By Myles Ludwig
The earthquake and tsunami that hit the Solomon Islands hard has a personal meaning for me. I have lived and traveled in the region and experienced typhoons, hurricanes and tsunamis, and I know how devastating those experiences can be for anyone who survives. For weeks later, imagined sounds of winds and waves disturbed my sleep.
I have a particular interest in the Solomon Islands because my father fought there during World War II alongside many other young men and women. In fact my father shares a name with those islands. I didn’t realize how courageous those young men and women were until several years ago when I saw the movie based on James Jones’ novel The Thin Red Line. I was struck by how naked, how unprotected they were in battle compared to our currently armored, gear-laden, night-goggled, Velcro-ed up forces fighting and dying for every inch of real estate. How frightened they must have been.
When my father came home, he had a few souvenirs from his landings in Okinawa, New Guinea, Mindanao and Tokyo. I understood them to be treasures. I can still see the small sepia photo of him camped with his buddies, a wide smile under his mustache. How young he looked; how frail.
He contracted jaundice in the Pacific jungles, but other than that, he never talked about his war experiences, though I have many of the charming letters he wrote to my mother while he was in training before he went to battle. I didn’t know him then, of course. I was too young. Growing up, I knew him as a moody man, even violent sometimes. But, he could also be loving.
Our relationship had the typical father-son twists and turns, sometimes fractious, sometimes joyful. Once, shortly before he died, he said to me: “The Army was easier than this.” I still don’t know whether he was talking about the interaction between him and me or his end-of-life experience. I am chagrined now when I recall our arguments at the dinner table during the Vietnam War about whether or not dropping the bombs on Japan’s civilian population could be morally justified. For him, this was no abstract, intellectualized moral issue. It was about his mortality. How callow I was.
When I was a grammar school kid growing up in New Bedford, we often “played army” in a vacant lot, pretending to die dramatically, not a thought given to reality. Not a thought given to Hemingway’s words, “In modern war … you will die like a dog for no good reason.”
I also remember a youngish, scruffy young man with wildness in his eyes who was a fixture in our neighborhood. He was always there as we walked the few blocks to school, always wearing an olive drab Army field jacket. He always seemed to be talking to himself. We didn’t walk on his side of the street because our mothers had warned us to be wary of him. He was shell-shocked, our mothers said. I had no idea what that meant and he never did anything to hurt anyone of us, but his presence and the concept of being shell-shocked was as frightening as it was incomprehensible. Crazy Ernie we called him, in our casually cruel way, in our childish arrogance and ignorance.
Now I think about the veterans returning from our recent wars. They were, and are, close to my father’s age when he served. As the late George McGovern said, “I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.”
So many of them have been suffering from what we called “shell shock” and are now calling post-traumatic stress disorder. Categorizing it like this is way of distancing ourselves from something undesirable, like calling prisons, “correctional institutions,” or unmanned instruments of the panopticon, “drones.” We especially like it if we can reduce it into an acronym: PTSD. Maybe, we think, giving something undesirable a name or fashioning it into an acronym makes it go away. But in fact, the opposite is true. Naming is giving life and PTSD is an existential condition. It can affect whole societies ― everyone can hear the sound of winds and waves ― as well as individuals.
I don’t think the quality of the war, just or unjust, necessary or chosen, has anything to do with it. I think those of us without their experience, have to realize the courage these young men and women who go to war ― from any country ― displayed in these mind-boggling situations. They have the wounds, visible or invisible. They have the scars.
Like my father, so many of them can’t or won’t talk about their experience, but instead, live in a kind of silent terror. I was struck by the words of one of these quoted in a story about PTSD in last week’s Sunday edition of The New York Times by Cecelia Capuzzi Simon, about writing therapy programs for veterans:
“Ron Capps sat alone in a truck in a Darfur desert preparing to shoot himself in the head. He had been in the military for 22 years, serving in the Army and working for the Foreign Service in the world’s hot spots including Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Sudan and Rwanda. He had debriefed Iranian terrorists held in Iraq, observed rebel forces and assessed the carnage they left behind in Sudan, counted the mass graves of the hundred thousand killed in the civil war in Zaire – and reported all back to Washington. After five wars in 10 years, Mr. Capps had developed post-traumatic stress disorder and it was killing him.”
Retired from service now, he describes this scene from his current perspective, that of a 51-year-old man, in his essay Back from the Brink: War, Suicide and PTSD.
We are more and more familiar with scenarios like this. Statistics about the effects of PSTD ― whether suicide or less dramatic actions ― are reported with increasing frequency. I understand there are many therapy programs to help PSTD sufferers cope, but I confess I didn’t comprehend what that really meant until I experienced a form of virtual reality therapy at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies.
I sat in a simple chair on a platform, donned some curious goggles, while Dr. Skip Rizzo, a pioneer in the field ― sporting a ponytail and earring, hardly a stereotypical academic ― completely changed my views. Sitting next to me, with a simple laptop loaded with sophisticated software, he altered my view from day to night, from walking in dangerous alleyways, to riding in a Humvee, either as driver, passenger or gunner (including appropriate sounds and sensations of movement … and being subject to attacks of many kinds including the notorious IEDs exploding in front or even beneath my virtual vehicle.
It was frightening. But it was more than that. It was shocking ― shell-shocking.
It brought me back to childhood memories of playing army in that vacant lot, and of Crazy Ernie, of my father’s moodiness and how little those of us who have not had the experience ― war, earthquake, tsunami ― can talk about it.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.