An essay by Jesse Albrecht, who served as a combat medic in Mosel, Iraq, 2003-2004

“I don’t know why I left, but I left on my own, and it won’t be long
till-I, till-I, till-I get on back home…blood, guts, sex and danger I
wanna be an airborne ranger…hi ho didlley bob, wish I was back on the
block, with that bottle in my hand-I’m gonna be a drinking man, I’m
gonna drink all I can, for Uncle Sam–re-up you’re crazy, re-up you’re
outta your mind…”

This weekend I spent chain smoking cigarettes and drinking, talking
with a friend I served with in Iraq—he just returned from Afghanistan.
The point kept resurfacing of feeling great worth in a worthless
endeavor, and then feeling worthless upon returning home after a
deployment.  When I returned from Iraq I felt like an alien here, Iraq
was my home, I had a purpose there, and all the continually fucked up
situations felt normal.  Here the violence, aggression, and fear which
made me successful in Iraq continue to cause struggle and pain.

It is important to hear directly from the participants and the arts
provide form where the experience and its results can be remade into
something tangible. Something that allows the outsider
(non-combatants) a chance to feel a sliver of our emotions their tax
dollars paid for. It is vital to remove the spin from the combatants’
experiences.

 The change started to resister for me when the Abu Ghraib pictures
surfaced and while I was disgusted like everyone else, I also
thought—well, shit, I would much prefer a naked pyramid any day of the
week over my head getting cut off and the video being posted on the
internet for the family to see…

But there are videos of American soldiers killing on the internet.  The cycle starts and everything else falls away.  Ideas of right and wrong are already conditioned out
of soldiers. Learning how to kill, wanting to kill, be rewarded for
it–having it be an honorable thing, is part of the training to become
a soldier.  Seeing dead and blown apart Americans as a medic wore me
down and quickly.  When we went out on security missions I hoped I
could kill who was trying to kill me.  My thoughts, hopes, and dreams
of killing weren’t like the John Wayne myth, but an up close and
personal event, where I could watch someone’s head explode, either
from my bullets or buttstroke from my rifle caving their face in, or
maybe disemboweling them with my fighting knife I wore on my body
armor (without the ceramic plates that would stop bullets).

It is not the other that commits the atrocities that are part of the
war experience.  It is people like me, an eagle scout, member of the
national honor society, my mother’s youngest son.  It didn’t take me
very long to get to the place where I wanted to join the ranks of
atrocity, because it is the energy and essence of war, the most
beautiful and most horrible intertwined in a never ending knot. I
thank God I didn’t act on my thoughts, and now my thoughts can act on
me, and I act on those around me.

“Oh Mamma Mamma can’t you see, what this war has done to me…and it
won’t be long, till-I, till-I, till-I get on back home. “

Inspired in part by the note below, in which a citizen asks a vet, “did you ever fall in love with your enemy,” and also by one of the characters in my thesis–a Japanese kamikaze fighter who came to the U.S. after world war II and made ceramics with a former navy reservist at NAU–I’m interested in exploring relationships that transcend the enemy lines. How often does this happen? What sort of consequences do the people involved have to face, either from their friends, their communities, or the institutions they serve? Do most of these relationships happen after the war is over and the emotional scars have healed? Which ones are happening now? I’d like to capture these stories–friendships, love affairs, working partnerships, creative collaborations–through photo essays and oral histories (which could be transcribed and illustrated by photos, or captured on video, for purposes of the web). The series could be multi-generational, involving veterans from world war II, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, as well as active duty soldiers.

Toy Soldiers on Storify

Here are some pics I snapped while visiting Peace & Quiet, the installation in Times Square that gave vets and civilians a “quiet space” to interact. This spare, bright little hut, created by the architecture firm Matter of Practice in collaboration with the Times Square Alliance, drew a mix of vets, active military personnel, people in the know, and randoms off the street. Story Corps was there, too, recording the stories of anybody who felt like sharing. But the heart of the installation were the notes that civilians and vets left for one another. People put their questions and thoughts onto cards that read, “I am a civilian,” or “I am a vet,” and posted them to a bulletin  board. By Friday, which was the day the installation closed, the notes spread across one of the walls of the hut, creating a kind of open-ended conversation. Here are some of my favorites…I only wish we could see what the answers would be!

What was cool and interesting about this project was that it gave folks a new context in which to ask these questions. It took a conversation that usually happens behind closed doors, if it happens at all, and put it in a little yellow hut, in one of the busiest places on earth. When you remove the clinical frame, these conversations become less fraught, and more open. The writing itself was a valuable process–there was something cathartic in putting your question to paper, and posting it up for people to see. More importantly, it gave us a platform on which we could speak, be heard, and engage with each other, which speaks to the possibilities in public art to mobilize, catalyze, stir up the pot. But it’s only one step. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Matter Practice and Story Corps do with the questions, dialogues, and stories they gathered. Otherwise, it’s just talk. And you know what they say about that.

Photographic coverage of Veterans Day around the country at BagNews…

I updated this post today, after reading this piece, which Nicholas Kristof wrote for the New York Times. It’s about a combat veteran who commits a heinous crime. He is only 25 years old. He is a decorated Sargeant and has no criminal record. So how, and why, Kristof asks, did this happen? He writes,

“I don’t know just what could have led an apparently normal young man to commit such a crime. All we know for certain is that a caring, much loved woman here in Delaware has been horrifically murdered, leaving a vacuum of sadness and a vexing uncertainty about whether there is a link to distant wars.”

