I think it’s easy to objectify veterans and their experiences, even if I believe that I care about them personally. I do it all the time, and I work with currently serving military folks who are combat veterans as well as with veterans who have separated from Active Duty (AD). I even objectify myself or my experiences as a veteran, I suppose, to create a buffer, for me, or “identity” between myself and those I write about or interact with. The old “subject-object” dichotomy has fueled all kinds of philosophical debates for a long time, so I guess I just have to accept that it "is what it is," as a friend of mine likes to say. It’s similar to the “head-heart” dichotomy, the longest distance you’ll ever travel being between them—that sort of thing.
I’d like to try to get to the heart quickly, but it’s s struggle. First, to put just a tad more distance ahead of this journey, let me admit this up-front: I didn’t serve in combat, instead serving near the DMZ in South Korea in the mid-70s, hardship duty, not combat. Whatever PTSD-originating experience I’d gone through actually pre-dated my enlistment, had to do with abuse I’d gone through as a kid in Chicago (stuff I still don’t talk about much outside of a therapeutic space), so whatever military-related events that might have added a new wrinkle to the emotional labyrinth I started to unravel in therapy just two years ago did not come from “combat” as folks think of combat. That’s writing for another day, anyway. I mention it to say that if I can “identify” with the experiences of my brothers and sisters who have been traumatized by their military, combat, or related horrific experiences, I attribute that to some combination of what I went through both prior to and during my military experience. Now, to the heart...
I met “Trina” in 2005, a petite, 20 year old woman, dressed in camouflage fatigues, a “combat” patch on her right shoulder. I know a “combat patch” because of my military experience. She sat dead-center in a freshman English class I decided to teach as an adjunct that fall. It ended up being the last class I have taught. Did she wear the camouflage to hide by deflecting others from whom she already felt alienated? Perhaps. Did she hope someone would ask where she’d been, what she’d seen, why she wore a duty uniform while off-duty? Did she dare someone to approach her an not understand? Perhaps that, too. This was a community college, a Sunday class. It was clear from the beginning that no one wanted to be there, eventually, it would turn out, myself included. Clearly, Trina was distracted, leaving to take a cell phone call (despite the “rule” for turning off phones during class) or to go to the latrine. Though she, too, might have wished to have been elsewhere, she also seemed to want to be there more than anywhere else. What tested her patience most, she would later tell me, was the other students’ complaints about meeting on Sunday, having to read so much between sessions (with once-per-week meetings, I doubled the reading assignments), and of course, having to take freshman English in the first place. Don’t even get me started on that complaint—I’ve taught off-and-on since 1984. Like many student veterans, especially combat veterans, Trina considered her student counterparts to be trivializing a huge opportunity, acting spoiled, complaining where they should be grateful, being unwilling to accept responsibility for performing a mission for which they, themselves, had volunteered, that sort of thing.
I reached out to Trina after reading one of her in-class essay responses to whatever question I’d posed. The question was diagnostic so most folks' responses were perfunctory (and bad). If you’ve ever taught freshman English and come across that occasionally gifted writer, not just competent, but amazing, you’d know why I approached her. Her writing revealed passion and insight way beyond her peers. It also suggested she was deeply troubled by something. We talked, I told her I was a veteran, and learned that she’d recently come back from Iraq, served with the 4th Infantry Division during its first deployment, a period during which the division was heavily engaged in attacking Tikrit, eventually providing forces that would find and capture Saddam Hussein. Whatever Trina had personally experienced or witnessed during her tour in Iraq, that deployment clearly haunted her even as she sat there, I believe attempting to move beyond what haunted her by taking classes, getting back into “life” back home, that kind of thing. I believe it was not working for her.
I encouraged her to write about here combat experience, that it might help her come to understand it better, get a handle on its meaning. Here, little did I know, I was really getting out of my element, perhaps, moving beyond my capacity to truly assist. I'm supposing now that she just wasn't ready for any of this. I tried to tread lightly, asked her if she could talk about her experiences ("Not yet"). Did she think she was suffering from PTSD? “Yes.” Did she feel she could seek help for it via military channels? “Absolutely not.” At that time, most combat vets who were still serving believed (and had reason to) that an admission of PTSD was career suicide, if, in fact, they desired a military career.
