Healing Combat Trauma

"The Black River of Loss, Whose Other Side is Salvation" - Poetry

An excellent poem about trauma, loss and -- ultimately -- survival -- with no implied reference intended to the famed/notorious American defense contractor of the same name (which coincidentally employs a number of combat-traumatized veterans, some of whom are looking for their own exit).

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

 

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

 

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

 

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

 

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

 

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

 

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

 

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

 

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

-- by Mary Oliver

When Two Are Better Than One: A Relationship That Can Save You

Although at first glance, we should really save ourselves -- not be saved by others -- there's something wrong with looking externally for something that should come ultimately from within -- still, relationships can exert powerful forces for good in our lives.  It's painful reading about the Vietnam veterans, for example, who are "unable to touch intimacy," or who still clearly keep intimate relationships at a distance, because they're afraid of the weight of failure, among other things. 

There's a nice segment of a poem from T.S. Eliot that speaks to this.  Eliot was a famous Modernist poet, from the school that developed around World War I, and while he wasn't sensational about this in his own life -- his first wife, Vivien, to whom the words "My nerves are bad to-night.  Yes, bad.  Stay with me." are attributed in Eliot's famous poem, The Waste Land, is also a woman he institutionalized; still, he is able to write these comforting words, which perhaps he practiced himself, and perhaps did not.  (They could also be about his marriage to his second wife, which was apparently much happier, though shorter-lived.  He was married to her at the time he wrote these lines.)  In any case, they can still serve to inspire us with their truth:

"If a man has one person, just one in his life,
To whom he is willing to confess everything --
And that includes, mind you, not only things criminal,
Not only turpitude, meanness and cowardice,
But also situations which are simply ridiculous,
When he has played the fool (as who has not?) --
Then he loves that person, and his love will save him."

-- T.S. Eliot, The Elder Statesman (1958).

Editor's note: For our ongoing series on "healthy sexuality and the combat veteran," go here.

The Wet Bond of Blood: Combat Participants "Closer to One Another Than Even Lovers"

While we've been blogging about "healthy sexuality and the combat veteran" lately, in our series on sexuality and intimacy - the good, the bad and the ugly -- it's always interesting to note by comparison just how amazingly close combatants end up feeling to one each other.  It makes you wonder if some of that fellow feeling and clearly love could be transferred successfuly to other, more classically intimate relationships after combat -- some of which seem dysfunctional at best -- and if so, how.

In the meantime, let's take another look at the closeness combatants develop in combat, as expressed by several articulate sources.

---

A few weeks ago we blogged about an excerpt the stunning war poem by Robert Graves to Siegrifed Sassoon, both WWI soliders, one gravely wounded, the other with PTSD -- about the relationships formed in combat:

Show me the two so closely bound
As we, by the wet bond of blood,
By friendship blossoming from mud,
By Death: we faced him, and we found Beauty in Death,
In dead men, breath.

Here's another item, this time from prose, but so artfully written, as to be poetic itself.  It seems to be highlighting just the same bond:

"We sit opposite one another ... two soldiers in shabby coats, cooking a [stolen animal] in the middle of the night.  We don't talk much, but I believe we have a more complete communication with one another than even lovers have.

We are two men, two minute sparks of life: outside is the night and the circle of death.  We sit on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease [from the fire] drips from our hands, in our hearts we are close to one another, and the hour is like the room: flecked over with the lights and shadows of our feelings cast by a quiet fire.  What does he know of me or I of him?  Formerly we should not have had a single thought in common -- now we sit with [the grilled animal] between us and feel in unison, and are so intimate that we do not even speak."

--from All Quiet on the Western Front, quoted by Robert Jay Lifton, in "Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans - Neither Victims nor Executioners."

Editor's note: There were some neat personal quotes I was going to add in here from a conversation with a veteran via email about his relationships with his foxhole buddies, but unfortuantely I can't seem to find them at the moment.  When I do, I'll add them back in to this post.  They seemed to quite confirm the two passages above.

A Terrible Beauty is Born: The Poetry of War, and Its Moral Ambiguity

James Anderson Winn, an English professor at Boston University, has come out with an anthology of war poems, entitled The Poetry of War, linked here.

Winn laments that there aren't more poems emerging from Iraq and Afghanistan, other than Brian Turner's Here, Bullet that deal with larger themes than just combat veterans' personal pain (I'm paraphrasing.)  At the risk of sounding glib, that's still fine with me because we've got to start somewhere, and reasoning from the specific (a veteran's own hurt and pain) to the general (the group of warriors, the country, or the wars themselves) will get there, in time.  He also makes the point that much of the best war poetry in our lifetimes, speaking generally, came out of World War I, whereas World War II generated excellent novels.  There's an article on Professor Winn and his new book, linked here; and a video of his discussing three war poems, linked here.

