Healing Combat Trauma

Holiday Gift: Rudy Reyes' Hero Living

If you're stumped for a holiday gift this year, think about the new inspirational book by Rudy Reyes, called "Hero Living: Seven Strides to Awaken Your Infinite Power," linked here.

Rudy Reyes is an inspirational "everyman" -- former Marine 1st recon, star of Generation Kill, who grew up admittedly hard and has honed, ever since, a set of internal values modeled on attributes of classical warriors. While Reyes, a former world martial arts champion, has honed his body to a superlative degree, it's his inside that's even more interesting -- how he's dealt with, and is still in the process of dealing with -- assaults on his soul, from childhood through combat.

Reyes has much in common with his childhood hero, Bruce Lee, from the unparalleled attention to fitness, to the equal attraction to the philosophical underpinnings of what success really is.

There's something for everyone in this book, and best of all, it reflects someone who's inspirational, yes, in his attitudes towards obstacles -- systematically conquering them all, in a focused way, one after another -- but is also, even by his own admission, very much "still a work in progress." Go, Rudy!

Editor's Note: For a recent article in "Military Times" about Rudy Reyes, entitled "The Hero Life: For Rudy Reyes, Inspiring Others is a Full-Time Job," click here.

Transforming an Addiction to ... Guilt, Suffering and Blame

Although it's been ten years since the book first came out, I've recently been reading "The Four Agreements: A Toltec Wisdom Book," by Don Miguel Ruiz. It's dynamic and interesting, and in places, he touches quite a bit on suffering and what he sees as our unfortunate lifelong addiction to it.

Because combat veterans and PTSD is what's frequently on my mind, it was hard to read what he wrote and not draw some parallels with our current topic. At the risk of minimizing the severity of what PTSD actually is, I still think it's instructive to consider what Ruiz says about suffering in general, and question ourselves about whether any of it applies. It's a short book, but much longer than I can do justice to here (so be sure to read it), but what I'm going to do is excerpt several passages that will at least introduce some key concepts. Also, the usual disclaimers. Ruiz is a philosopher, not a psychotherapist. That said, his insights are interesting, novel, and potentially also fairly valid. It's always worth turning over a concept that plagues us to see if there are any new ways of looking at it. That's what I hope talking about Ruiz' book here on this blog might do.

Early on in the book, Ruiz mentions the in-justice of having to pay, in our minds, many times over for the same "mistake" or bad act, and how different it would be if we could act badly once, suffer guilt once, and be done with it. It's not the case, though, and he describes it:

“How many times do we pay for one mistake? The answer is, thousands of times. The human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for the same mistake. The rest of the animals pay once for every mistake that they make. But not us. We have a powerful memory. We make a mistake, we find ourselves guilty, and we punish ourselves. If justice exists, then that was enough; we don’t need to do it again. But every time we remember, we judge ourselves again, and again, and again.  If we have a wife or husband he or she also reminds us of the mistake, so we can judge ourselves again, and find ourselves guilty again. Is this fair?”

The problem with this is not only the lack of balance, but also what Ruiz emphasizes is the "emotional poison" that affects us:

“How many times do we make our spouse, our children, or our parents pay for the same mistake? Every time that we remember the mistake, we blame them again and send them all the emotional poison we feel at the injustice, and then we make them pay again for the same mistake. Is that justice? The Judge in the mind is wrong because the belief system, the Book of Law, is wrong. The whole dream is based on false law. Ninety-five percent of the beliefs we have stored in our minds are nothing but lies, and we suffer because we believe all these lies.”

A conversation I had earlier this year with the head of trauma research for the National Institute of Mental Health still stands out in my mind, regarding what he said about blame: that those who blame others, or themselves, are the slowest to heal from tragedy and trauma. The fact of affixing blame, and not being able to move past it, apparently becomes an obstacle. We certainly know people (you and I both do) and sometimes we are people who are fixated on and obsessed with actions in the past. We may even be in a cycle of constantly churning over past events, constantly recycling and reliving them in our minds, always seeking a possibly different ending -- and perhaps this invades our sleep, not only our awake lives. The constant churn with no possible solution is exhausting, and it's numbing. It's also hard to break. But it's also important to break, because without it, there's no moving on.

