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| The Colorado Springs Gazette/Associated Press |
Phil Klay, who served in the U.S. Marine Corp from 2005 to 2009, including a tour of duty in Iraq from January 2007 to February 2008 wrote a fabulous WSJ article, "Treat Veterans With Respect, Not Pity." It provides a fascinating comparison of the Veteran experience throughout the past Century, from the World Wars to our current military engagements. He shares his "jarring experience with an increasingly common reaction to my war stories: pity. I never thought anyone would pity me because of my time in the Marine Corps." Similarly, he declares, "for a certain subset of the population, my service means that I - along with all other veterans - must be, in some ill-defined way, broken." Additionally, he points out, "pity places the focus on what's wrong with veterans. But for veterans looking at the society that sent them to war, it may not feel like they're the ones with the most serious problem."
This article explores many of the current misunderstandings and false stereotypes about Veterans in the American public today, due to the impact of our media, from our beloved comedians, to our well-respected news sources.
In order to fully appreciate the post-service experience of our Veterans today, it is helpful to take the time to read accounts such as these. Klay summarizes his sentiments as follows: "I find it difficult to pity someone who, when his life is considered in its totality, achieved so much good and touched so many people. War subjects some of its participants to more than any person can bear, and it destroys them. War makes others stronger. For most of us, it leaves a complex legacy. And though many veterans appreciate the well-meaning sentiments behind even the most misdirected pity, I can't help feeling that all of us, especially those who are struggling, deserve a little less pity and a little more respect."
The full WSJ article is provided below. As we celebrate this summer season, enjoy the plentiful cookouts, lemonade stands, and water sports. But also, please take time to say THANK YOU and consider the complex and diverse perspectives of our Veterans. Their service and sacrifice over the years, have afforded us the freedom to enjoy such luxuries in America.
Treat Veterans With
Respect, Not Pity
Too many Americans assume that
troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan must be traumatized.
By PHIL KLAY
Updated May 23,
2014 12:34 p.m. ET
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| Luke Sharrett/Getty Images |
A couple of years ago, I spoke at a storytelling competition about some
Marines I'd known during our deployment in Iraq and my feelings on getting out
of the Corps. After I left the stage, an older woman in the crowd came up to me
and, without asking, started rubbing my back. Startled, I looked over at her.
"It was very brave of you to tell that story," she said.
"Oh, thank you," I said, a little confused by what was
happening. "I'm OK."
She smiled sympathetically but didn't stop. I wasn't sure what to do, so
I turned to watch the next performer—and she remained behind me, rubbing me
down as if I was a startled horse in a thunderstorm.
It was my first really jarring experience with an increasingly common
reaction to my war stories: pity. I never thought anyone would pity me because
of my time in the Marine Corps. I'd grown up in the era of the Persian Gulf
War, when the U.S. military shook off its post-Vietnam malaise with a
startlingly decisive victory and Americans eagerly consumed stories about the
Greatest Generation and the Good War through books like "Citizen
Soldiers" by Stephen Ambrose and movies like "Saving Private
Ryan." Joining the military was an admirable decision that earned you
respect.
Early on in the Iraq war, after I accepted my commission in 2005, most
people did at the very least seem impressed—You ever fire those huge machine
guns? Think you could kick those dudes' asses? Did you kill anyone? I'd
find myself in a bar back home on leave listening to some guy a few years out
of college explaining apologetically that, "I was totally gonna join the
military, you know, but…" The usual stereotype projected onto me was that
of a battle-hardened hero, which I'm not.
The Colorado
Springs Gazette/Associated Press
But as the Iraq war's approval levels sunk from 76% and ticker-tape
parades to 40% and quiet forgetfulness, that flattering but inaccurate
assumption has shifted to the notion that I'm damaged. Occasionally, someone
will even inform me that I have post-traumatic stress disorder. They're never
medical professionals, just strangers who've learned that I served.
One man told me that Iraq veterans "are all gonna snap in 10
years" and so, since I'd been back for three years, I had seven left. Another,
after I'd explained that I didn't suffer from PTSD and that my deployment as a
staff officer in Iraq had been mild, said that I needed to have an honest
conversation with myself. And since I'm a writer, I've been asked more times
than I can count whether my writing is an act of therapy.