In truth, I had no idea what she had gone through, nor how writing about it in an unsupervised way, outside of a therapeutic environment, might help. I’d thought about the possibility of her having been sexually assaulted, but had no idea what I would do about it if she actually started writing about such experiences. She appeared to want to confide somewhere, to someone, but looking back, I doubt I would have been the best person in whom to confide. Apart from her inability to write about the military experience, anything she wrote was ferociously angry and hyper-critical of others, the military, fellow-students, faculty, her neighborhood in suburban Washington, DC, her friends.
She started to come to class later, making excuses to leave early. Eventually, she disappeared about mid-term. What little I had from her in writing revealed someone who could have gone way beyond meeting the assignments to exploring some really illuminating prose or poetry, perhaps developing something worthy of publication, not just in a student publication but national one. The fact that this was something I’d done when I started college should have told me I was, in a sense, presuming to know what would have been best for her. That I was overstating the value of my experience and certainly undervaluing how little I knew about her situation. I saw empowerment or liberation through writing where she might have been better served in a therapeutic environment that, sadly, she saw as off-limits under her current circumstances. What she did say before she left is that she was not going to re-enlist, that she was done with the military. Wherever she is today (she never replied to phone calls or e-mails, and the English department had no idea what happened to her), someday I’d like to thank her for the impact that our brief and seemingly futile interaction had on me.
First, I’d just started working a new job at the place I’d been for 15 years before I met her. All those years, I helped colleges and universities find grants for research. In 2005, I’d just started working under a contract that involved helping Active Duty soldiers and veterans go back to college, as well as helping colleges to provide a more welcoming environment for returning veterans. What I, at the time, saw as my failure with Trina led me to put everything I had into developing a presentation we called “From the Battlefield to the Classroom,” which I ended up taking to dozens of colleges and universities between 2006 and 2010. More importantly, witnessing Trina’s struggle first-hand affected my decision to go back into therapy in late 2010, when my work under that contract ended and my emotional world started collapsing. For the first time, I sought to understand what exactly had haunted portions of my life since my early teens and went deeper into therapy than I’d ever dared before. I finally got a diagnosis, learning that I, too, suffered from PTSD. What I realized in my case, too, thanks to my dealing with a caring and careful therapist, is that traveling back through such PTSD-generating experiences is extremely serious and delicate business. As a friend of mine has said, “It’s tough sledding” more often than not sometimes.
Did Trina experience Military Sexual Trauma (MST), due to which she now suffered from PTSD? I posted a diary here last week focused substantially on MST. Not many folks read it, but I get it. There are a lot of issues that compete for space here. And lately, there have been a lot of big things going on. Anyway, based on what I researched and wrote about here, I believe it is highly likely that she did have PTSD based in part on MST. Beyond what I wrote about in that diary, it is a fact that very many women (and quite a few men) who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan have died from “non-combat” causes. According to one source, out of the 130 fatalities among women who have served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly half, 50, died from non-combat causes. In nearly half of those cases, family members of the deceased service member remain very suspicious of the cause, leading them to pursue investigations that might lead to answers. In most cases, those family members suspect violence related to sexual assault as the cause of death. I believe their suspicions are well-founded, which is why the military is less-than-forthcoming with information about such deaths.
Whether or not MST contributed to Trina’s PTSD, I don't know for sure. Still, I am grateful she survived and hopeful that she has found the path to healing that she needs. She certainly contributed to my seeking that path through the example of her courage. She is a daughter, perhaps a mother, perhaps a sister, friend, beloved of many, somewhere. For me, she can never exist in the abstract, can never be just an object. I think about her often, have prayed for her, and believe that she has found a healing path, as have I. She will make it home, unlike many of her sisters and brothers, our brothers and sisters, whose existence we might tend to objectify because the tragedy of many of their experiences would otherwise, thoroughly, break our hearts.