What Only Soldiers Understand (On Youth and Male Friendship)

Sebastian Junger has a new film about the same group of soldiers he followed in the award-winning documentary, Restrepo. It's not really sequel, however, even though it uses the same cache of interviews he drew from in the last film. Korengal, which takes its name from the Korengal Valley in northeastern Afghanistan where he followed the 15-month tour of the platoon in 2010, is more a story about male bonding among young men. There was some of that theme in Restrepo, but here it is the focus of the film. Sounds promising - I look forward to seeing it.

What Only Soldiers Understand

Christopher de Bellaigue
August 20, 2014


Outpost Films A soldier on patrol in Sebastian Junger’s Korengal
The acclaimed documentary Restrepo, which was made in 2010 by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, followed a platoon of US soldiers during their fifteen-month tour of duty in the Korengal Valley in northeastern Afghanistan. Released during President Obama’s Afghan “surge,” when there were some 30,000 US troops deployed in the country, the film took its name from Private First Class Juan Sebastián Restrepo, who was killed by the Taliban and immortalized in the name of an American observation post — “OP Restrepo.” The film began with a Taliban ambush and featured explosions, grueling patrols, and the slam of bullets into wood, earth, and metal. Restrepo conveyed with a relentless, almost monotonous immediacy the experience of combat — and this for an audience that was, in every sense, thousands of miles away.

Korengal is a new film that follows the same soldiers over the same period of time and draws from the same corpus of footage and interviews. But Korengal, while clearly related to Restrepo, cannot be considered its sequel; it might be misleading even to call it a war film. The film contains allusions to the death of PFC Restrepo, but the viewer is more aware of a second casualty, whose voice can occasionally be heard from behind the camera. By the time Sebastian Junger came to gather his material into Korengal, his confrere Tim Hetherington had been killed (while following another war, this one in Libya) and the US was preparing to pull out of Afghanistan. To some degree, the film is Hetherington’s memorial.

Korengal’s subjects are youth and male friendship, and it deals in a peculiarly profound way with the unsettling sense that a young warrior experiences, after fighting alongside his brothers-in-arms, that he knows all the joy and agony that life can offer. “I’d rather be there than here,” says one of the film’s unsuspecting heroes, the elfin, soft-spoken Misha Pemble-Belkin, after his tour has finished; “I’d go back right now if I could.” His nostalgia is echoed by others who spent their entire deployments despising their surroundings and longing for home, and insights of this kind into human frailty and illogic lift Korengal into a rare category of achievement.

Junger is outstanding at evoking the diabolical thrill of battle. “Until you hear the snap of a bullet go by your head” — and here Specialist Kyle Steiner, another of the film’s stars, permits himself a knowing, almost superior smile –- “there’s nothing else like it.” The film’s pivotal scene is a single firefight built into a mesmerizing homage to combat, complete with thumping, cod-Irish score and whoops of bloodlust. “I’m on fucking fire!” someone yells amid the mayhem. We all are, and we can be pretty sure the Taliban shooting back feel the same way — only their shouts are a little different, more in the line of, Allahu Akbar.

After the high of engagement comes the low of enforced inaction, boredom, and jangling nerves. Some of these men only recently grew into their bodies, and they hardly know what to do with themselves. They wrestle like lion cubs, play video games, mistreat a guitar, and conduct inane conversations (would George Clooney beat Fabio in a fight?). And, like generations of soldiers before them, they smoke.

There is an affecting scene when one of the soldiers confesses that he is afraid that God hates him because he has committed sins while in battle. But Korengal does not mention religious faith as a possible psychological buttress , and whether this reflects the predilections of the filmmakers or the skepticism of the men is not clear. If the answer is the latter, then a want of belief may be one of the few things that distinguish the men of Second Platoon, Battle Company from their predecessors in war. Given the psychological damage to which many of them confess, it may not be a good thing.