I'm never offended; these are genuinely concerned people trying to reach
out. But I find it all strange, especially since the assumption never seems to
be that I have the actual symptoms of PTSD—intrusive memories of some
traumatic event, numbing behaviors, a state of persistent hyperarousal.
Instead, it is more in line with the Iraq veteran Brian van Reet's observation
that "PTSD has graduated from a diagnosis into an idiom used by soldiers
and civilians to talk about all kinds of suffering, loss, grief, guilt, rage,
and unrewarded sacrifice." For a certain subset of the population, my
service means that I—along with all other veterans—must be, in some ill-defined
way, broken.
I suppose it is the lot of soldiers and Marines to be objectified
according to the politics of the day and the mood of the American people about
their war. I know a veteran of World War II who hates the idea of the Greatest
Generation. "War ruined my life," he told me. "I couldn't date
girls after the war. I couldn't go with people. I was a loner… It took years
after the war for me to realize that the Earth is beautiful, not always ugly.
Because I had so many friends killed in front of me, on the side of me, and how
they missed me, I have no idea."
Vietnam veterans—who, like World War II veterans, were a mix of
volunteers and draftees and probably expected, at least at the beginning of the
war, a similar beatification—had the opposite problem. In "Recovering From
the War," Patience H.C. Mason relates her husband's story: "Bob, who
never fired a gun in Vietnam…who saved hundreds of lives by going in for
wounded when it was too hot for the medevacs…got off the plane to buy some
magazines in Hawaii. The clerk smiled at him and asked if he was coming back
from Vietnam. He smiled back and nodded. 'Murderer!' she said."
Compared with that kind of reception, the earnest pity that Iraq and
Afghanistan veterans often receive is awkward to complain about. It can
sometimes even work to our advantage. When a friend of mine went
apartment-hunting recently, he had a potential landlord cry and call him a
"poor soul" because of his service. "I went along with it,"
he said sheepishly. He didn't want to blow his chances on the application.
Still, there is something deeply unsettling about the way we so often
choose to think about those who served. "People only want to ask me about
the worst things that happened," an Afghanistan veteran recently told me.
"Never my best times in the Corps. Who were my favorite people I served
with? Or even, hell, what was the biggest barracks rat I ever saw? It wasn't
all bad."
The theologian Jonathan Edwards didn't consider pity an expression of
"true virtue." Pity addresses the perceived suffering, not the whole
individual. "Men may pity others under exquisite torment," Edwards
wrote, "when yet they would have been grieved if they had seen their
prosperity."
Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable
with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite. Thus the
response of a New York partygoer who—after a friend explained that the proudest
moment of his deployment to Iraq came when his soldiers were fired on and
decided not to fire back—replied, "That must make the nightmares even
worse."
This insistence on treating veterans as objects of pity plays out in our
national dialogue as well, whether it is Bill Maher saying on his April 4 HBO
show, "Anytime you send anyone to war, they come back a little
crazy," or a Washington Times article about PTSD claiming that,
"Roughly 2.6 million veterans who serve in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer
from PTSD-type symptoms." That is roughly the total number of veterans who
served, which suggests that the reporter thought there might be a 100% saturation
rate of PTSD among veterans.
Expert estimates of the actual prevalence of PTSD vary between 11% and
20% for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, according to the U.S. Veterans
Administration. A 2012 VA report concluded that 247,243 veterans had been
diagnosed with the disorder at VA hospitals and clinics. (For some perspective
on these numbers: According to experts cited by the VA, some 8% of the overall
U.S. population suffers from PTSD at some point in their lives, compared with
up to 10% of Desert Storm veterans and about 30% of those from Vietnam.)
Some of these diagnosed veterans are my friends, and though their
injuries certainly deserve all the research and support that we as a society
can give, the current narrative about PTSD does them no favors. Even the Pulitzer
Prize-winning reporter David Finkel, who has produced some of the bravest and
most admirable reporting on the Iraq war and its aftermath, can fall into
uncomfortable generalizations. In his recent book "Thank You for Your
Service," he writes of a battalion of 800 men: "All the soldiers…came
home broken in various degrees, even the ones who are fine."
