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Where’s the Real Healing for our Iraq Veterans |
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By Edward Tick, Ph.D.
[This is an excerpt from a speech given by Edward Tick, author of War and the Soul at the 2007 Bioneers Conference. This is reprinted with permission from http://bioneers.org .]
PTSD is spiritual distress that we are all in. John Zemler (http://www.johnzemler.com ) is a veteran of thew first Gulf War and of secret operations in Europe, and he said to me recently, “Ten years from now, when we all have PTSD, let us be worthy of the wound. The conditions we’re living in today in war and in peace at home are the conditions that bring about PTSD. It’s rampant in our inner cities, it’s rampant in our prisons, it’s rampant in homes. We all have the wound. We need to listen to it and be worthy of it.”
PTSD is not a mental illness. Every one of us will get it under violent and stressful enough conditions. It’s a universal response to severe stress. So PTSD is, also, the world soul crying out its anguish to us all, begging us, like global warming, to pay attention to the health of the Earth, PTSD is begging us to pay attention to the health and well-being of our souls and our societies.
What is the usual contemporary response? Give our survivors massive amounts of medication, separate them, send them off to hospitals, let them go and hide in the woods by themselves, or practice therapeutic strategies that teach them not to talk about the wound, not to talk about their experiences, and avoid anything that might cause you stress. Well, war hurts, and it should. So we practice the good-old don’t ask, don’t tell strategy about war. We don’t ask the veterans their stories, and they don’t tell them, and that’s wrong.
This old strategy that isolates and medicates our veterans effectively cuts the tongues out of our warriors. We need to restore their voices in our communities and in our societies and around the world. Some of you, no doubt, have heard the famous saying from Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, “Truth is the first casualty of war.” When we restore the stories, when we restore the voices of our veterans and survivors, then we can restore truth. We can hear and respond to PTSD just like we can to global warming. We have to restore these silenced voices, and when we understand that PTSD is a spiritual wound and a social disorder, then the recipe is clear and, again, it’s what the traditional people have been teaching us forever: the recipe for healing PTSD is spirituality and community.
There are many ways we can respond. When we understand it is an identity disorder, we can work with our survivors to achieve an identity transformation that includes their wounds. We cannot and should not try to be pain free. In the Civil War, PTSD was called soldier’s heart; my organization takes its name from that. We should not be pain free but, rather, as all of us have been saying, there’s immense amount of pain in the world we need to face together, we need to be in a new and constructive and open-hearted and compassionate relationship to our own and each other’s pain and the world pain.
Understanding that PTSD is a soul wound teaches us, again, as traditional cultures have been teaching us forever, that the way we heal soul wounds is through initiation. PTSD is an incomplete initiation. Our veterans and survivors are stuck in the underworld and we need to go down there and meet them in hell and walk out with them.
When we do this, we, our hearts will be broken also, but we will discover depths of love and commitment that only people who have served in hell together know. And we are invited to share that, but we must have the courage to expose ourselves to so much pain, to see things we don’t want to see and know things we don’t want to know.
We can complete the initiations and bring them back from hell. Many veterans, as they heal, say, well, I’m no longer a Vietnam veteran, I’m no longer a Somalia or Grenada or Panama or Gulf War veteran; I’m a warrior whose service was in Vietnam or Panama or El Salvador. I’m a warrior. I’ve joined the world class of spiritual warriors, and my service was unfortunate, but I can carry it because I’ve returned and I have a new identity with new meaning.
Now, understanding PTSD as a social disorder also helps us with the recipe. The Veterans Administration does not have the resources or the will or the know-how to bring our veterans home and bring healing. We need to reformulate our relationship to veterans. Vets, soldiers, warriors put their lives on the line for the rest of us. Whether or not we think the cause is legitimate is beside the point; this transcends politics. Most people, when they go into the service, go to preserve the people and the country and the values they love, and are willing to sacrifice their lives for that. They often only find out that the service was illegitimate when they’re in the middle of it, in the middle of combat and they can’t come back.
So, we need to say to all of our survivors, you served in our name; now it’s our turn to serve you. You went out on the front lines for us; now come back into the tribal circle, into the community circle, and let us protect you.
There are two things we must do as a consequence of war: we must practice this responsibility for our veterans and all of their family – the widow and the orphan – and we must practice the same responsibility to anyone we have ever harmed anywhere on the planet.
Tomorrow, at the end of our Bioneers conference, I leave for my seventh trip to Vietnam, where our veterans meet with their veterans. I can’t tell you how beautiful it is to run a reconciliation group with American and Canadian and Australian and Viet Kong and North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese army veterans, all loving and embracing each other as brothers and sisters who have survived the same hell.
In addition to that, we participate in Vietnamese culture so that Vietnam becomes a place, not a war. We participate in their spirituality, Buddhism, which has protected them. There’s not much PTSD in Vietnam, which is counterintuitive. Well, they were severely physically damaged. We are damaged in our soul. Vietnam is healthy, welcoming, and they want us to come back and practice forgiveness. They want to heal our veterans.
I want to end with a quick story about one modern ghost dancer. A man named Bob was an infantry grunt. He participated in the destruction of villages. He had severe PTSD. Divorced twice. Nightmares. On the verge of his third divorce. He had over 200 college credits but couldn’t finish a degree, couldn’t keep a job. We went back to Vietnam twice.
He saw the ghosts, not only in his nightmares, but as we were driving through the rice paddies. He saw the people he killed and the people we bombed and the children and his comrades who had died. He saw them all walking toward him as ghosts, and, in particular, there was one 14-year-old boy, the first Viet Kong soldier he had killed. He saw this boy for decades in his nightmares, and then walking toward him again in Vietnam.
He saw the ghosts and knows they’re real. We identified his wound, again, not as individual psychopathology, but as a soul wound, and he embraced it as a soul wound, and we went in search of the recipe in Vietnam, through spiritual restoration techniques that could bring soul healing.
So, we honored his dead. He went back to where he served, where his comrades fell, and we prayed. We honored the Vietnamese dead. We practiced reconciliation with these former enemies and entered a universal brotherhood. We did rituals for the souls of the Vietnamese lives that he took. We practiced restoration projects. We built a school in the Mae Kong Delta. He “adopted” some Vietnamese children and sponsors them in school. And, finally, we climbed to a sacred pagoda and did a memorial service for that one 14-year-old boy. And at the end of this long process, during that ceremony, he saw the boy’s soul come to him, on top of sacred Black Lady Mountain in Vietnam. The boy’s soul came to him smiling, with arms out, embracing him and saying thank you; I’ve returned; from now on I am your spiritual guide and friend and we will walk and serve together for the rest of our lives.
Bob began sleeping like a baby. This was seven years ago. He has not had a combat nightmare since then. He’s reconciled with his wife and has a great marriage. He continues to support Vietnamese children and veterans. He’s active in his community in veterans affairs, and he’s become a modern ghost dancer.
So, I end with this song from our First People, a Payute’s ghost dance, because when we embrace PTSD this way, life can return to all of us, including the spirits. The Payute people sang:
The Father will descend.
The Earth will tremble.
Everybody will arise.
Stretch out your hands.
We shall live again.
We shall live again.
[This is an excerpt from a speech given by Edward Tick, author of War and the Soul at the 2007 Bioneers Conference. This is reprinted with permission from http://bioneers.org .]
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