More than the deaths, lost limbs, and broken ankles (plenty in the scree-covered mountainsides) that punctuate the deployment, it’s this vulnerability that interests Junger and Hetherington. In Specialist Miguel Cortez they have a perfect case to study. Cortez is the kind of man whose cracks show through his too-ready smile, and whose eyes flee when he thinks dark thoughts. As the deployment wears on it’s Cortez who begins to court death, and who has to be told by his comrades that by endangering himself he is endangering them. And it’s this same, magnificent Cortez who wins a Bronze Star Medal for valor, and who says (again with that disarming smile), “I would actually throw myself on a grenade [for them], and the guys know that I would, without hesitation.”

Complexities of this kind are the stock-in-trade of Korengal — the product of a close, compassionate interest by Hetherington and Junger in the soldiers around them. There is a fascinating diversion into the racial bafflements of Specialist Sterling Jones, for instance. He is one of the few black men in the whole company — because, as he says sardonically, “black people don’t jump out of planes.” Jones believes he is disliked by his white comrades, which makes his motivations for fighting all the more surprising. “I’m not doing this for recognition from my country,” he says. “Truthfully, I could give a shit what anybody thinks — except for those guys to my left and my right, because that’s what it’s about…that’s why in a deployment you see people run out under fire to go pull their buddy back.”

The irony about Jones is that his mother had urged him to join the army, and he had protested. Pemble-Belkin is the opposite. His parents were Oregon hippies who disapproved of him playing soldiers. Now he smiles angelically and asks, “What’s not to like about a giant machine gun?”

A second telling absence in Korengal is politics. Officers and NCOs dutifully repeat the message of bringing civilization to a benighted people, but for the rest the war seems almost like a sealed exercise, justified in personal, rather than patriotic terms. They certainly feel no sympathy for the locals, and why should they? As Steiner puts it,

Hearts and minds is out the window when you see the guy shooting at you and then he puts his wife and kids in front of him knowing full well that we won’t shoot back. Or the guy who shakes our hand, takes the ten bags of rice we give him for his family and the school supplies…and immediately walks up the mountain and shoots an RPG at us, and walks back down and smiles the next morning when he’s walking his goats…

Fuck his heart. Fuck his mind.

It is a remarkable commentary on modern warfare waged by a democracy that a film like Korengal can be made, with the full cooperation of the US military, and without anyone getting into trouble for an excess of candor.

Later on, after the deployment, Steiner is under pressure from his family and his girlfriend. He is back home, but it seems that he is not fully present. “You’ll never understand,” is his somewhat tetchy response. “It’s not your position to understand.” Steiner wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the helmet that protected his head from a Taliban round. He is the kind of man who would cross the country to help a former comrade change a tire –- “in a heartbeat.” Now he delivers himself of an aphorism that expresses his feelings brutally: “You may have your family’s blood running through your veins. You didn’t shed it with them.”

Even for the survivors, war is a kind of death.

Happy Memorial Day

Happy Memorial Day, back to tomorrow.

Wartorn 1861-2010 - A Documentary on War and PTSD

No new information here for those who work with PTSD and especially combat-related PTSD, but this is still an essential documentary for those who love, live with, or know the young men (and women) coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. An estimated 25-35% of combat veterans (mostly men) from these two recent wars will experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. This HBO documentary examines their experience, their symptoms, and their lives once they return home.

Wartorn 1861-2010

68 Minutes



After the Civil War more than half of the patients in mental institutions were veterans. In 1980 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) became an accepted diagnosis for veterans with psychological wounds. Based on personal accounts of American soldiers whose physical and mental health was torn asunder by the shock and fear of bloodshed and PTSD, the documentary narrates the chronic effects of battle agony and post-traumatic anxiety on military personnel and people close to them throughout American history... from the Civil War through today's modern warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There's a lot of confusion about post-traumatic stress. What are some of the physical manifestations? Well, the hallmark symptoms are the agitation and being keyed up and on edge. And the problem with PTSD is that those symptoms don't go away when soldiers come back home. It's almost like a seizure where they don't have control, they don't know when it's going to happen, and they have to constantly plan so that if it does happen, they're in a place where they can recover.

