The War on War

Somewhere, timewise, about the middle of the Afghanistan War, I was asked to travel to South Carolina and deliver a lecture on the veterans’ crisis in this country. The University’s campus was located in Beaufort, a few miles from where I went through bootcamp in 1967, The USMC Recruit Depot on Parris Island. I found my old notes yesterday and because the conditions about which I spoke have not gotten that much better in the last few years, I’m reprinting them here to remind anyone who reads this blog that we still have work to do.

First of all, let me thank the University of South Carolina at Beaufort for sponsoring this program, and Dr. McCoy for inviting me. I’m familiar with your area. I was here over four decades ago as a tourist on one of your little islands. Parris Island, and I’ve always remembered, quite vividly, my visit. Dr. McCoy is a professor whose field of expertise is the Humanities, but like many people who study the human race through our societies, our language, our art, our various histories, and our socio/political experiments, she is also very much a humanitarian, a person not only given to the study of our way of life but actively engaged in trying to help us become better people. That’s a noble and often frustrating way to live. Consequently, in this time when many politicians look for ways to send our young men and women into battle and cut their benefits when they come home, she’s asked me to stand here tonight as a gentle reminder that for those of us who were lucky enough to come home from the modern wars governments generate as part of economic and foreign policy, those wars never really end. As good people, we should be aware of that fact and willing to reach out to the veterans in our communities a helping hand whenever possible and at the very least, an acknowledgement of the sacrifices they’ve made in our name.

Let me give you a little background, so you know where I’m coming from. Like many young men who enlisted in military service during the Vietnam War, I’m not a special person. I had a pretty normal middle-class adolescence in the early 1960’s. My parents loved me. Life wasn’t particularly hard. I was popular in high school, often to the point of acting like a privileged asshole. When I turned 18, I went to college on a baseball scholarship while many of my classmates were being drafted and sent to fight a war 10,000 miles from home. We didn’t know much about Vietnam at the time. All we knew was that our leaders in Washington said it was a country in trouble because of a thing called communism and we needed to help (by we, of course, they meant a generation of teenagers). Hell, most of us didn’t even know what communism was. We just knew that when somebody said the word, we were supposed to get mad.

After a year in college, I begin to feel guilty, especially since two of my classmates and friends – Bob Staley and Billy Lynn – had died already in Vietnam. I enlisted in the Marine Corps and began an experience that for me included some of the best and worst times of my life. Like thousands of my peers, I came home on a stretcher and spent many months at Great Lakes Naval Hospital. When I was discharged, I went back to college and spent the next twenty-five years limping through drug addictions, four marriages, and at least a dozen jobs. In my mid-forties, burned out, used up, and lost with no direction home, I took a creative writing workshop. Among the 12 people in my group were two other Vietnam veterans. After reading some of my pathetic attempts at writing a personal narrative, one of the vets approached me and said, “Hey man, you got PTSD. Have you been to the VA? I said, “Are you kidding me. The last time I went to the VA with my leg swelled up, they found 8 new pieces of shrapnel they didn’t even know were there. I asked the doc about it and he told me to quit complaining I was still able to walk. That was ten years ago and it made me so mad, I haven’t been back.”

 Well, this guy kept pushing me and I finally went back. That was 15 years ago, and that initial trip became the first chapter of one of my books.

The modern American soldier, when deployed to a combat zone, lives a life of constant anxiety. He struggles to survive horrific conditions and it doesn’t matter much what war or who sent him. He thinks about doing whatever he has to no matter how dangerous or how absurd to survive. And, in this 21^st century that means she as well as he. Every day a soldier lives in a combat zone brings that soldier one more day closer to coming home, returning to their families and communities. If they make it home then the emotional weight of the things they carried in combat with their fellow soldiers becomes the weight they carry in the silence of their minds, and alone. This is coupled with the realization that the world they left is not the world they come back to. It’s all changed because they are not the same people who left. When this happens, the struggle to survive bullets evolves into a struggle to survive memory, and it’s a daily process.

Like soldiers rely on the person next to them to help carry the weight of combat, they have to be able to rely on their communities when they return to carry the weight of life – all the practical things that have gone unattended and unrealized for untold months or even years, like finding a job, re-engaging with family members who will now see them as strangers, maybe even fear them as strangers – re-entering schools, learning to navigate sidewalks and drive cars and climb steps with missing limbs. They have to be able to rely on communities for support in the emotional aspects of their return while they’re busy with these practical matters, veterans outreach programs, church groups, extended family members, close friends. While everything I’m saying here seems reasonable, it’s often neglected, sometimes because we in the community have forgotten or ignored the sacrifices these people have made, out of sight – out of mind, so to speak, but more often, I believe, because we’re self-conscious about how we’re supposed to act. Vietnam veterans returned to a public that blamed them for an unjust war and suffered greatly because of that for years. Iraq and Afghanistan vets are returning to a public of 300,000 million people that has been largely indifferent to those wars. Both of these attitudes make it more difficult for soldiers to rejoin the world and feel useful again, feel whole again.

Now, I know I’m preaching to the choir here because many of you are vets and this is a military town. But all of you have influence with people outside our small circle. So, let me share just a few facts with you for you to reflect on. Here’s some truth at the community level. Every night in this country 200,000 veterans sleep on the streets of our cities. Over half of these homeless veterans have substance abuse problems or severe mental problems, or both. The suicide rates among soldiers returning from wars in the Middle East is the highest it’s ever been in the military – right now, it’s higher than the casualty rate in Afghanistan, over 22 suicides every day – and that doesn’t include, car wrecks, drug overdoses, and other self-destructive behavior for people recently discharged. The unemployment rate for veterans is about double what it is for the rest of the country, and big banks continue to foreclose on veterans homes with impunity. Even though it’s illegal.

Everything I just mentioned affects us at a community level. Now, I didn’t recite this litany of sorrow to be dramatic or depress you, even if it is depressing. I went over these facts because if you are a person with any compassion there are a couple of questions on your minds right now. Why are we not taking care of our veterans better and what can I do about it? Here are some simple ideas – most all veterans support groups can use donations of your time or money or both. You don’t have to be a psychologist to listen, to hand out information, to drive a veteran or his family someplace, to buy a meal or share a bag of groceries. What if you are an expert? A lawyer can take on a little pro bono work on behalf of someone whose house has been repossessed while he was on deployment. If you run a business, do you search for veterans to hire? If you teach, are you willing to spend some extra time helping a young soldier deal with the confusion of re-entering the educational system? The possibilities are almost limitless if we think about them. I’ll leave you with one of the simplest ways to help veterans:

On February 27, 2014, just a few weeks ago a major veterans bill came before the senate. The bill contained provisions that would restore the COLA for vets, and protect them from losing their benefits in the event of another government shutdown. It also would have authorized the construction of 27 new clinics and medical facilities, and it would have provided tuition assistance to post-9/11 vets.

 The bill required 60 votes out of 100 to pass and it was defeated. I’m not a politician and I’m not talking to you about politics. This isn’t a town hall meeting. I don’t give a damn which party you support. I do however care passionately about supporting this country’s warriors who come home. A politician will tell you – oh it’s a complicated issue, many factors involved. It’s not that simple. Yes friends, it is that simple. This year already, Congress has cut healthcare, education benefits, and job programs for veterans. Check your congressman’s voting record on veterans’ issues. It’s public information. Are they voting to do the right thing or are they voting their own economic and political interests? Are they willing to support new wars on foreign soil, but not support troops when they return? Consider your vote based on the way they vote. That’s something all of us can do to support our men and women in uniform. And, it is our responsibility in a democracy to do that.