NPR - To 'Hell And Back,' With A Marine And His Wife

I listened to this earlier in the week and thought it was very revealing about how so many of the soldiers coming back from Iraq and especially Afghanistan are struggling with life back home. Sounds like a good film that might be a little hard to watch.

To 'Hell And Back,' With A Marine And His Wife

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The documentary Hell and Back Again follows U.S. Marine Sgt. Nathan Harris and his wife, Ashley, as the two grapple with the physical and emotional fallout of his injuries in Afghanistan.

October 18, 2011

One Marine had been killed. A dozen had collapsed from heat exhaustion. It was 130 degrees, and their supplies of water were running out.

"That's when Sgt. Nathan Harris handed me his last bottle of water," says Danfung Dennis, a filmmaker and acclaimed combat photographer. "We first met on Machine Gun Hill."

From The Film

'How You Doin' Ma'am?'

'I Just Love My Pistol'

'That's Where It Hurts'

'He Gets So Mad'

With two deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan under his belt, the 25-year-old Harris was "an exceptional leader," Dennis tells NPR's Renee Montagne — the Marine chosen to be first off the chopper in an assault on a Taliban stronghold that would become a brutal firefight. "'He was this courageous platoon leader who was at the tip of the spear of this entire battle."

Six months later, watching a contingent of returning Marines step off the buses in North Carolina for a reunion with their families, Dennis realized that Nathan Harris wasn't among them. He'd been hit two weeks before — shot in the hip by a Taliban machine-gun round. He had nearly bled to death.

"He was in extreme pain and distress," Dennis recalls, "and feeling very guilty for having left his men behind."

Harris' agonized struggle to transition back into a society that didn't much understand what he'd been through became the focus of Dennis' documentary Hell and Back Again, which won a World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Daily stresses that get under everyone's skin — paying bills, finding parking at a Walmart — proved overwhelmingly distracting for Harris.

"It makes me want to lose my frickin' mind," Harris says in the film. "It's just like, 'My God, I would rather be in Afghanistan, where it's simple.' When you come home, it's almost more difficult than doing that stuff."

EnlargeDanfung Dennis/Docurama Films

Lingering pain from a gunshot wound to the hip is just one of the hurdles facing Harris as he tries to re-acclimate to life stateside.

Simple? In a sense.

"Back in Afghanistan, it's simply walking, fighting and do it again the next day," Dennis explains.

But not uncomplicated. Embedded with Harris' unit, Dennis went through multiple combat engagements with the Marines. His camera captures the chaos of battle up close — dirt sprays the lens when a rocket-propelled grenade detonates nearby, and the day darkens when an IED explodes, enveloping the unit in dust and uncertainty.

"When you're exposed to that much violence and that much trauma, it's a very natural response for your body to go into this emotionally numb state," Dennis says. "You have to. When you get home, that's when it comes back — and so I'm trying to blend these two worlds, Afghanistan and North Carolina, and seamlessly create one experience to show that the fighting doesn't stop when you get back."

To create that "one experience," Dennis overlays footage from Harris' daily life in North Carolina with audio from battles the two went through in southern Afghanistan. In one scene, Harris' wife orders corn dogs and fries from a fast-food drive-through, as the roar of jet engines, the beat of helicopter blades and the chap-chap-chap of machine-gun fire slowly drowns her out.

EnlargeJoe Raedle/via Docurama Films

Director Danfung Dennis (bottom left) shot Hell and Back Again in part while embedded with Harris' unit — Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment.

Those scenes aren't literal depictions of what was going through Harris' mind in those moments. They're more impressionistic.

"Sgt. Harris and I never sat down and looked at the footage I was shooting," Dennis says. "He just had to trust me to tell his story. And so I think I brought in a lot of my own personal experiences of what it was like to come home from war — of how that war stays with you, the things that you've seen stay with you. And they change you."

Much of the film is literal, though — a chronicle of how the war changed Harris. In a pharmacy, picking up her husband's powerful medications, Ashley Harris speaks of the stranger she sometimes sees behind Nathan's eyes.

"He gets so mad, he turns into a different person almost. ... It's like I don't even see my husband; it was almost like someone had taken over him," she says.

Wounded though he may be, Nathan Harris is still an active-duty Marine, part of the Wounded Warriors Regiment at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Dennis says he wants to go back to the battle — "he wants to be a leader of men."

It's unlikely to happen, and Harris eventually realizes that. "So Ashley, in one way, is relieved," Dennis says. "But at the same time, I think they both wonder, what is he going to do? Nothing really seems to have the same sort of purpose or meaning once you've been over there. And so he's sort of in this transition still, two years later, [discovering] what it means to come home from war where there isn't a clear spot for you to land."