So what about the people that don't get it? Is there anybody that you can honestly say was in a great deal of intense combat situations and comes back completely fine? Those folks are pretty rare. There's that mythology of the warrior that the only thing you should feel when you shoot an insurgent is recoil. But in fact, nobody is really unscathed unless you really have no compassion for human life. If you have a total disregard maybe the only thing you feel is recoil. Everybody else carries something with them.

In August 1943, General Patton slapped a young soldier who was hospitalized with nervous exhaustion. He was reported to have said: I won't have the hospitals cluttered up with these sons of bitches who haven't got the guts to fight. Send that yellow son of a bitch back to the front line.

Chris Hedges - War Is Betrayal: Persistent Myths of Combat

As far as I know, there has not been a formal declaration of war in my lifetime (since 1967). Still, various presidents have sent our military around the planet in a variety of combat missions, most recently to Afghanistan and Iraq. There also has not been a mandatory draft in my lifetime, which has resulted in a military composed of the patriotic (an act of service to the nation) and the poor (those who join to learn a skill or earn money for college, or simply to escape a life of flipping hamburgers).

According to Chris Hedges, in a new article for the Boston Review, the reality is even more harsh:

We condition the poor and the working class to go to war. We promise them honor, status, glory, and adventure. We promise boys they will become men. We hold these promises up against the dead-end jobs of small-town life, the financial dislocations, credit card debt, bad marriages, lack of health insurance, and dread of unemployment. The military is the call of the Sirens, the enticement that has for generations seduced young Americans working in fast food restaurants or behind the counters of Walmarts to fight and die for war profiteers and elites. 

I doubt that Hedges identifies himself with the term, but I'm willing to bet he has been named a Marxist by the rich, mostly-white "ruling class" he so often targets in his articles and books. For him, this is a nation of social class built on wealth and power - the rich (the proverbial 1%) vs. the rest of us.

The poor are those who do the hardest most dangerous work, and that includes military service - of the 25 most dangerous jobs, 99% of those doing them are men, and of those men, my guess is that a fair percentage are from low-income families and from minority families. And now, even women are beginning to enter these fields (especially military service).

Here is some more from Hedge's article, War Is Betrayal: Persistent Myths of Combat:

At the age of ten I was given a scholarship to a top New England boarding school. I spent my adolescence in the schizophrenic embrace of the wealthy, on the playing fields and in the dorms and classrooms that condition boys and girls for privilege, and came back to my working-class relations in the depressed former mill towns in Maine. I traveled between two universes: one where everyone got chance after chance after chance, where connections and money and influence almost guaranteed that you would not fail; the other where no one ever got a second try. I learned at an early age that when the poor fall no one picks them up, while the rich stumble and trip their way to the top.

Those I knew in prep school did not seek out the military and were not sought by it. But in the impoverished enclaves of central Maine, where I had relatives living in trailers, nearly everyone was a veteran. My grandfather. My uncles. My cousins. My second cousins. They were all in the military. Some of them—including my Uncle Morris, who fought in the infantry in the South Pacific during World War II—were destroyed by the war. Uncle Morris drank himself to death in his trailer. He sold the hunting rifle my grandfather had given to me to buy booze.

He was not alone. After World War II, thousands of families struggled with broken men who, because they could never read the approved lines from the patriotic script, had been discarded. They were not trotted out for red-white-and-blue love fests on the Fourth of July or Veterans Day.

The myth of war held fast, despite the deep bitterness of my grandmother—who acidly denounced what war had done to her only son—and of others like her. The myth held because it was all the soldiers and their families had. Even those who knew it to be a lie—and I think most did—were loath to give up the fleeting moments of recognition, the only times in their lives they were told they were worth something.