Kristof contextualizes the crime and the perpetrator without forgetting the victim and the tremendous loss her family and community faces. By doing so, he raises an essential question about the costs of war beyond the combat zone. In Kristof’s thinking, and I agree administrations who wage and support these ware are too slow to bear the burden of their ripple effects.

Freelance journalist Michael Yoanna created this tip sheet for journalists who cover veteran and military suicides. In one, Yoanna, who is currently directing and producing a documentary about a group of veteran cyclists recovering from war, writes,

“Don’t always assume the worst outcome. Yes, there is much reporting to be done on the themes of homelessness, drugs, homicide, suicide and harassment of wounded soldiers by the military. There are also many inspiring stories of veterans returning home and healing their wounds of war and persevering. There are many who have considered suicide and have found the resources and support they need. Telling their stories can be very powerful and inspiring.”

Yoanna’s work does double duty. Not only does he seek to motivate reporters to do better work, he also goes after institutional stigma within the military. In a scathing, investigative piece published in 2009 by Salon, Yoanna exposes the military’s resistance to diagnose PTSD, and its disturbing pattern of labeling vets with “childhood trauma” or “personality disorders” instead. Earlier that year, Salon reported on a review by the Department of Veterans Affairs to investigate 72,000 veterans who received monthly disability payments for psychological trauma. The review was halted after a veteran in New Mexico shot himself in protest.

A predilection to place blame on the victim of trauma is as old as trauma itself. So is the tendency to objectify the victim’s experience. Which is why I like Claire Felicie’s black and white portraits so much. They are close. Intimate. Vividly detailed. They make you feel as though you’re in the company of very old friends, or at least, men and women you might relate to. Check them out here.

In the decades following the Vietnam War, the image of the veteran as a deranged, drug-abusing, baby-killing, ready-to-snap-at-any-moment character became iconic. Movies like Deer Hunter, Platoon, and Forrest Gump (see clip below) showed us the horrors of war, while coining  tropes that persist to this day.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6c1HWWspGo[/youtube]

In many respects, we’ve come a long way. The psychological and physiological symptoms that vets experienced in the wake of Vietnam–nightmares, edginess, flashbacks, sleeplessness, rage—became an official condition when the American Psychiatric Association defined it in 1980. During the decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, PTSD has been a focal point of the media. Journalists like Nicholas Kristof have reported extensively on veteran suicides and “the invisible wounds war.” By focusing on the stories of individual men and women, Kristof’s work shines a much-needed spotlight on just how many veterans are falling through the cracks, and takes the government, the military, and our society to task for letting it happen. (Read some of Kristof’s pieces here and here).

But I’m curious, in a moment when the media is saturated with stories about the struggles of active military personnel and vets, which stories are missing, or skewed, or playing off tropes? ABC news reports that in the decade since September, 11, 22.658,000, men and women have been deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, or both. That’s a lot of people. How well are we telling their stories?

In a recent piece for the NYTimes, Mike Haynie, Ph.D., a veteran of the Air Force and executive director of the Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University laments the media’s stigmatizing coverage of soldiers. He writes: “For better or worse, the media will play a large and important role in shaping the cultural narrative that defines this generation of veterans. Unfortunately, that narrative has been a story of extremes to date.” (Read more this here).

Haynie takes reporters to task for their “paper-selling sensationalism” coverage of vets, and lists a number of labels, like “rambo”, “ticking time bomb”, “monster”, “hero”, and “broken”, that he finds particularly dangerous. The deluge of stories about PTSD and suicides (a recent spate of articles calls the alarming rate of veteran suicides as an “epidemic”, here, here, and here) has many wondering if the media has stigmatized vets even more. David Dobbs writes about this here.

And as for extremes, here is another: Our soldiers are heroes. Until they mess up. Abu Ghraib comes to mind. This was a horrifying incident. But soldiers are trained by governments to kill. So why, when the violence spills over, do we act so surprised, and rush to villainize them? In his critique of the controversial 1981 film, Fort Apache, The Bronx, titled “The Uniforms That Guard Us,” neo-conservative critic Richard Grenier takes the movie to task not so much for its racist portrayal of blacks and Puerto-Ricans, but for its dehumanizing, portrayal of cops, who, he argues, are doing the dirty work that keeps the rest of us safe. In his defense, Grenier calls upon a quote by George Orwell, a vehement opponent of war until he fought for his country in WWII, who wrote: “people sleeps safe in their beds at night only because rough men are ready to do violence on their behalf.” I don’t agree with Grenier’s politics, or his review. But I do think he makes a good point. It’s convenient for us to judge when someone else is doing the dirty work for us.

In this blog, I propose to examine the ways in which veterans and active-duty military personnel are being covered in the media. At what point does the constant drumbeat of P-T-S-D reduce the experience of suffering to an acronym? When, as journalists, are we doing more harm than good? Representations of treatments, from the anti-suicide nasal spray to community-based, alternative forms of therapy (art, canine, equine, mindfulness), will also be subjects of exploration.

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