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.