“For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’” Rudyard Kipling wrote. “But it’s ‘Saviour of ’is country’ when the guns begin to shoot.”

Any story of war is a story of elites preying on the weak, the gullible, the marginal, the poor. I do not know of a single member of my graduating prep school class who went into the military. You could not say this about the high school class that graduated the same year in Mechanic Falls, Maine.

This was true, in its own way, in my own high school.

Only none of us were wealthy. The only true wealth in rural Southern Oregon was intelligence and hard work, our ticket to college. For others, especially the young men, it was a life in the timber mills (a life that dried up not long after we graduated) or spend a few years in the military to earn money for college or learn a trade.

Hedges can be prone to more than a little hyperbole, but this article is pretty spot on. Read the whole thing.

But before you go read the article (and I hope you do), here is one last passage that gets the point across in case you choose not to click through:

War comes wrapped in patriotic slogans; calls for sacrifice, honor, and heroism; and promises of glory. It comes wrapped in the claims of divine providence. It is what a grateful nation asks of its children. It is what is right and just. It is waged to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil. War is touted as the ultimate test of manhood, where the young can find out what they are made of. From a distance it seems noble. It gives us comrades and power and a chance to play a bit part in the great drama of history. It promises to give us identities as warriors, patriots, as long as we go along with the myth, the one the war-makers need to wage wars and the defense contractors need to increase their profits.

But up close war is a soulless void. War is about barbarity, perversion, and pain. Human decency and tenderness are crushed, and people become objects to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the scenes of eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded all combine to spin those in combat into another universe. In this moral void, naïvely blessed by secular and religious institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions, our strict adherence to moral precepts, becomes stark. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions that fill our days. It might let us see, although the cost is tremendous.

Male Veterans with Traditional Masculinity Values Exhibit Negative Health Behaviors

It has long been known that men are less likely to seek medical care and engage in health-supporting behaviors than are women. But the gap has been narrowing in recent years as more men take responsibility for their health.

One group where this "health gap" has not changed is male military veterans. As we begin the process of reintegrating the soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, this is going to become an issue, considering the higher rates of PTSD and other health issues already being recorded.

Part of the problem with military personnel and health-supporting behaviors is that men who are drawn to serve are more likely to embrace traditional masculinity values, and admitting one needs help does not fit that value set. Further, there is a serious and overt stigma associated with seeking mental health treatment. in particular, in the armed forces. It can make one an outsider, but it can also impact assignments and promotions.

The recent study showed that men who identify most with traditional values of masculinity - toughness, aggression, and achievement - were less likely to engage in activities to support their health and experienced higher rates of PTSD. These men also tend to believe that "real men" don't pay much attention to emotions, which may contribute to their higher rates of PTSD.

The APA Monitor reports a new study that examines the link between masculinity values and health-supporting behaviors:

Male veterans who conform to traditional ideas of masculinity visit their physicians less often and exhibit other negative health behaviors, suggests research conducted at the University of Mississippi. The study found that male veterans who identified more with toughness, aggression and achievement were less likely to seek medical care, exercise and eat right, and had more post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms than those who identified less with stereotypical masculinity. The men who said that "real men" don't think much about emotions were less adept at recognizing and coping with their own, perhaps making them more vulnerable to PTSD. (Psychology of Men & Masculinity, April)

Unfortunately, the article is behind the usual pay-wall, so here is the abstract:

Masculinity moderates the relationship between symptoms of PTSD and cardiac-related health behaviors in male veterans

Morrison, Jay A.