Back to Ruiz:

“From the point of view of the Victim we can say that something sad happened to us, and from the point of view of the warrior, we can say that what happened to us is normal.”

And why that could be vitally important:

 “Letting go of the past means you can enjoy the dream that is happening to you right now.”

Ahhh.

And then, most to our point (intention) here on this blog, what I hope we're all about:

“Awareness is always the first step because if you are not aware, there is nothing you can change. If you are not aware that your mind is full of wounds and emotional poison, you cannot begin to clean and heal the wounds and you will continue to suffer.”

“There is no reason to suffer. With awareness you can rebel and say, ‘This is enough!’ You can look for a way to heal and transform your personal dream.”

The Four Agreements: A Toltec Wisdom Book. A small book with some insightful philosophical thoughts that just might start us on the path -- or lead us closer to -- personal transformation for dealing with suffering, loss and guilt.

"Not Victims, but Veterans": Max Cleland Writes an Open Letter to Other Combat Veterans

Max Cleland, decorated Vietnam war hero, triple amputee, head of the Department of Veterans Affairs under President Carter, and PTSD sufferer, who came to that knowledge in later life, decades after his military service, has written a new book, called Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove.

There was an interview with Cleland on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday, October 6, 2009, linked here.

But most interesting for our purposes -- since this blog is about combat veterans and PTSD -- is the "open letter" to other veterans that Cleland writes, and which is excerpted as part of the NPR piece.

"As combat veterans," he writes, "we have been through some of the most traumatic life experiences possible. War is as close to hell on earth as anything ever could be. That does make us different from our loved ones back home. War marks us all, some more deeply than others."

There's some wonderful, heart-felt expression in this letter:

"The soldier's lot is to be exposed to traumatic, life-threatening events — happenings that take us to places no bodies, minds, or souls should ever visit. It is a journey to the dark places of life — terror, fear, pain, death, wounding, loss, grief, despair, and hopelessness. We have been traumatized physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Some of us cope with exposure to hell better than others. Some are able to think of their combat experiences as but unpleasant vignettes in a long and wonderful life. It is not to those veterans I am speaking. I love them, but I am not afraid for them.

I am speaking to the rest of my brothers and sisters, those who find themselves trapped in the misery of memories as I was for so long. For them, I am afraid.To those veterans I say, you are not alone.

Many of us have been overwhelmed by war. Many of us have been unable to cope on our own with what has happened to us or with what we have done. Many of us have been left hopeless, lost, and confused about ourselves and our lives in ways we never thought possible.

That does not make us victims. It makes us veterans."

The rest of the open letter is equally wonderful, and well worth reading. In it, Cleland talks about his own personal highs and lows, what he understands about PTSD and his own case, and what has helped him get through. It's clear the concern and caring he feels for other combat vets. The letter is linked here.

After Combat: Too Much Time on My Hands, Missing the Action

Among the many first-person narratives to come out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a few start to address their growing awareness that they came back from the war with symptoms of PTSD. The recent warriors, now writers are just beginning to come to terms with the their experience, and both figuring it out and giving it effective voice is a difficult task that may get somewhat easier to accomplish in the years ahead. It's remarkable and positive to see the shortened cycle time in play as these warriors realize they may have PTSD, and it's also educational to hear how they describe what their concerns are, and what their adjustment has been like.

In former Marine sergeant Clint Van Winkle's recently published autobiographical work, "Soft Spots," he talks in one section about the experience so common to warriors -- that back in the "safety" (and boredom) of civilian life, they both have more time on their hands to think and revisit the past; and also an increasing sense that they miss tremendously the amped-up experience of war and their buddies -- the living and the dead.

Van Winkle, a Marine sergeant who first went to war on Valentines Day, 2003 was, according to the book jacket, "among the first wave of troops that crossed into Iraq, and his first combat experience was the battle of Nasiriyah, followed by patrols throughout the country, house-to-house searches, and operations in the dangerous Baghdad slums."

Here's how Van Winkle describes this collection of feelings and impressions, in an extended passage we've cut and spliced together somewhat for easier reading. The phrases in bold for emphasis are ones you hear again and again from combat veterans, in one form or another. With love and appreciation for the recent combat vets who are still processing these issues, and may be for years to come, here's what Van Winkle had to say about his own struggles to re-adjust:

“In war, no one asks you if you killed anyone.  You don’t have to say anything after a firefight.  You just come back and sit around with your fellow Marines. All you have to do is nod and they know. The questions are answered because you were there together.  They know and you know.  Nobody asked why one of us shot into that window or why the unit in front of us ripped into that bus or why I shop the group of men hiding behind that wall.  Everything was understood.

Maybe it wasn’t the war itself but the people who were in the war with me that I missed. Perhaps all I really wanted was to know it was all right and worth it and that my actions were justified.  I wanted to be back in the company of others who understood what it’s like to pull the trigger.  Wanted to get away from the questions and the made-up answers – to get back to a place where I felt normal again.

...

Names of the war dead for the week scrolled across the bottom of the big-screen television. … No matter how many times I saw the different list of dead troops, I never got used to it or the feeling that maybe I should have been included.  I wasn’t familiar with any of the names, but that hardly meant anything to me.  I didn’t have to know the dead personally to know what kind of stuff they had participated in.  I mourned each as if he had been a personal friend, and the grief took a toll on me.

...

I had too much time on my hands.Even though I was taking classes…I was bored – like being stuck in Kuwait without anything to do.  It was easy to understand why Gunny always had us doing something…. He must have known that boredom brings problems, allows too much time to think….

In some messed-up way, being home produced withdrawal symptoms. I’d experienced the most exciting events of my life. Nothing could ever compare to the feelings war induced.  Nothing. I’d never get the same adrenaline rush or create the kinds of bonds we Marines had with each other.  Civilian life was dull compared to what I’d done.

...

But I wasn’t being unappreciative. If anything, the war had made me appreciate life more, helped me see what was important. It was just hard to express that appreciation when all I could think about was Iraq.  There was no escaping it.  Iraq was everywhere.

...

True, it was over.  But in some respects the war had become more real than it had been while I was in Iraq.  There wasn’t much time for reflection while we were in country. I never stopped to think about what it all meant, or really even cared.  It wasn’t until I got home and started to talk to the dead, revisiting the war, that anything started to sink in. Was it worth it? I don’t know. That’s up to the dead to decide.

When I’m an old man and all the dreams and sights have left my head, when the memories are stolen from me, then historians will tell us whether it was worth it or not – if the war really helped anybody.  Until then, I’ll live with the dead.  We’ll carpool together.  Do lunch and late-night snacks.  Slumber parties and drinking binges.  It really won’t matter what anyone says, or if the whole stinking operation finally gets labeled a “good war.” It was too late for me. The dead and I were together.

From the book jacket:

Clint van Winkle, Soft Spots: A Marine's Memoir of Combat and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Winkle was a sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps. While in Iraq he served as an Amphibious Assault Vehicle section leader attached to Lima Company 3rd Bn 1st Marines. After completing his enlistment, he earned a B.A. in English, and then a Master's in Creative and Media Writing.

Editor's note: The illustration for this post is a wonderful drawing by Marine combat artist Michael D. Fay, of Lance Corporal Nicholas G. Ciccone, who suffered from PTSD and later sadly took his own life.

Cast Adrift by Trauma in the Center of Your Own Universe...

I've been reading Belleruth Naparstek's book, "Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal," and she makes an excellent point both about the safety and normalcy we unconsciously come to expect from life, and then the terrible way in which we find ourselves suddenly cut adrift from those same moorings through tragedy and trauma.

After first describing how the human toddler first takes sheer delight in realizing they are the center of their world and can "make things happen" -- by knocking over piles of blocks in play, again and again, or shouting and laughing at the sound of his or her own voice -- she the contrasts this with the sheer helplessness people feel because of a trauma-causing incident. Sagely, she describes the point:

"And because it is built into our human hard-wiring to love ourselves for being able to make things happen, the converse is also true: we lose self-regard when bad things happen that are beyond our control.  The essential insult of trauma is the helplessness it generates, and the inadequacy and powerlessness we feel in its grip.

Rational or not, we can't help but feel it's a reflection on our worthiness that, when confronted with a terrifying and terrible event, we didn't prevent it, escape it, or fix it.  So we somehow lose value to ourselves and, at a level we may not even be aware of, we feel guilty and ashamed."

This is a powerful and accurate description of what so many people go through after trauma. Good for Naparstek for bringing it to light.

Triggered by Talking about Trauma

It seems a bit paradoxical that the very act of attempting to talk about trauma might actually trigger trauma, and turn out to be "too much" for the traumatized person to handle, but this can be the case, according to Belleruth Naparstek, in her well-regarded book, "Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal." She writes:

"This is because with PTSD, language can be a trap. If a deeply traumatized person is prompted only to speak and think about the events that created his distress, without enlisting help from the imaginative, emotional, sensory and somatic capabilities of his right brain, his symptoms can actually get worse instead of better.  Encouragement to "talk about it" -- a therapist's and, for that matter, a good friend's stock-in-trade -- can catalyze a tailspin of flashbacks, nightmares and overwhelming anxiety."

Clearly, we're just scratching the surface here of a much larger topic.  But while the case can be made that listening to another deeply is often quite therapeutic, having to talk about (relive) something traumatizing might have adverse effects.

Rudy Reyes Has a New Book -- Hero Living -- Coming Out

Rudy Reyes, former Marine recon, multiple tours of duty, and consistent inner warrior, has his first book out, called "Hero Living: Seven Strides to Awaken Your Infinite Power."  You can pre-order it now on Amazon, here.

Editor's note: We've talked about Rudy Reyes before on the blog, here and here. To his credit, as a warrior who's seen intense combat, Rudy understands that not all wounds are physical -- and he's done what he can, throughout his life, to strengthen and balance his inner self with his outer. You can find Rudy's own web site, here. (The slideshow of his life is really quite striking. That's linked here.)

"Anything is Subject for a Poem" -- Even Combat and Its Aftermath

It's hard for me to believe I haven't already posted this, but that's what the blog search says -- and I must believe it. Here's an interesting item from the always-fabulously-insightful Den Ming Dao, on how "anything is subject for a poem," and why a regular discipline of "writing down the bones" can be advantageous to any of us, even -- or especially -- combat veterans.  He writes:

Anything is subject for a poem:
A catalog of boxing equipment, a collage of other poems,
Serpentine trail of incense, raised deer fur, old shoes pointed pigeon-toed,
Glass and steel cityscape, almond eyes of a saint, weeping tiny flowers,
Sunlight on whitewashed walls, blue shadows of stooped women,
A spring mousetrap, a trickle of blood in the gutter,
The homing swoop of a gull, chill white-capped bay, scent of eucalyptus.
Green lawn of broken blades, clods of fat earth.
Anything is subject for a poem.

Even in sleep, write a poem.
When waking, write a poem.
While loving, write a poem.
Even voting, write a poem.
When angry, write a poem.
While dreaming, write a poem.

The sages say quite seriously that those who wish to know better should cultivate the poet in themselves.

-- 365 Tao: Daily Meditations, by Den Ming Dao.

Escaping from the Bamboo Chest

Every once in a while I come across a book about war and healing combat trauma that's new to me, and such was the case recently with one by Frederick Graham, called "The Bamboo Chest: An Adventure in Healing the Trauma of War," linked here. Unfortunately, the subtitle is a bit of a misnomer, unless you interpret it in a particularly specific way, in which case it works.  But while it's far afield from actual "healing combat trauma," the reality is, it's an amazing true-life adventure story by someone who understands he's very lucky to be able to tell it. 

For those of us who grew up reading books like Papillon, by Henri Charriere, who uses the opportunity of his captivity in and subsequent escapes from the notorious French prison, Devil's Island, to teach himself some things about himself, or any of the wonderful high-adventure historical novels by James Clavell -- Shogun, Tai-Pan, King Rat, Noble House, etc. -- Graham's book fits right in.  It's a remarkable story about a guy whose dad was a Marine, who grew up in and around Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and then finds himself imprisoned in a South Vietnamese jail in the 1980s, with an absolutely frustrating roommate who he'd been arrested with and grows to really detest, for all the right reasons.  Graham uses the opportunity of his imprisonment to reflect and make adjustments to his character, finds and nurtures his inner strength, and experiences several important insights from his childhood around the war in Vietnam that helps his adult self integrate itself more completely. 

