Healing Combat Trauma

Quotable Quotes -- A 5th Century Mercenary on the Warrior's Life

"It is one thing to study war and another to live the warrior's life." -- Telamon of Arcadia, mercenary of the fifth century B.C.

If you want to have a clearer picture of what it takes to live the warrior life -- and the ongoing attempt to integrate and embody those experiences into one's current life -- be sure to watch the remarkable documentary starring Rudy Reyes which we wrote about recently, here. The documentary, by In Their Boots, is entitled, "The Way of the Warrior."

I think of all the warriors I have known, and they're all still integrating what they've learned and been into who they are right now. It isn't easy, and it never stops. But healing does and can happen.

"Healing Happens" -- Support Our Work at Healing Combat Trauma

Are you a combat veteran with PTSD, a family member, caregiver, or healthcare provider who believes -- as we do -- that "healing happens"?! Then purchase some beautiful gear at CafePress that shows the world you believe in healing.

We've got T-shirts, hoodies, coffee mugs, even a baby bib and an awesome-looking messenger bag that all share the same message of healing and hope. A portion of the proceeds from the sale goes to benefit our work. We hope you'll take a look, at our Healing Combat Trauma store on CafePress, linked here.

And thank you in advance for your support of our work.

Drug-Free Breathing and Relaxation Study for Veterans with PTSD

Here's a study that may be of interest to veterans with PTSD who are in the Bay Area (San Francisco). Biofeedback is a useful technique in the stress-management toolkit. It's hard to say whether it will really help with PTSD but learning it will help with stress levels in general; and there are other ways to learn it/practice it even if you can't be part of the study. More on that separately.

From the study description:

Have you experienced a traumatic event? Do you experience:

• Recurrent dreams or memories of the event?
• Avoidance of people, places, or things that remind you of the event?
• Hypervigilance or are easily startled?
• Difficulty falling or staying asleep?

If you have any of these or similar symptoms, you may be suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

You may be eligible to participate in a drug-free Breathing and Relaxation Therapy study using a biofeedback device at no cost.

The study is conducted by researchers at Stanford University and the VA Health Care System, Palo Alto. Services provided to participants include free psychiatric and physiological evaluation. Financial compensation also provided. To participate in the study you must be between ages 18-65

For general information about participant rights, contact 1-866-680-2906

For further information, please contact (650) 493-5000 ext 69995 or BaRTstudy@gmail.com.

Eddie's Place on Facebook Chronicles the Story of an American Hero with PTSD

If you've been following our "An American Veteran" series the past year on this site about Eddie Livingston -- the World War II veteran and POW who wrote powerfully and simply about the trials of being a veteran with untreated PTSD -- we've set up a "page" for him on Facebook where you can learn more about him and read some of his writings. The page is called "Eddie's Place," and you can click here for that link.

A little bit more about who Eddie is:

A sharecropper's son from Alabama, Eddie enlisted in Army at 15 years old. He joined the 82nd Airborne and volunteered to be part of the "Pathfinders," a small group who parachuted into Normandy ahead of the Allied invasion. He was later captured, and spent a year as a prisoner of war (POW). Eddie fought in five campaigns in Salerno, Sicily, Cassino, Anzio and Normandy, and was a POW at the infamous Belsen-Buchenwald. He received seven purple hearts, three bronze stars with combat "V" for valor, two presidential unit citations, and was awarded, but never received, the distinguished service cross for his valor at Normandy.

There's a movie about the Pathfinders, in which Michael Connor Humphries, himself an Army vet, who played the young Forrest Gump in the movie of the same name, plays the part of Eddie. The movie, "In the Company of Strangers," has just been released overseas. You can watch it via download on the Web, here, or learn more about its production in links on "Eddie's Place" on Facebook.

