By Bill Williams
Most civilians are unaware of the physical and psychic horrors endured by soldiers, according to this timely new book by Nancy Sherman, a professor at Georgetown University.
Sherman says up front that The Untold War “is not a political tract for or against a war.” Rather, it is about “the inner battles … the moral weight of war that individual soldiers carry on their shoulders and don’t usually talk about.”
Sherman interviewed numerous soldiers and officers who described their conflicted emotions on and off the battlefield. “They feel pride and patriotism tinged with shame, complicity, betrayal, and guilt,” she writes. Many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, with symptoms that can last for decades.
Soldiers should “not have to bear the moral burdens of war on their own,” Sherman writes. “We need to begin to cultivate the kind of empathy that will allow us to support our soldiers properly when they return home to our communities.”
One can’t help but feel sadness and anger when reading about the brutality and ugliness of war, the occasional resort to torture, the killing of civilians referred to as “collateral damage” and the heavy toll of smashed bodies and minds.
Sherman describes the work of one expert who tries “to turn reluctant-to-kill soldiers into ready-to-kill soldiers” who know the difference between “murder and justified, lawful killing in war.” One challenge, she says, is making sure that soldiers “preserve their humanity” in the midst of killing.
Soldiers must be encouraged to get in touch with their emotions, rather than bottle them up and pretend that everything is fine, the author says.
Because Sherman is a professor, philosopher and psychoanalyst, her writing sometimes has an off-putting academic tone. She calls this book a “philosophical ethnography” and quotes liberally from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud and others to make her points about war and ethics, which sometimes leads to dry prose.
Sherman is more compelling when she offers case histories based on her interviews. One poignant story involves Maj. Tony DeStefano, a married man in his 50s who was diagnosed with severe post-combat trauma and mild traumatic brain injury related to the war in Iraq, and is racked with guilt and shame about not being able to support his family because of his injuries. One of DeStefano’s teenage daughters told Sherman, “The second time he came home he was totally different. He wasn’t the dad I knew. He snapped a lot; he’d go 100 miles per hour in the car. It’s so scary.”
When DeStefano suffered a massive panic attack, his doctor suggested inpatient treatment at a Veterans Administration hospital. DeStefano balked, saying that if he sought such help, it would be “a disgrace to the officer class,” explaining later that “we’re taught to suck it up and truck on.”
Unfortunately, many of the profiles are too short and superficial to leave lasting impressions. Sherman talks in general terms, for example, about returning soldiers who engage in “risky and aggressive behavior: motorcycle accidents on bases, bar-room brawls, and domestic violence.”
Some officers and soldiers, according to Sherman, feel profound shame “that we have become a country that has morally and legally justified the use of torture. … The fact of torture has opened disturbing questions of identity – just what does the uniform stand for and what are the ideals that they have signed up to defend?”
Sherman also describes the moral ambiguity of various interrogation techniques that involve stress and deception, but fall short of torture, and she faults health professionals for their role in the mistreatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo Detention Center.
An estimated 30 percent of soldiers return from Iraq with emotional problems. The number of those who need treatment for brain injuries, lost limbs and post-traumatic stress symptoms is growing.
Soldiers struggle with ambiguity. One soldier thought that his killing an enemy soldier was fine, until he approached the body and took out the wallet, which contained family pictures.
“The pictures were like those he carries in his wallet,” Sherman writes. “That empathic moment unleashed a torrent of guilt.”
Many people do not realize the extent of limb injuries and disfigurement in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We don’t see the wheelchairs, the canes, the stumps, the prosthetics, the burns, the empty eye sockets.” Soldiers often are scarred by the memory of collecting the body parts of comrades killed in roadside bombings, sometimes having to retrieve limbs from tree branches.
Although this book has weaknesses, it nevertheless sheds light on an important topic that has received too little attention from the general public – the crushing burden carried by soldiers who return home broken by the terrors they have experienced or witnessed.
Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers, by Nancy Sherman; Norton; 338 pp.; $27.95