Psychology of Men & Masculinity, Vol 13(2), Apr 2012, 158-165. doi: 10.1037/a0024186 

 

Male veterans ( n = 197) completed an abbreviated version of the Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory (CMNI; Mahalik et al., 2003), the Masculine Gender Role Stress Scale (MGRS; Eisler & Skidmore, 1987), the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist–Military Version (PCL–M; Weathers, Huska, & Keane, 1991), and a measure of cardiac-related health behaviors. Hierarchical multiple-regression procedures were followed to test hypothesized main and interaction effects. The interaction between conformity to masculine norms and symptoms of possible posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the prediction of health behaviors was significant, Δ F(1, 191) = 6.05, Δ R² = .03, p = .015, and was replicated in a subsample of men scoring above the recommended cut-off for possible PTSD in veteran populations on the PCL–M ( n = 32). The Emotional Inexpressiveness subscale of the MGRS was uniquely associated with probable PTSD symptom severity ( r = .49, p = .005), suggesting that emotional inexpressiveness associated with the male gender role may contribute to the failure of emotional processing relevant to the etiology and maintenance of PTSD.

Happy Memorial Day - Perspectives . . . .

According to Wikipedia, Memorial Day was originally known as Decoration Day (because people had begun decorating, both during and after the Civil War, the graves of family members who had been killed):

On May 5, 1868, in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic - the organization for Union Civil War veterans - Logan issued a proclamation that "Decoration Day" should be observed nationwide.^[14] It was observed for the first time on May 30 of the same year; according to folklore, the date was chosen because it was not the anniversary of a battle.^[15]

Events were held in 183 cemeteries in 27 states in 1868, and 336 in 1869. The northern states quickly adopted the holiday; Michigan made "Decoration Day" an official state holiday in 1871 and by 1890, every northern state followed suit. The ceremonies were sponsored by the Women's Relief Corps, which had 100,000 members. By 1870, the remains of nearly 300,000 Union dead had been reinterred in 73 national cemeteries, located near the battlefields and therefore mostly in the South. The most famous are Gettysburg National Cemetery in Pennsylvania and Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington.

The Memorial Day speech became an occasion for veterans, politicians and ministers to commemorate the War - and at first to rehash the atrocities of the enemy. They mixed religion and celebratory nationalism and provided a means for the people to make sense of their history in terms of sacrifice for a better nation. People of all religious beliefs joined together, and the point was often made that the German and Irish soldiers had become true Americans in the "baptism of blood" on the battlefield. By the end of the 1870s much of the rancor was gone, and the speeches praised the brave soldiers both Blue and Gray. By the 1950s, the theme was American exceptionalism and duty to uphold freedom in the world.

Over the decades, Memorial Day became a national holiday and a community celebration of our military and its fallen heroes. "Taps" is the somber traditional song played in Memorial Day events:

Taps (in the key of B flat)

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Taps as played on the bugle by the United States Army Band

While I appreciate the need and the desire to honor those who have served and died for their country, today I want to offer a slightly different perspective - one that I have only come to over the past 15 years or so. Additionally, in the pictures I am including in this post, I want to highlight the humanity of these men and women in such inhumane circumstances.

When I was young (teens and twenties) I tended to think of soldiers as brain-washed kids whose souls had been removed in basic training so that they could be made into efficient killing machines (think of the basic training part of Full Metal Jacket). Maybe part of that view was shaped by my father's insistence that I follow the family tradition and join the Navy or the Marines (all males on my dad's side have done this as far back as anyone knows), and my sense of relief (yes, I mean this) when he died before I had to make the choice to do as he wanted and be miserable, or refuse and be rejected as a wuss and a coward.

I was not cut out to be military. I knew that as a child, and my life has born out that instinct.

But I know now that the men and women who serve are often horrified by the things they have to do in combat, and with a few exceptions (those who are not mentally well), killing is the last thing they want to do. Some studies have shown that during WWII and earlier wars, as many as 80% of soldiers did not fire their weapons in combat situation (these numbers come from U.S. Army Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall, whose methods and veracity have been challenged). Marshall felt that the soldiers simply could not take another life - and, as draftees, they had not been trained to do so.

