Breaking the Trance of Denial

by Anne Pyburn, January 27, 2009

Across eras and cultures, harsh lessons have been considered essential to manhood: physical discipline, emotional suppression, competition. Larry Winters learned well, becoming a United States Marine during the Vietnam War, when that notion of manhood was being widely (and often unkindly) questioned.

Fifty-eight thousand young soldiers never came back from that journey. A hundred thousand more have since died by their own hands—and who can count the collateral damage to relationships and dreams? We still live in a nation where conditioning a dog to fight gets you jail time, while doing the same to humans is considered honest work. Now, with two wars in progress, the government still debates whether those who admit to suffering emotionally are “really wounded,” and thus deserving of disability checks and medals.

As for Winters, though far from unscathed, he managed to combine introspection and passion and become a psychologist, a journey he chronicles in The Making and Unmaking of a Marine (Millrock Writers Collective, 2007). His new play, “Nothing Means Nothing,” “addresses many of the hidden questions of veterans’ lives.” Within those “hidden questions,” true healing may lurk; Winters offers the outlines of a map and a loving heart to light the path.

The Pentagon just decided not to award the Purple Heart to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) sufferers, saying that PTSD “is not a wound intentionally caused by the enemy, but a secondary effect caused by witnessing or experiencing a traumatic event.”
Dollars and semantics. Did the government “intentionally” send troops into war? Do they “intentionally” hide wounded and dead veterans returning under the cover of night? Does the Pentagon “intentionally” create a network of bureaucratic chaos that no sane human being can navigate, preventing many from receiving deserved benefits? Is it “intentional” that we isolate veterans in VA hospitals and don’t face the results of war in our civilian waiting rooms?

Where the hell did those traumatic events come from, if not an enemy? I wonder how many of those Pentagon decision makers would like to personally experience the “secondary effect caused by witnessing or experiencing a traumatic event” and have it discounted?