I don't know what it means to be simultaneously "broken" and
"fine." I do have friends with real PTSD, which they manage with
varying degrees of success. I also have friends whose pride in their service is
matched by feelings of sorrow, anger and bitterness. But I wouldn't classify
them as "broken." If a friend of yours just died on his seventh
deployment in a war that hardly makes the news anymore and you didn't feel sad,
angry and bitter, perhaps that is what counts as "broken." Likewise,
if the absence of any public sense that we are a nation still at war doesn't
leave you feeling alienated, perhaps that means you're "broken" too.
Pity places the focus on what's wrong with veterans. But for veterans
looking at the society that sent them to war, it may not feel like they're the
ones with the most serious problem.
Experts think
PTSD occurs:
In
about 11-20% of U.S. veterans of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
In
as many as 10% of veterans of the 1991 Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm)
In
about 30% of veterans of the Vietnam War
Worse, those warm feelings of pity toward us broken veterans can too
easily turn ugly. After the April 2 shooting spree at Fort Hood that left three
soldiers dead and 16 wounded, the Huffington Post ran an article titled
"This Map Shows the Deadly Aftermath of War Right Here at Home,"
complete with a graphic showing killings committed by veterans.
Such "ticking time-bombs" articles usually fail to put their
numbers in perspective. Indeed, one Marine who had trained as an intelligence
analyst crunched the murder-rate numbers for a VA blog and found that, if the
Huffington Post's numbers were accurate, the rate for veteran-committed
homicide would still be a fourth of that for the general population. (The
Huffington Post later took down the article, admitting that it was
"incomplete and misleading.") While the exact numbers are difficult
to measure, it appears that the crime rate for veterans is comparable to, if
not lower than, the civilian crime rate, with veterans actually
underrepresented in the U.S. prison population, according to Justice Department
statistics.
As Sgt. Dakota Meyer, a young Marine and PTSD sufferer who was awarded
the Medal of Honor for heroism in Afghanistan, explained after the Fort Hood
shooting, "PTSD does not put you in the mind-set to go out and kill
innocent people… The media label this shooting PTSD, but if what that man did
is PTSD, then I don't have it."
Kristen Rouse, a veteran and blogger who was struck by another article
alerting fearful readers to ZIP Codes that have large numbers of veterans with
PTSD, wrote that the article treated a PTSD database "like a sex offender
registry." A recent opinion piece in the New York Times even tried to link
combat trauma with membership in the Ku Klux Klan. If vets are truly "broken,"
after all, there really is no telling what they might do.
This perspective is more than a little bizarre. Veterans rank among our
most engaged, productive citizens. Just look at nonprofit groups such as The
Mission Continues, which provides public-service fellowships for veterans
across the country ("Reporting for duty in your community," their
website says), or at the engagement efforts of groups such as the Iraq and
Afghanistan Veterans of America (which strives to connect "the 99% of the
population who haven't served in Iraq or Afghanistan with the 1% who
have").
In New York, the contributions being made by veterans couldn't have been
more apparent than after Hurricane Sandy. When the city failed to coordinate
relief efforts in the Rockaways, the veteran-led relief group Team Rubicon
filled the leadership gap by using a data-visualization program to map
conditions and coordinate efforts to help people stranded after the storm.
Veterans are used to creating order in chaotic environments—just the sort of
people a city in a crisis needs.
But let's not see the veterans engaged in this work as a group of
"healthy" veterans who can be contrasted easily with a second group
of "broken" veterans. Some of our most inspiring veterans have been
plagued by the same issues that tend to receive such hyperbolic press. One of
the founders of Team Rubicon, Clay Hunt, was a Marine who served two
deployments in Iraq, provided relief efforts after earthquakes in Chile and
Haiti, raised money for wounded veterans and helped lobby Congress for
veterans' benefits. He also, at age 28, joined the sad ranks of veterans who
have taken their own lives.
I suppose that pity is one natural response to such a story. But I find
it difficult to pity someone who, when his life is considered in its totality,
achieved so much good and touched so many people.
War subjects some of its participants to more than any person can bear,
and it destroys them. War makes others stronger. For most of us, it leaves a
complex legacy. And though many veterans appreciate the well-meaning sentiments
behind even the most misdirected pity, I can't help feeling that all of us,
especially those who are struggling, deserve a little less pity and a little
more respect.
Mr. Klay served
in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2005 to 2009, including a tour of duty in Iraq
from January 2007 to February 2008. He is the author of
"Redeployment," a short-story collection recently published by the
Penguin Press.
Thanks for sharinng this
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