Back in the fall of 2005, I had a conversation with a Marine officer in Ramadi, when Ramadi was an extremely violent place. The officer was on his third or fourth tour, and confided that he thought he'd come back to Iraq "to lay my demons down on the battlefield." Not sure what he meant by that, I suggested that more likely the opposite was true. People picked up demons on the battlefield (e.g., post-traumatic stress) but were rarely able to lay them down. If they could, more people would probably want to go to war.
In any case, as our conversation progressed over the ensuing months, I strongly preached the "gospel" of integration: something I'd learned from my own excursion into Taoist acupuncture and Chinese medicine in general. The concept of embracing opposites within us, and not rejecting one side of ourselves while embracing the other; recognizing that the good and the bad are both equally "us." It's an abstract concept, and until there's a reason to face it head-on, perhaps we never really do. Post-traumatic stress is of course one great reason to face it. We're both the angels we were before combat and the demons we found ourselves being during combat.
Many a Marine and soldier has expressed their observation about being two people. The Marines even have a saying about it, how they know how to be "the best friend and the worst enemy." The yin and the yang, the dark and the light, both dwell within. Part of the exasperating hardship of PTSD is coming to terms with how this can even be true, and yet, not destroy you. Churches and sometimes even well-meaning friends and family members insist that you can only be one or the other: the good or the bad, and if you're conflicted, well, you must just need to "pray about it harder," or, "try not to think about it so much." In fact, while balancing two selves may seem quite precarious -- the ideal self and who you've actually become -- the reality is, synthesizing the two into the "non-dual" self may ultimately be a healthier expression and resolution of the conflict within.
With this as a background, it was with interest that I read the following passage in a short but powerful book by a Jungian psychoanalyst who wrote, addressing the intrinsic conflict in warriors,
"Medieval heroes had to slay their dragons; modern heroes have to take their dragons back home and integrate them with their personality." -- Robert A. Johnson, "Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche."
