You might have seen the following in the January
Harper's:
"Number of the GI Rights Hotline, a non-profit, non-governmental service for soldiers seeking assistance: 1-800-394-8544
Number of calls taken in 2004: 23,681"
That second number was only 1000 or so the year I first learned of the Hotline -- back in 1995, when it felt like about eight people fielding calls from thousands of military bases. We felt it was pretty busy then - before GWB, before this horrific war and the stream of trauma it's pouring back our way. Clearly, we didn't know what the word "busy" meant.
I thought I'd offer some notes from 1999, before the storm. (The named GIs are quite masked, of course, with all identifiers stripped or changed.) I wrote it to get down, in the moment, the experience on my end of the Hotline. I offer it now to honor the young people who trusted us, and me, to help them navigate their own big changes - as well as all those who are cramming the Hotline now, crying for survival.
Jim called again today --and he was still a Marine.
I had hoped the next time I heard from him, he would be out: calling me from his home in Arkansas, or else at least safely enroute. That his commanders at Camp Pendleton, after nearly six months of suicide threats, a psychiatrist's recommendation, his own quiet passionate patience, would make the obvious choice: the military discharge known as entry level separation, or "failure to adapt to military life." Instead, he was calling to tell me his command has seized on his statement (in therapy) that he had problems with depression long before he joined the Marines. They're threatening him with a court-martial for "fraudulent enlistment." Given the amount of recruiter fraud that goes unnoticed, and the lies that Jim himself was likely told, I'd burst out laughing if this weren't such a horrific situation. This is way beyond my expertise, way beyond the discharge information I spend most of my counseling time dispensing; I refer Jim to a lawyer, talk to him about Congressional help, but end up offering to coordinate both.
The next call, about an hour later, doesn't ask the usual "Is this the G.I. Rights Hotline?" Instead, I get a question that no longer surprises me. "Is this Chris?" Well, Lombardi, I tell myself, you always wanted to be famous.
I once hoped my name would be spoken across the land. That was before it was passed from hand to hand in the halls of Fort Benning, whispered in bathrooms in Puerto Rico, or over the net, until people I didn't know looked me up on people search and wrote to me. I never knew I'd get famous as a girl-who-understands, as if I were some cross between Mom and a lawyer, a prostitute and the chaplain they never had.
That was before the hotline exploded into ten thousand calls a year. It was also before some editorials I wrote, about the prevalence of rape and assault in the military, turned into a full-time job of their own, with hundreds of women calling in to tell their stories. Now I find myself having to explain, over and over, that I'm not a veteran myself, honest.
Answering the Hotline has changed my life. I've learned an immeasurable amount from this work -- this day by day contact with survivors of an institution that deliberately inflicts severe trauma, with an intent of creating and fostering violence (what the criminologist Lonnie Athens calls "violentization"). We get involved when this trauma has unforeseen results -- rape, or a kid throwing himself from a basic training wall. The result feels like prison activism sometimes: what we can actually do is so limited. We give information, referrals; we listen. With each call, when we say "What's going on?" the subtext is _I believe you. _
Now I take it as a compliment when a GI asks, "What branch of the service were you in? . . You just seem like you understand." I'd never thought of my capacity for empathy as a job skill; this whole experience has taught me listening skills, and patience, and the ability to take someone for where they are, only asking them to change slowly. It has undoubtedly changed me as a person, though it has sometimes contributed to my depression: it's as if I am walking around with all these fears and angers and slammed walls, these drill sergeants pasting feces over barracks doors, this sense of not knowing or understanding what happens next. Until I too am bewildered, I too am wondering where the next screamed order will come from. Until I am nearly as impatient as they with the slow pace of it all: the bureaucracies of military commands, their particular set of egos and priorities, while the guys who call beg me, "Isn't there a faster way?"
Then there's Jim, who knew enough to threaten suicide when he felt it and get a recommendation from the psychiatrist, calling me now because there are shadows in rehab who have been there for months.
On today's call I finally get Jim's backstory: he has a family at home, grandparents back in Kansas, who he says are enormously supportive. I then have to talk him into why it's important to get them involved, that they should keep calling their congressional caseworker every day: "my grandson's suicidal, the doctor already says to let him out!" He wants, I think, to take care of it himself; he has also a lawyer in Kansas. In truth his case is so new that I try to advise waiting, to see what the command does: but I am not the one in a rehab unit while the drill sergeants shout outside, "1,2,3,4, Marines kill, kill we will." I'm not the one who dreamt of turning my gun on myself.
When I think about it, there's quite a range of education, street-smarts, worldliness coming from the other end of the phone. One day runs the gamut -- from Jean, a Marine from New Orleans, who jumped when I mentioned Andrei Codrescu's Messi@h (which takes place there) to Dan, a navy conscientious objector, who's already accepted into the Lutheran Volunteer Corps the minute he gets out, to Jim, who's barely twenty, who wants most of all to farm back home.
Same with the kids who call us about the Delayed Enlistment Program, who've changed their minds and learn they can get out. I think of Brad, shy halting questions in a deep Tennessee accent, which made the word "eighteen" (for his age) almost indecipherable to me; Edgar, whose grandparents speak only Spanish and were terrorized by his recruiters, who told them he would suffer for the rest of his life if he didn't follow through on his promise to join the Army. (The usual rack of lies, as we've come to know them: no federal money for college, prison time, fines, arrest record.)
Another spectrum emerges in the conscientious objectors who've visited the office -- on leave, or AWOL. Cal, who's out now, was in high spirits when he snuck up here on his day off, saying "The military is paying me to be here!" Chea, a gentle Asian Marine, nodded gravely to everything I said about what I'd seen of the effects of military training -- and then offered some cogent observations of his own. "I find that I'm angry more easily now . . . I saw some nice guys turned into real jerks." And Kym, a tired-looking Berkeley hippie who joined out of abstract beliefs about peacekeeping, insisted on writing a CO claim, thirty pages of passionate manifesto, even though she's been AWOL since July, making her discharge an entirely different matter.
I thank the gods for the small group of veterans who are sharing CCCO's share of the Hotline with me -- these days taking most of the initial calls, working together on the tough cases. I feel sometimes like the Hotline is a small patch of fencing or something, trying to catch those caught in a whirlwind, the whirlwind of military recruiting and training. Every once a while someone slams against the fence and manages to hang on. It's hard and strange work, holding out your arms so someone can get over; only occasionally do you get to hear the cry, "I'm out! Thanks!"
It's not a bad way to be famous.
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Now, there are fifteen organizations and hundreds of people holding the fence together --including some who've made it through from the other side. If you talk about supporting the troops, those groups and the work they're doing is a pretty good start.
Because even if the troop withdrawal is sooner than we fear, that tsunami is coming -- 75 percent of those returning, by some estimates, will need some sort of support to deal with the aftermath. And the desperate maneuvers of an Army currently recruiting retireees and expanding its stop-loss policies will likely create even more need, even for those who don't go to Iraq.