From the article:

Like many people in my generation, my most immediate experience with war was the war in Vietnam. Although I was lucky enough not to go there, I did get drafted in 1968 and found my time in the Army pointless and frustrating. So it was instructive to read poems by soldiers who genuinely believed in the rightness of the wars they were fighting. I remain deeply skeptical of war as a means of bringing about change, but I respect the determination and heroism of soldier-poets from many eras, and I have tried, in my book, to honor their memory.

Also from the article: Winn's best answer, in response to the best question asked him:

What can poetry tell us about war that news accounts or history books cannot?

For journalists, and even for historians, war is a contest. One side wins, the other loses; the balance of power in some part of the world may change as a result. But poetry is an ideal form for expressing ambiguity, and thus for describing the heroism of the vanquished, the intolerable cost of so-called victory, and above all, the complex and contradictory feelings of all those touched by war.

Editor's note: The post title is taken from a great line from Irish poet W.B. Yeats about the Easter Uprising of 1916.  Now I'd like to find the source of a great line Winn uses in his videotaped talk, which says "...the hot lips of liberty which kiss men cold."  That's a great jumping-off for something: not sure what yet.  I guess I'll have to buy Winn's book to find out who said it first.

Vietnam War Poetry - "Waiting for the Fire"

An "interesting" poem about Vietnam, written by a combat veteran -- ironically, though, one from World War II, not Vietnam at all. While it is a powerful poem, it still feels a tad disingenuous, and perhaps too critical/judgmental about a combat experience he wasn't a part of. The Vietnam veterans I've talked to are anything but "dry-eyed" about their experiences there.  Poetry is wonderful, and people tend to take it at face value.  This one, however, makes me wonder why the poet didn't write about something more immediately within his own experience.  Had a Vietnam veteran written it instead, I would have a whole different reaction to it.  To the degree that it's still an important poem about war, it's worth knowing about, but maybe not taking as "gospel."

Waiting for the Fire

Not just the temples, lifting
lotuses out of the tangled trees,
not the moon on cool canals,
the profound smell of the paddies,
evening fires in open doorways,
fish and rice the perfect end of wisdom;
but the small bones, the grace, the voices like
clay bells in the wind, all wasted.
If we ever thought of the wreckage
of our unnatural acts,
we would never sleep again
without dreaming a rain of fire:
somewhere God is bargaining for Sodom,
a few good men could save the city; but
in that dirty corner of the mind
we call the soul
the only wash that purifies is tears,
and after all our body counts,
our rape, our mutilations,
nobody here is crying; people who would weep
at the death of a dog
stroll these unburned streets dry-eyed.
But forgetfulness will never walk
with innocence; we save our faces
at the risk of our lives, needing
the wisdom of losses, the gift of despair,
or we could kill again.
Somewhere God is haggling over Sodom:
for the sake of ten good people
I will spare the land.
Where are those volunteers
to hold back the fire? Look:
when the moon rises over the sea,
no matter where you stand
the path of the light comes to you.

-- Philip Appleman.

Philip Appleman received the Humanist Arts Award from the American Humanist Association in 1994. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1944 to 1945 and in the U.S. Merchant Marine Corps in 1946 and from 1948 to 1949. He is the author of three novels, including In the Twelfth Year of the War; a half-dozen nonfiction books, including the new third edition of the Norton Critical Edition, Darwin; and seven books of poetry, including New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996, from which the above poem is reprinted.

The Wet Bond of Blood - Relationships Forged in Combat

Show me the two so closely bound
As we, by the wet bond of blood,
By friendship blossoming from mud,
By Death: we faced him, and we found
Beauty in Death,
In dead men, breath.

From one combat veteran and poet allegedly with PTSD -- Robert Graves -- to another -- Siegfried Sassoon.  The two fought in World War I, where Graves was injured and almost died; and Sasson was hospitalized for his PTSD.

Poet e.e. cumming's on Truly Effective Troop Support

Good ol' e.e. cummings.  A Harvard-trained poet who volunteered for ambulance duty in World War I, and was captured as a spy -- he knew what he was talking about.  The well-meaning care packages, while great and all, don't really take the edge off.  What's really needed is something you can't actually send:

my sweet old etcetera

aunt lucy during the recent

war could and what

is more did tell you just

what everybody was fighting

for,

my sister

isabel created hundreds

(and

hundreds) of socks not to

mention shirts fleaproof earwarmers

etcetera wristers etcetera, my

mother hoped that

i would die etcetera

bravely of course my father used

to become hoarse talking about how it was

a privilege and if only he

could meanwhile my

self etcetera lay quietly

in the deep mud et

cetera

(dreaming,

et

   cetera, of

Your smile

eyes knees and of your Etcetera)

-- e.e. cummings, circa 1928(?)

Crawling from the Wreckage - Then Back, to Explore the Wreck

From fellow journalist, fan of veterans, and shared animus-mundi-ite Chris Lombardi, over at Incredible Panic Rules, a stupendous fragment of poetry, from fellow Harvardian Adrienne Rich, which communicates much of what veterans go through, when they look back in anguish, and try to make some sense of their experience of combat trauma:

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

"The thing I came for, the wreck and not the story of the wreck," indeed.