Despite Eddie's valiant service, he spent most of the last three decades of his life living in abject squalor in Alabama, in a broken-down home without running water or electricity. The letters that he typed to everyone who would listen -- Life magazine, U.S. presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Ann Landers, newspaper editors and of course the VA -- are a powerful testament by a simple, humble man about the pains and perils of being a veteran with untreated PTSD, and so much more. A few sample quotes from Eddie:

"People tell me to forget the war, telling me it is over. Their advice is sound and well-intentioned but impossible to follow. Simply because my mind is not a faucet that I can turn on and off and at will. I am working on it."

and

"Although the war is long over, the experiences of war especially that P.O.W. (experience) still bother me very much at times. I have periods of nervousness and fear in which I am frightened and suspicious of almost everyone."

and

"After four years, seven wounds, a year as a P.O.W., World War II ended for me. I did the best I could, and no man should feel ashamed of his best. I have always known that war is our ultimate failure. But war is an addictive thing. I became addicted, and now I am addicted to agitation. I have no way of knowing how crazy I am. I doubt if the psychiatrist would (even) know. I made the fatal mistake of staying in combat too long. I had no choice; I had to stay. What we know does hurt us. It is what I know that has made me the way I am."

For more about this unsung American hero, read the "An American Veteran" series here, and follow him on the "Eddie's Place" page on Facebook, linked here.

Quotable Quotes -- Chief Dan George on the Necessity of Love

It's not always easy to love a combat veteran with PTSD. Heck, it's not even easy to BE a combat veteran with PTSD and manage to love yourself, or those around you the way that you want to.

But part of healing is getting back in touch with how important love is, and even respecting its own form of therapeutic, healing power. Listen to these words from a very wise sage about just how important love is, in the natural order of things:

"Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. We must have it because without it we become weak and faint. Without love our self-esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails. Without love we can no longer look out confidently at the world." -- Chief Dan George, Canadian First Nations chief, poet, author and Academy Award-winning actor.

Martin Luther King Jr Had a Dream for Combat Veterans, Too

Martin Luther King Jr., from a speech delivered exactly one year before he was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn.:

"This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love." -- Martin Luther King Jr, speech at Riverside Church in New York City, April 4, 1967. 

Editor's note: A link to the online text and audio of his full speech is here.

Quotable Quotes -- Vulnerability, Trust and the Breakthrough

“We're never so vulnerable than when we trust someone - but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy." -- Walter Anderson

Quotable Quotes -- Helen Keller on Suffering Refining Character

It's not easy to find any true benefit to suffering, but occasionally, a wise person offers some. Here's what Helen Keller -- someone who surely endured much of what the rest of us would consider suffering -- had to say:

"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved." -- Helen Keller.

Marine Recon Rudy Reyes in "The Way of the Warrior" Documentary from "In Their Boots"

The documentary series "In Their Boots" does a great job at showcasing important aspects of the servicemember, veteran, and family member experience in short films on subjects as varied as the participants themselves. Every single one of the episodes is worth watching and taken together, they represent an entire educational arc about the OIF/OEF veteran experience. Periodically we highlight one of the documentary series' new episodes here.

Rudy Reyes, former Marine recon sniper, star of "Generation Kill," and author of "Hero Living" is the star of the recent "In Their Boots" episode entitled: "The Way of the Warrior." The charismatic and exceptionally authentic Reyes carries the entire show himself, making crystal clear the conflicts within and without that the warrior faces. Reyes, not unlike many other veterans, has been fighting serious battles on and off his entire life. The way of the warrior has always appealed to him; and he speaks with powerful candor about the costs, as well as the camaraderie, this life has brought him.

Confucius wrote, "He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior." Rudy Reyes is on that path. His level of honesty is not typical, is not ordinary, and does not come without a very high price; but you honor it with your attention. So many other warriors cannot be this clear or this forthright about articulating their inner struggles. While we give warriors points for subduing others in combat, those who watch this territory know the hardest battles are fought and won within. Rudy Reyes continually finds, and challenges, this personal edge. In this way, he truly embodies "the way of the warrior."

Editor's note: The link to the film is below. The photo pictured below is not Rudy Reyes.