Owen Marcus - Guess what? Turns out, Men Are More Sensitive than Women, Part 1

Excellent post from Owen Marcus - in this two-part series, Owen looks at some research on the sensitivity of men. We are not big dumb brutes.

Guess what? Turns out, Men Are More Sensitive than Women, Part 1

You don’t believe me? I have science backing me up. The Huffington Post’s article by Peggy Drexler explains how scientists discovered that men are hardwired to be more emotionally sensitive than women.

University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Dr. Ruben Gur says that the same way men and women have different bodies, they have different brains — with eons of evolution creating distinct wiring. It goes well beyond the formative impact of testosterone and estrogen. Other studies elaborate on the biological link to male-female communication styles. Men are wired to act during times of high emotion, since emotion can lead to violence; there is a shut-off mechanism. He stops talking — just when women, wired entirely differently, want to talk.

The article goes on to say:

… boys reacted to the crying with a higher release of stress hormones. Boys are more fragile than girls medically and emotionally. Boys are more susceptible to birth defects and developmental disabilities; they are more vulnerable in the womb, with more fetuses lost in miscarriage. As children, they are more easily stressed, which means they cry more when they are upset and have a harder time calming down. And they are more emotionally vulnerable to the ill effects of extreme lack of affection.

Men avoid confrontations with emotional women

I know I am not alone in saying that I have avoided confrontations with a partner when she is upset. Obviously, I do it less now that I understand what’s going on. Yet, I still find myself recoiling when a partner is upset. I can taste the sharpness of my cortisol and norepinephrine rushing through my blood. I want to run, but if that doesn’t work, than the urge to fight arises.

At the same time I feel the love and concern for my partner. I am overwhelmed between my reptilian-brain needs and my love. Then my head jumps in to tell me what I should do. I feel trapped in a no-win, triple bind. All this is going on while my partner is getting more upset.

Does this feel familiar?

Read the whole article, and see also Guess What? Men Are More Sensitive (emotional) than Women, Part 2

Language Skills Help Boys Develop Self-Regulation

This is crucial - self-regulation is one of the best indicators of mental health in adults.

Language Skills Help Boys Develop Self-Regulation

Many a parent of a toddler has encouraged their child to "use your words" in dealing with a problem or request, instead of crying, acting out, or whining. It turns out that teaching toddlers to "use their words" is especially useful in helping boys develop self-regulation. A recent study published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly found that language skills are more important in the development of self-regulation skills in young boys than young girls.

The study looked at children as they developed from age 1 to 3. As previous research has shown, this study replicated the finding that language skills, particularly vocabulary, helps kids regulate their emotions and behavior. Research has often found that girls are typically more advanced in their language skills, and thus self-regulation skills, at this young age. What was different about this study, however, is that it showed that toddler boys with strong language skills can be as skilled in self-regulation as girls at this age.

What's so important about self-regulation? Well, besides the obvious encounters in daily life (e.g., not running out in the street), self-regulation has been highlighted as one of the key aspects to success in school, career, and life. Ellen Galinsky in her book Mind in the Making, lists focus and self-control as one of the 7 essential skills kids need to learn in order to be successful. She states the following about these crucial skills,

"Focus and self control involve many executive functions of the brain, such as paying attention, remembering the rules, and inhibiting one’s initial response to achieve a larger goal. Scientists call these executive functions because these are the brain functions we use to manage our attention, our emotions, and our behavior in pursuit of our goals. Many scientists now believe that executive functions predict children’s success as well as—if not better than—IQ tests."

So it seems the early development of self-regulation skills can only help our children as they move through life.

Being mom to a 16-month-old boy, made reading this article particularly relevant to me. Even at this young age, I am already beginning to see how language is helping him with self-regulation. He is starting to learn that certain items are off-limits (e.g., trash can, toilet bowl) and when he gets close to them he says "no, no." This "self-talk" is the early stages of this development of self-regulation. He has heard his dad and I say "no" to these items enough that he has begun to internalize it. Of course, at this age, he is not always successful in staying away from these items, but at least he's learning :) Hopefully, as he learns more and more vocabulary he will be able to say what he needs or wants, as well as continue this internal dialog to help control his actions. I think it is helpful to know that boys really are able to learn language skills to help self-regulation at the same level as girls. Although girls usually have a natural tendency to pick up language earlier, it is important to encourage language skills as much as possible with boys too.

Photo credit

Claire Vallotton, & Catherine Ayoub (2010). Use your words: The role of language in the development of toddlers' self-regulation. Early Childhood Research Quarterly

Tags: Language Skills, Boys, Development, Self-Regulation, The Thoughtful Parent, boys, language, emotional regulation, education, development, Claire Vallotton, Catherine Ayoub, Use your words, role of language, development of toddlers' self-regulation