By Vietnam that had changed, with up to 95% firing in combat situations. Part of the reason this changed was due to the training they received (from Greater Good, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman):

Since World War II, a new era has quietly dawned in modern warfare: an era of psychological warfare, conducted not upon the enemy, but upon one’s own troops. The triad of methods used to enable men to overcome their innate resistance to killing includes desensitization, classical and operant conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms.
__

By the time a soldier does kill in combat, he has rehearsed the process so many times that he is able to, at one level, deny to himself that he is actually killing another human being. One British veteran of the Falklands, trained in the modern method, told Holmes that he “thought of the enemy as nothing more or less than Figure II [man-shaped] targets.”

There is “a natural disinclination to pull the trigger… when your weapon is pointed at a human,” says Bill Jordan, a career U.S. Border Patrol officer and veteran of many gunfights. “To aid in overcoming this resistance it is helpful if you can will yourself to think of your opponent as a mere target and not as a human being. In this connection you should go further and pick a spot on your target. This will allow better concentration and further remove the human element from your thinking.”

As it turns out, however, killing people carries a cost to those who do so. The numbers are alarming, with between 18 and 54 percent of the 2.8 million soldiers who did tours of duty in Vietnam suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) These numbers are significantly higher than previous wars. A 1988 study (Jeanne and Steven Stellman at Columbia University), the first one to look at the environmental influence on PTSD, found that those most likely to suffer PTSD served in high intensity combat situations (again from Greater Good):

These veterans suffer far higher incidence of divorce, marital problems, tranquilizer use, alcoholism, joblessness, heart disease, and ulcers. As far as PTSD symptoms are concerned, soldiers who were in noncombat situations in Vietnam were found to be statistically indistinguishable from those who spent their entire enlistment in the U.S.

The PTSD rates seems to be even higher now (and we may not know the full extent of the problem until 5 or 10 years after these wars are over) - but the walls between the soldiers who carry this wound and getting some help are often daunting.

During the Bush administration, the VA was directed to significantly reduce its diagnoses of PTSD, an order that was overturned by Obama. But the challenges to getting service remain, not least of which is the shortage of social workers (the VA does not yet hire counselors, marriage and family therapists, or licensed substance abuse counselors, despite regulations having been changed to include counselors and other masters level therapists).

According to this 2010 article from the American Observer:

Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War . . . . On the anniversary of the start of the war in Afghanistan the veteran's group declared its aim to halt the redeployment of soldiers with psychological health problems like post-traumatic stress disorder , traumatic brain injuries and military sexual trauma.

Veterans describe various institutional challenges that lie along two fronts—getting soldiers the treatment and time to heal, but first, simply ensuring that soldiers who suffer from trauma are identified. They attribute the challenges to stigma, inadequate screening, insufficient resources, and ultimately the military, whose ultimate goal is returning service members to active duty.

You can listen to one soldier's story, that of Matt Southworth:

Listen to Matt Southworth talk about his experience

Top officials in the VA, as late as 2009/2010, do not even believe PTSD is a legitimate diagnosis. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at the VA, Michael McLendon, was quoted in a Boston Review (Nov/Dec 2009) article as follows:

[PTSD] is not a diagnosis based on empirical evidence, but rather . . . it is an artificial construct erected by a vote of selected psychiatrists. This does not mean that there are not problems that certain individuals do have [and] issues that need to be addressed. But rather, it means that we have created policies and programs that have not served veterans well.

This lack of support is part of the problem. More than any other group, the military should understand the psychological cost of killing. But treating PTSD takes time and that costs money when veterans are involved. Part of why Bush and the VA wanted to minimize the numbers of soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD was that it was adding up to a lot of money. It's much easier to deny their symptoms, give them a collection of medications (Alternet, 2010) that amounts to a chemical straightjacket [Paxil (an antidepressant), Klonopin (a mood stabilizer), and Seroquel (a controversial anti-psychotic drug)], and send them back for another tour of duty.

