate ‘normal’.

But Esther couldn’t forget about it. Mindy was on the side of the bus they took to the zoo. Mindy was on the nightly news, and every commercial between kids’ TV shows . Mindy was on the radio, lisping Pop my bub-ble, pop pop my bub-ble. What he felt for Mindy was barely short of violence. He restrained himself from shouting back at posters, and the radio, and the television: What is your position on civilians in combat zones? Mindy, what’s your position on waterboarding? Mindy, do you think Iraq was a mistake? He got letters occassionally, from people who were still there -one from Jones, one from Ramirez, three from guys he didn’t know that well and fgured must have been lonely enough that they’d write to anyone. He hadn’t read them.

Evan’s story takes on PTSD directly while her main character looks at it sideways. More recently, we’re seeing films emerge that dig deeper into the lives of men and women at war. Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, although mostly set in Iraq, gives a contrasting snapshot when a soldier comes home. Faced with the banal reality of home, the main character goes back. Not really an outcome we’d all assume. I plan to see Brothers, which comes out in December. From the previews alone, it flags another issue that the military is forced to be honest about. General Casey expounds further in his recent interview on Meet The Press.
From the NYT:

General Casey acknowledged that fighting two wars at the same time have put strains on the Army and its soldiers. But he said the Army had taken steps to ensure that soldiers are prepared for the mental stress of combat and treated well if they suffer psychologically.

“We’ve also worked very, very hard to enhance what we’re doing to — for the mental fitness of the force,” he said on “Meet the Press. “ He cited a “stigma reduction program” started in 2007 that “resulted in about a 40 percent increase in soldiers willing to come forward saying they have some symptoms of post-traumatic stress.”

He said that last year the suicide rate exceeded the civilian rate for the first time and as a result the Army is spending $5 million to have the National Institute of Health study the problem. More recently, he said, the Army has started a program called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness designed to give soldiers skills “to build the resilience to deal with some of the challenges that they’re facing.” will provide us with another window into the struggles of veterans returning home and challenges their caregivers face.

Our generation is overwhelmingly defined by one word: Iraq. The first short story I ever wrote is from the point of view of a woman who shares a bus ride with a Vietnam vet during the first gulf war. The first decade of the 21st century is dominated by the fact of war. For almost twenty years, Iraq has been part of my imagination and nightmare. I wonder about the lasting effects of two wars on our overall psyche. I wonder still if there will ever be any relief from the weight of all these things…