God, the Army and PTSD--recommended article.

This story by Tara McKelvey for the Boston Review covers the relationship of the religion of some of the appointees overseeing the VA with their penny-pinching, glib, and dismissive response to the real disorder that effects the nerves and behaviors and sense-perceptions of persons who have been subjected first-hand to real emotional and physical trauma. It shows a culture that wanted to ignore the reality that soldiers are thinking, feeling human beings, or wanted to pacify them with self-help books like Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life, as if simply having the right attitude would be enough to hold at bay the real life and death terrors of war.

The blog-worthy excerpt:

Sullivan was working as an analyst at the Veterans Benefits Administration in Washington in early 2005 when he was called to a meeting with a top political appointee at the VA, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Michael McLendon. McLendon, an intensely focused man in a neatly pressed suit, kept a Bible on his desk at the office. Sullivan explained to McLendon and the other attendees that the rise in benefits claims the VA was noticing was caused partly by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were suffering from PTSD. “That’s too many,” McLendon said, then hit his hand on the table. “They are too young” to be filing claims, and they are doing it “too soon.” He hit the table again. The claims, he said, are “costing us too much money,” and if the veterans “believed in God and country . . . they would not come home with PTSD.” At that point, he slammed his palm against the table a final time, making a loud smack. Everyone in the room fell silent.

“I was a little bit surprised,” Sullivan said, recalling the incident. “In that one comment, he appeared to be a religious fundamentalist.” For Sullivan, McLendon’s remarks reflected the views of many political appointees in the VA and revealed what was behind their efforts to reduce costs by restricting claims. The backlog of claims was immense, and veterans, often suffering extreme psychological stress, had to wait an average of five months for decisions on their requests.

When I asked him years later about the meeting, McLendon laughed. Then his face darkened in anger. “Anybody who knows me knows I wouldn’t talk that way.”

Nevertheless, McLendon was open about the skepticism he felt toward the diagnosis of PTSD, calling it “a made-up term,” which has “taken on a life of its own.” As he spoke about the diagnosis, he pounded the table with the side of his hand more than ten times, hitting it so hard that the wooden surface shook. “Do I think they have a mental illness and should be stigmatized for the rest of their life?” he asked. “What gives a psychiatrist the right to do that?”

(Emphasis mine. Although other bloggers have also selected this bit.)

This way of thinking, this attitude of "belief in God and country" preserving the minds of the men and women who serve in sometimes harsh and definitely perilous conditions, strikes a bit close to my own idea that, whether appointee or bureaucrat or REMF, there is a habit of thinking of the US serviceperson as some robot. I think of it as the "No true American soldier" fallacy. It's a paradigm that takes as its articles of faith that there are no atheists in foxholes, that the needs of soldiers are few and they, and their families, can survive on little, that they do not need to have considerations made for such issues as cultural diversity or sexuality, and that they serve a fully admirable purpose--until they need to be replaced for a variety of unpleasant reasons.

They are heroes or heroines like Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman. They don't freak out, are never raped, seldom get captured, don't see friendly fire due to tactical errors or communications problems, and they never miss their target. Or miss being home except in letters to reassure their families. Because they only have to kill baddies, they don't feel it, and because the baddies can't shoot straight, they don't feel real fear. (It's total crap, of course.)

Our fighting men and women are first and foremost men and women. They are only taught to fight. The traumas they experience, and the reality of transitioning from the battlefield to home is an issue that has to be addressed, sometimes even with one-to-one counseling. Belief in God and country is not always enough to someone who has seen Hell in some other country. What they need is reassurance that they aren't in a new minefield, or that there isn't another IED around the corner when they are redeployed. If their nerves have been wound up to expect something that never occurs at home, they might need medically, pharmaceutically wound back down--that's just science.

I'm not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but I appreciate what they do. I think they can do more than pastors can. And I also think our soldiers should see a real open-door from their support-system regarding treatment for their issues, and not stigmatization.

I think that would be part and parcel of the phrase "the least we can do."