Quotable Quotes -- Smedley Butler, Maverick Marine, on the True Costs of War to Veterans and Their Families

USMC Major General Smedley Butler wrote a remarkable and well-known piece of work called "War is a Racket," originally delivered as a stinging speech. In it, he takes the war profiteers of World War I and beyond to task for forgetting who it is who fights the battle, and who bears the ultimate price of war. His words are, of course, as relevant today as they ever were. In fact, it's intriguing to read his words and quiz ourselves how alike -- or different -- are conditions today.

So many people want to say, "Oh, we're just finding out about PTSD, that's why the system lags behind in treating vets." But in fact, this is not the case at all. The phenomenon of combat-wounded bodies, minds and spirits has been around as long as there's been war, irrespective of what name we've used to describe the malady. "Shell shock"? "Soldier's Heart"? "Post-Traumatic Stress"? Ultimately, it's all the same thing. And documentaries from "Hidden Wounds" and "The Soldier's Heart" back in 2006, which I wrote about here almost five years ago now, to HBO's recent "Wartorn" all make this point quite eloquently.

But back to Smedley Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor winner who served more than 33 years on active duty in the Marine Corps. Here's a sampling of his direct comments on what happens to the wounded and their families, and we quote it at length because there's just so much material here to really chew over and decide how "new" the struggles we're facing really are, re-integrating veterans after combat. His words:

"But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.

If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran's hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men -- men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.

Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face" ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.

In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don't even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.

There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement -- the young boys couldn't stand it.

That's a part of the bill. So much for the dead -- they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded -- they are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too -- they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam -- on which a profit had been made. They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. The paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they were hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and the cold and in the rain -- with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby.

But don't forget -- the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too.

Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service. The government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we captured any vessels, the soldiers all got their share -- at least, they were supposed to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the soldier anyway. Then soldiers couldn't bargain for their labor, Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn't.

Napoleon once said,

"All men are enamored of decorations . . . they positively hunger for them."

So by developing the Napoleonic system -- the medal business -- the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.

In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army.

So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side . . . it is His will that the Germans be killed.

And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies . . . to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious.

Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure."

Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.

All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill . . . and be killed.

But wait!

Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance -- something the employer pays for in an enlightened state -- and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left.

Then, the most crowning insolence of all -- he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days.

We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back -- when they came back from the war and couldn't find work -- at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!

Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly -- his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.

When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too -- as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices.

And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying."

-- Smedley Butler, "War is a Racket." (1935).

Editor's note: You can read "War is a Racket" in full at several places on the Web. It's well worth reading. And, if you'd rather hear key parts of it delivered as a speech, which was its original form, check out this link from YouTube.

Quotable Quotes -- Epictetus on Living in the Present Moment

"Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. Quit evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now." -- Epictetus, Stoic philosopher.

Quotable Quotes -- Ralph Waldo Emerson on a Positive Daily Mindset

Good advice for today and following: "Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Life, Death, Loss -- and the Compensations of Calamity

For everyone who's lost anyone -- and for veterans, that means their brothers and sisters in combat; for family members, their veteran -- there's obviously nothing good to be said about the tragic loss. But reading American luminary Ralph Waldo Emerson over the New Year's weekend, from an essay called "Compensation," we see him point to some positive things that loss brings forth. Not anything that lessens the original loss; but growth of a new kind, made possible because of that very loss.

Because it's almost impossible to find something good to say about something otherwise completely bad -- and because loss (and blame) tend to hang around for years, even decades longer than they "should" -- it seemed important to reprint Emerson's words here, in case they comfort any.

"We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in. We are idolators of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in to-day to rival or re-create that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old tent where once we had bread and shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, “Up and onward forevermore!” We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the New; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters, who look backwards.

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances and the reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, from an essay called "Compensation," published in 1841.

Quotable Quotes -- Ralph Waldo Emerson on the Patience of Nature

"Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson.