I've recently started reading a very interesting book from the Vietnam era, by Arthur Egendorf, a Ph.D. psychologist who was first a veteran - and later tried to piece together what he had experienced in a way that could also help others. Egendorf's in-depth work at the time with veterans, and his motivation behind it, really seem exceptional.
Gerald Nicosia writes about him, too, in the excellent "Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement," because Egendorf was instrumental in establishing the veterans' "rap groups" which were an early feature of attempts made to cope with the combat trauma and PTSD Vietnam vets experienced.
This passage, from Egendorf's book, is remarkable to me for several reasons: Egendorf's own intuitions about healing; his humility, openness and vulnerability with his patient (and friend); their nuanced dance together; and of course, best of all, the effects it actually had on the Marine he helped. Egendorf's book is out of print, but here and there copies are available used, including on Amazon. Here's what he wrote:
“If you look, it’s not hard
to find veterans who are engaged in healing.
I met one of them eight years ago while visiting a VA hospital. His name was Jim, an ex-Marine from the Bronx
recovering from his latest breakdown, back for another of the hospital visits
that began a year after he returned from Vietnam. I introduced myself as a fellow vet, now a
psychologist, who wanted to interview him for a study that would help Vietnam
vets.
“You want to help me?” he
asked. “For six years I’ve been in and
out of this hospital, and I’ve heard enough of shrink talk. I want to know how you made it. That’s how to help me. Tell me how did you get it together?”
I responded by making him an
offer. If he would let me interview him,
he could ask me anything he wanted. He
accepted and spent ten hours telling me his story. Before the war he was the kind of youngster
teachers like. He behaved well in class
and worked part-time after school.
During his teens he had seen a psychiatrist for “nerves,” but generally
had held his own. In 1969, when he was
eighteen, Jim was drafted and goaded into “volunteering” for the Marines, then
sent to combat duty in Vietnam. He saw
action in I Corps, in the north of South Vietnam.
Ever since he came back, his
mother and his wife had been trying to tell him that something was wrong, For the first year all he did was stay in the
apartment, smoke dope, and listen to music.
Then one day while looking out the window he saw a junkie trying to
steal the radio from his car. Jim
grabbed a baseball bat, ran after him, and started pounding the guy so
fiercely it took three people to tear him away.
After that he knew he was out of control and went for help.
Seven years after coming
back, Jim described his burdens this way: “Before I went, I worked for six
years. I was the best assistant manager
Martin’s Bargain Store ever had. I can’t
work now. They messed up my head. How the hell are you supposed to concentrate
after all I’ve been through? Reality
sucks. It’s not what you know, it’s who
you know. That’s why a nineteen-year-old
acidhead or college guy gets out of it.
Who do I know? My shrink from
before the war said I was fine. Now the
VA says I was always cuckoo and my problem’s got nothing to do with the
war. My wife is scared of me. My family thinks I’m nuts. We were supposed to be over there fighting
for freedom, killing people who never did us any harm. What are you supposed to do after that?
I listened, particularly to
what was left unsaid. He had just
started to find some direction in life when the war crashed in. Then it was “pussy,” as his drill instructors
called him, and thirteen months of being constantly threatened with death, and
seeing a dozen guys he knew pulverized into heaps of bloody flesh. Others made fun of him, mocking a grunt from
New York who resented the practice of calling Vietnamese “slopes” or “dinks” or
“gooks.” When the time came to go home and he looked forward to leaving the
mess behind, he found that things didn’t work as he expected. After coming
back he wasn’t anybody’s hero, the afterimages of shattering brutality stayed
fixed in his mind, and the business-as-usual reality at home had no room for
what he carried inside.
For Jim and many like him, it was not them but the world that was crazy. What was keeping all of it from blowing up,
just like the people and placed he had seen “wasted”? Presidents
give the orders and people die. It’s
like a primitive ritual with human sacrifices to bloodthirsty gods. Jim was sure about only one thing: The people
pulling the strings didn’t care what happened to him.
“How’d you get it together?
That’s what I want to know,” he kept asking.
Our backgrounds were different, but the war gave us a common bond. Jim was a ghetto kid who didn’t finish high
school before entering the service, whereas I had gone to private school,
Harvard, and then Europe for a year of postgraduate study before my draft board
notified me. Unlike him, I never saw a
psychotherapist while growing up and was never seriously upset until after I
came back, and then never so bad that I couldn’t go to school and hold a job,
too. All the same, he knew. “Something got to you too, huh?”
He tested me to see if I’d
open up with him. “People like you go into psychology to straighten themselves
out, right?” Yes, I told him, he was
right about that. After years of taking
pills and hearing therapists interpret his past and try to modify his behavior,
Jim wanted to “relate.” It was the same
hunger that led a dozen of us to form the veteran rap groups that began meeting
in New York City in 1970. In these
groups we asked each other and the therapists who volunteered to assist us in
gaining the same openness Jim now wanted.
After a few meetings Jim
asked to be a regular client. At the
beginning he couldn’t take much – he would miss appointments and “forget” to
return my phone calls. Eventually, though, we met more regularly, and he began
to thrive on the questions I raised.
What had gotten to him? What was so
troubling? What made him so vulnerable? What was he going to do about it now? How was he going to handle his life? I didn’t intend for him to answer my
questions the way elementary pupils answer their teacher’s drill.
Rather, the idea was for him to use the questions to orient himself, to
direct his energies where the questioning pointed. It was time for Jim to stop telling the same
story over and over and to begin living out a new one.
The more we worked together,
the more he saw opportunities to make
himself useful – a gesture that would help his wife, an odd job to pick up
some cash, a game he could play with his kids.
He studied enough to distinguish his sensitive reactions from his
deluded flights of fancy. And when he
was ready, he acknowledged that his
suffering would never make sense o its own. It would only be valuable if he took it as a
lesson, something he could use to remind himself that how he handles his life
is up to him.
After a few months of
groundwork, Jim was out of the VA for good. Then he got off tranquilizers and stayed away
from pot. In the next year, he and
his wife stopped fighting and started talking, and soon after that he was
holding a job for the first time since he left the Marines. Two years after we began meeting he bought
his own house and was holding down two jobs.
Instead of complaining about his two kids, which is all he had done when
we first met, he’d brag about them.
The time came when he raised
a more ambitious question. Given his suffering, and what he’d learned,
what purpose would he devote himself to?
“People, I want to do something for people,” he’d say. One of his dreams was to save enough money to
start a summer camp for ghetto kids. In
the meantime, he began seeing the people
in his daily lives as the ones to serve.
Jim still has bad days and
times when his kids get to him, but he no longer doubts that his life is
workable, which gives him a certainty that makes him proud. He’s especially happy about the way men who
live on his street now listen to him.
“They figure I must know something after I’ve been through. They ask me how they can straighten
themselves out.” He volunteers at the
local Outreach office for veterans, run by the Veterans Administration. “If a
high school dropout ex-cuckoo like me can do it, anybody can.”
As powerful as that is, here's something I like just as much: Egendorf's own description of his participation in the dance between patient and practitioner:
“How did you do it?” was the
question Jim kept asking. I knew he
wouldn’t be satisfied with some formula or set of rules. He wanted me to open up, to make it safer for
him to open up to himself and to me. And
so I told him about myself, but not to give him know-how. I simply related bits of my story as they
became relevant. For example, I told him how sensitive I was when I came
back. At first, little things would
get to me. I’d be overwhelmed by seeing a dead dog lying on a highway, or the
picture of a mourning woman in a magazine, or newspaper listings of the
soldiers just killed. Strangers halfway
around the world, especially dead ones, seemed closer to me than anyone had
ever been except my family and one or two lovers.
I also told him about how I
threw myself into issues connected with the war. Before Vietnam I had read newspapers
casually. In the months and first years
after coming back I would tear into the pages to see what new horrors I needed
to absorb and to find out which people in high places I would cheer that day
and which ones I would scream at during the hours I spent raging in my
head. I was more deeply moved by tenderness than at any time in my life, and
I was also more easily angered. I’d write scathing letters to editors, congressmen,
and the President. I’d blurt out slogans
to old friends and family, who didn’t know how to talk with me anymore.
I didn’t tell Jim only about
matters that weighed me down. I made
sure to tell him some things that were hard to admit to myself at first, things
I needed guts to say, but once said would leave me feeling lighter. I told him it wasn’t just the pain that
had surprised me; I had also begun to catch glimmers of some secret joy. I was happy I had made it through the war
when others didn’t, which was hard to acknowledge. But something else delighted me even
more. Strangely, I was glad to feel so
much hurt, as if having allowed something to tear me open meant one day I would
give birth to something I might treasure.
Jim would compare himself to
me and decide that I was so much better off that I had to know something that
made life easy. So I also let him know about my awkwardness – the many times I
flip-flopped back and forth, from wallowing in my distress to trying to hide
from it. But I also told him I learned
more from my mistakes and weaknesses than from anything else. In fact, my about-faces, in which neither
wallowing in the pain nor turning my back on it satisfied me, eventually led me
to the realization that I was searching for the third way. I couldn’t say what it was at first, but I
figured somebody had to know or there wouldn’t be such people as counselors and
therapists. They must know, I
thought, and so, hungering to find out what they knew and daring to think I’d
know too once I joined their ranks, I took a job as a crisis counselor.
Jim grasped the irony of my
story. Contrary to what he had initially thought, I wasn’t useful to him
because of any information I had. What I
had to offer lay in my willingness to admit that I don’t have anything in
particular to tell people until I hear them talk. I’m willing to be with them without answers, so that I can assist
them with their own search. I told Jim
that I’m as surprised as anyone when this works. The moment when someone trusts me enough to
tell me his troubles a change takes
place in me. I suddenly have more wisdom
for them than I usually have for myself. I listen, make comments, and without
having to think or plan in advance, ask questions they find helpful.
In the end, what Jim
accomplished by being with me wasn’t new information to pass along, something
he could go out and tell someone else. He developed an approach to life that
transformed his experience of the war from a burden to an opportunity for
healing. The shift happened as a result
of our being together, and by our pursuing a joint quest that fostered trust,
respect, appreciation and the openness that is healing in itself.
Most crucial is the openness. I’ve noticed
this not only with Jim but also with hundreds of others I’ve worked with since,
and with dozens of therapists I’ve trained.
In this book I intend to convey what I mean by openness, in such a way
that healing from war dawns as a possibility for you.”
-- Source: Healing from the
War: Trauma & Transformation after Vietnam, by Arthur Egendorf. Boston: Shambhala Press (1986)
(Shambhala Press is what
published Claude Anshin Thomas’ excellent book, At Hell’s Gate: A Soldier’s Journey from
War to Peace, which we have mentioned frequently on this blog.)