Medications can be necessary for some survivors, but individual and/or group therapy is even more important. Returning for another tour of duty is NOT a good clinical choice, even if it seems to be a good financial choice on paper (retraining a soldier lost to PTSD can be very expensive - but we ask them to serve as volunteers, and promise to take care of them, so spend the damn money to train someone else, and spend the damn money to help the soldier with PTSD).

The lack of real or perceived social support is often part of the problem.

In a 2003 study from Karestan C. Koenen (VA Boston Healthcare System and Boston Medical Center), Jeanne Mager Stellman and Steven D. Stellman (Columbia University), and John F. Sommer Jr. (The American Legion), conducted over a 14-year period with Vietnam veterans, the key to recovery from PTSD is perceived social support.

High combat exposure, perceived negative community attitudes at homecoming, minority race, depression symptoms at Time 1, and more anger at Time 1 predicted a more chronic course. Community involvement at Time 1 was protective and associated with decreased risk at Time 2. Discomfort in disclosing Vietnam experiences was associated with an increased risk for developing PTSD but did not predict its course. Combat exposure predicted PTSD course more strongly than any other risk factor. Findings suggest recovery from PTSD is significantly influenced by perceived social support.

Social support is exactly what the Vietnam vets did not get. I recently spoke with a 73-year-old veteran of that war, who had served in a combat role, who said, with sadness and some tears, that no one had ever thanked him for his service to his country - not family, not friends, and not co-workers. He said that experience made him bitter and hurt him deeply.

Things have shifted in the last couple of decades. Many Americans opposed both Gulf Wars and the war in Afghanistan, but even among far left liberals the slogan was, "Hate the War, Love the Soldier."

So on this memorial day, let us praise the fallen, those who gave their lives for their country, but let us also love the men and women who have returned from any and all of our wars with psyches broken by the horrors they have seen and committed. No person should have to carry that burden alone, or in silence.

Where the government is failing these walking casualties of war, let us take the lead and give them the social support that can make the difference between a lifetime of suffering or the promise of healing and a return to a life in the world, not apart from it, an outsider in one's own home and country.

These men and women have paid a deep price in service to their country, our country, we owe them some compassion and some support.


Want to help?  
(inclusion of listing here does not imply endorsement) 

• Soldier's Best Friend is non-profit dedicated to providing "United States military veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) with a trained Service or Therapeutic Companion Dog, most of these dogs of which will be rescued from local shelters."
• VA Voluntary Service - Volunteer to help care for wounded veterans.
• Angels of Mercy / No Soldier Left in Need - Donate clothes to wounded soldiers returning stateside, or donate to long-term rehabilitation programs.
• Wounded Warriors Fund - Donates everything from phone cards to TVs to wounded soldiers.
• Adopt A US Soldier -  “Adoption” is as easy as writing letters or as involved as sending care packages. 

There are also many other ways to help.

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

Listen to the Story

Morning Edition

[7 min 18 sec]

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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."

NPR - At Home With Warriors, And The Burdens They Carry

Nice segment from NPR - a review of a new documentary on the men (and women) who serve their country and are trying to find their place in a world that will never look or feel the same for them.

At Home With Warriors, And The Burdens They Carry

by ELLA TAYLOR

Justin Hennard/Quincy Hill Films

Art's Sake: Dominic "Dom" Fredianelli is the linchpin of a group of young Michigan men who go off to war — and return home bearing its scars — in Where Soldiers Come From. An art student at Finlandia University, Fredianelli channeled his experiences into a massive mural in his hometown.

Where Soldiers
Come From

• Director: Heather Courtney
• Genre: Documentary
• Running Time: 93 minutes

Not rated.