Unfortunately, though Graham is plenty psychologically adept with his own experience, because he wasn't actually involved in the Vietnam war directly as a soldier, the "war" in the subtitle is at a slightly larger remove than it was for the actual participants.  However, as a story about man against the elements -- particularly man against society, and in some ways, man against himself -- it's really quite an exciting tale, and one worth reading.

Hanging Tight to the Narrative, to Pull You Out of Hell...

More Tyler Boudreau, from "Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine," on why he writes:

"They say war is hell, but I say it’s the foyer to hell.  I say that a lot.  I say coming home is hell, and hell ain’t got no coordinates.  You can’t find it on the charts, because there are no charts.  Hell is no place at all, so when you’re there – you’re nowhere -- you’re lost.  The narrative, that’s your chart, your own story.  There are guy who come home from war and live fifty years without a narrative, fifty years lost. They don’t know their own story, never have, and never will.  But they’re moving amidst the text every day, and every long night without even realizing it.  They’re out there beyond the wire, trudging through the sentences, tangled in the verbs, suffocating on the adjectives, wrecked by the names.

They live inside the narrative like a cell, and their only escape is to understand its dimensions.  Once you get it, maybe you can start tearing down the walls.  Every soldier’s mind is different.  There is no single code to break.  It’s ever-changing.  I don’t have a recipe, but there’s one thing I do know, and that is the power of the narrative.  Put the story together.  Understand the story.  Ask questions of the story; make it answer you.  Make it.  You don’t take no for an answer.  You keep building that narrative until the answer comes around.  That’s the low road out of hell."

Okay, the low road out of hell: Maybe. It's not the first time someone's thought that telling their story -- just getting the words down on paper -- would have curative powers.  Read another Marine captain, Nate Fick's, essay for Powells, the great used book store in Portland, Oregon, about why he wrote "One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer."  See other veterans from other eras -- for example Claude Anshin Thomas, who wrote At Hell's Gate: a Soldier's Journey from War to Peace -- as they grapple with the narrative, to pull themselves to safety -- or sanity.  See and feel the way they fight for it, with every breath, with every word on the page. The same goes for the veterans who are the authors and the poets in Maxine Hong Kingston's anthology, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. Many,  many people feel...that this way lies redemption.

Or does it?

A little over a year ago, I was "gifted" with a narrative worthy of a Charles Dickens, if Charles Dickens had been to war.  Forty years the combat veteran had spent, trying to crack his own case (of severe, combat-induced PTSD), trying to get it all down on paper.  To make sense of it for himself, to make sense of it for his family.  And 40 years is not an insignificant amount of time.  He followed the narrative, all right; he clung to it like a rope.  But you know what?  All it did is lead him to the precipice of healing.  It wasn't even the precipice itself. What it did do was, in a way, detail the exhausting of his options, and get him in touch with the many things he'd tried -- including, in his case, religion -- so that he could he could continue the search, this time going even deeper.

Ironically, and we had several conversations about this -- he never finished the narrative, even after 40 years.  He didn't finish it, and he couldn't finish it -- we eventually agreed because it was his LIFE, and there was no real need to sum that up as though it was already over, because it wasn't.  It, and he, were still very much "a work in progress." And there weren't any simple answers, that would put everything into perspective.  Not for the combat veteran, not for his family either.  It was a pretty good narrative of what he endured, and the sense he was able to make of it.  But it was not in any way curative, though getting it down on paper was powerful, and compelling, and both moved his readers -- and himself.  It moved his readers (including his family) towards empathy, or a better, deeper understanding of what he'd gone through.  And it moved himself to continue going after the true prize, which was healing -- not just setting down what he had experienced.  IF writing were truly curative, we'd see more mentally unbalanced, yet otherwise fabulous authors experience "the cure."  (And one has only to think of the great Virginia Woolf, her pockets loaded with rocks, headed into the water to drown herself, to reflect on the apparent wisdom encoded in that statement.) What writing is, or can be, is deeply cathartic.  What it isn't, is the actual "cure."