More reflections from Claude Anshin Thomas:
"So you see that the war is not over; it never ends. My involvement in this war has scarred me in many wars. It scarred my body, it scarred my heart, it scarred my soul. The reality of this war lives with me today. It doesn’t go away. There is no sense trying to hide it, because war does not go away.
Vietnam was the first war after which society could not sweep its soldiers’ pain and anguish under the carpet of heroism and adulation. The defeat and shame of that war have allowed us to see more truthfully the defeat and shame of all war and all violence, but Vietnam veterans have paid a heavy price for this truthfulness.
The embrace of family and friends and the celebration of ticker tape parades can seem to justify much hardship and cruelty. But as I have been able to interact more and more with people of my father’s generation, I have discovered just how many veterans from the Second World War spent their entire lives isolated from their families, suffering in silence. They have spent endless hours in the garage or the basement alone, many of them – like my father and other veterans I grew up with – attempting to drink away the guilt, the shame, the confusion, the fear, the anger, all the feelings of lack of feelings that are the reality of war. These men are trapped in a code of silence, and many of them are dying there.
The military teaches you to dehumanize, but much in our society also teaches us to dehumanize. And once you dehumanize, once that becomes a habit, it doesn’t change easily. When we dehumanize others, we lose our humanity. This doesn’t just happen in the military: it happens through television, in the movies, in the magazines; it happens on the street; it happens in stores and in the workplace. Those who haven’t served in the military are confronted with very similar kinds of issues. Think of those shootings in schoolyards, people beating someone [else] to death because the person is gay, road rage. Even just shouting at someone in a checkout line because we can’t tolerate the uncomfortable feelings that can arise when we have to wait.
In many life experiences, we are dehumanizing others and being dehumanized The war in Vietnam, the war in the Persian Gulf, the war in Kosovo, the war on the streets of [South Central] Los Angeles, Hartford, Denver, Cleveland, or any town, the wars that take place in our homes – what are the seeds of those wars? Vietnam is only an expression of something that beings inside each and every one of us, male or female. We all possess the seeds of violence, the seeds of war.
When I entered a rehabilitation center for drug addiction in 1983, I was able to stop using drugs, stop drinking. After I stopped using drugs and alcohol, the obvious intoxicants, I began to be able to learn what the other intoxicants were that were preventing me from looking at myself. And I began to stop using those things also. I stopped using caffeine, I stopped using nicotine, I stopped eating processed sugar, I stopped eating meat, I stopped going from one relationship to another. I kept coming more and more back to myself, in my commitment to heal, even though I did not understand (in any intellectual way) what it was that I was doing.
In 1990 it became impossible for me to hide from the reality of my Vietnam experience any longer. Vietnam was not just in my head; it was all through me. I had talked intellectually about Vietnam, but I had never fully opened myself to the totality of the experience. Now the pain reached a point where it was so great that I only wanted to hide from it, to run from it yet again. My first thought, of course, was to get drunk. When I drink, it covers the pain like a blanket. But under the blanket, inside me, is full of barbed wire; every time I move it cuts at me, tears my skin. When I drink, I have the illusion that I have put a buffer between my skin and the barbed wire, but this is not the truth; when I am anesthetized, I am just not so aware of the ripping and tearing…"
-- from At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace, by Claude Anshin Thomas.