With: Dominic Fredianelli, Cole Smith, Matt "Bodi" Beaudoin

Watch Clips

'Introductions'

'Dreams Of Bigger Things'

'TBI'

September 8, 2011

Where Soldiers Come From, the latest in a slew of documentaries about American military recruits muddling through a tour of duty in Afghanistan, pointedly enters theaters as we observe another anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. But the film's true historical referent is the end of the Vietnam War, when U.S. soldiers returned home to a thundering silence — or, from certain quarters, to outright hostility. Today, to judge by the swelling torrent of nonfiction films bearing witness to the plight of the American grunt in and after Iraq and Afghanistan, we can't apologize enough for blaming the messengers.

Helped along by advances in digital technology, just about anyone with airfare and a camera can tag along with an Army unit these days and follow it home. But though it's essential to keep asking what we're fighting for — as most of these documentaries do —there's an inevitable risk of mediocrity in numbers. There's also the risk of blunting our sympathies: No matter how urgent the narrative of comradeship under fire — nor how frustrating the return home to five minutes of glory and a lifetime of struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and inadequate support services — its endless repetition courts indifference.

Up to a point, Where Soldiers Come From covers that familiar ground in a familiar way. Heather Courtney, who wrote, co-edited, shot and produced the film, rode a bomb-sweeper with a small band of National Guardsmen from the small town of Hancock, in Michigan's beautiful Upper Peninsula. With them she endured the tedium of waiting, the terror of undetected roadside bombs blowing up in their faces, the creeping disillusion when they saw no progress in a war whose purpose they had understood only imperfectly, if at all.

What's different, as the film's title suggests, is Courtney's focus on the modest community that raised these young men, whose families defy stereotype about the demographics of non-officer Army recruitment. Neither Dom, a sensitive lad studying graphic art in college, nor Cole, an easygoing everyman with a penchant for stand-up comedy, joined up to escape troubled childhoods. Their reasons were practical and banal — a recruiter's promise of a fat signing bonus and college tuition, the absence of any other career plans — and their decisions taken with what seems a hair-raising lightness.

EnlargeHeather Courtney/Quincy Hill Films

Dom's tour of duty takes him to rural Afghanistan, where he works to clear IEDs.

Both were raised in solid, loving, working-class families — one military, one not — in a stable environment. (As stable, anyway, as a town can be when it's had to remake itself from mining town to tourist hub, and when cycles of recession have left the lucky ones working two jobs.) Parents and girlfriends — patriots all, yet disgusted with the Bush administration and hopeful, on the eve of the 2008 elections, about a promised Obama troop drawdown — are far from thrilled about the boys' decision. But they throw their collective weight behind them.

No doubt the fact that Courtney herself grew up in northern Michigan helped open up these self-effacing citizens, so clearly unaccustomed to explaining themselves. The director has a storyteller's grasp of the telling detail: the carefree dive into Lake Superior; a farewell cake iced with thanks for the boys' upcoming service; the Army educator who, shepherding recruits through a month's perfunctory training, can't pronounce the name of Afghanistan's president. She draws sharp contrasts between snowy rural Michigan and the parched mountainous terrain where the boys serve, charts their eventual return home to run-ins with G.I. Bill bureaucrats, details their struggles with traumatic brain injury — the legacy of repeated concussions even in soldiers who don't suffer a direct hit.

More than most documentaries on the subject, Where Soldiers Come From builds a world for these young men and watches it turn upside down, reframing itself slowly and painfully around the unforeseen consequences of snap decisions. Offering no commentary, Courtney positions herself as an observer, yet her choice of moments to capture leaves us in no doubt where she stands.

"Hearts and minds," Dom murmurs with heavy irony as he hands out candy to Afghan children, and Courtney keeps the camera running when his friend Bodi erupts into a bitter tirade. Openly admitting that he hates Afghanistan and its people, he insists that the Army has turned him into an all-American racist.

For Dom, stricken with TBI, there will be relief through his art and a neatly redemptive ending to the movie. But it's Bodi's desperate, abandoned rant that will echo in our minds, the unofficial voice behind the official remembrances of Sept. 11.