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. There may be a sad professional end to the story -- it appears that Egendorf has since lost his license to practice -- however, his work at the time, and the motivation behind it, really seems 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 po8unding 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 da
