Beacon Broadside

Honoring our Veterans, Understanding their Challenges

During the Civil War, the Press of the American Unitarian Association—the fledging publishing house founded in 1854 that grew into Beacon Press—published a tract called A Soldier's Companion.

This handy booklet, intended to supply Union soldiers with solace and inspiration, included hymns, anthems, poems, and practical instructions. Some 57,000 were distributed, free of charge, during the course of the war.

Amid songs and hymns about freedom and temperance were allusions linking the American Revolution—the patriotic fight for independence from England—with freedom for all mankind. References to abolition and the dreaded fugitive slave laws were scattered throughout the booklet. The poem “Wipe out, O God! The Nation’s Sin,” for example, warned, “There is no liberty for them / Who make their brethren slave.” Songs like “Arouse, New England Sons” invoked,“Free! While the very homes you’ve made / Beside your fathers’ graves/ Are pillaged, if ye dare to aid / The panting, flying slave?” Luminaries such as Harriet Beecher Stowe altered classics to fit the cause; her lyrics to “America, the Beautiful” included the lines “Let Freedom’s banner wave / Till there be not a slave.” A Soldier’s Companion also contained practical advice to men in the field. Soldiers were warned, for example, to “sleep as much as you can,” avoid “all use of ardent spirits,” and “wear flannel all over in all weathers.” (From A Brief History of Beacon Press by Susan Wilson.)

In the years since, many Beacon Press books have examined the issues faced by soldiers at war and upon their return home. 

My River Home: A Journey from the Gulf War to the Gulf of Mexico
by Marcus Eriksen

During the course of the war in Iraq, many veterans have become increasingly disillusioned, and increasingly vocal. Many began seeing the war as damaging for the country, and especially for the men and women fighting overseas. In My River Home, Marcus Eriksen, a veteran of the Gulf War, charts his personal shift from proud Marine to self-destructive veteran to engaged activist protesting the injustices of the Iraq War with Veterans for Peace. Eriksen made sense of this transition only after a fascinating adventure traveling through the heart of America, down the entire length of the great Mississippi River on a homemade raft.

 

The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq
by Helen Benedict

More American women have fought and died in Iraq than in any war since World War Two, yet as soldiers they are still painfully alone. In Iraq, only one in ten troops is a woman, and she often serves in a unit with few other women or none at all. This isolation, along with the military's deep-seated hostility toward women, causes problems that many female soldiers find as hard to cope with as war itself: degradation, sexual persecution by their comrades, and loneliness, instead of the camaraderie that every soldier depends on for comfort and survival. As one female soldier said, "I ended up waging my own war against an enemy dressed in the same uniform as mine."

In The Lonely Soldier, Benedict tells the stories of five women who fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2006. She follows them from their childhoods to their enlistments, then takes them through their training, to war and home again, all the while setting the war's events in context. 

 

Love in Condition Yellow: A Memoir of an Unlikely Marriage
by Sophia Raday 

Berkeley peace activist Sophia Raday never imagined she would fall in love with an Oakland police officer and major in the Army Reserve, much less marry one. Barrett is loving and loyal, but in his world a threat lies around every corner, and so he asks Sophia to stay in Condition Yellow—always aware that her life may be in danger soon. Sophia's heart-wrenching yet humorous narrative about coming to a new understanding of peace and partnership gives hope for healing the deep divisions in our country, from the front lines of a most unusual union.

 

The Sutras of Abu Ghraib: Notes from a Conscientious Objector in Iraq
by Aidan Delgado

As the planes hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Aidan Delgado was in the process of enlisting in the U.S. Army Reserve. Two years later, he arrived in Iraq with the 320th Military Police Company. As he witnessed firsthand the brutality of the occupation and the abuse of unarmed Iraqis, Delgado came to believe that war was immoral and ran counter to his Buddhist principles. He turned in his weapon and began the long process of securing conscientious objector status. His book is urgent reading for anyone who cares about American ideals overseas, and for all those who understand why peace is patriotic.

 

Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War
by Penny Coleman

In the early 1970s, Penny Coleman married Daniel, a young Vietnam veteran and fellow photographer. Soon, Daniel became deeply troubled, falling victim to multiple addictions and becoming strangely insecure. He suffered from what we now call posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). After Coleman left him, he committed suicide.

Struggling to understand Daniel's experience, Coleman began investigating the history of PTSD; she found clear cases of the disorder as far back as the Civil War. In Flashback, Coleman deftly weaves psychology and military, political, oral, and cultural history to trace the experience of PTSD in the military up through the Vietnam War. She then focuses on Vietnam to show why this war in particular led to such a high number of PTSD cases, many of which ended tragically in suicide. Like the soldiers listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall, these men are casualties of war.

With record numbers of American soldiers returning from the Middle East already suffering from PTSD, Flashback provides a necessary lesson on the real tragedy of battle for soldiers and their families, something that continues long after the war ends.

Veterans’ Day: A Soldier—His Prayer

This anonymous poem was blown into a slit trench in Tunisia during a heavy bombardment in the early days of World War II. It was included in Poems to Live By in Uncertain Times, edited by Joan Murray.

A Soldier—His Prayer

Stay with me, God. The night is dark,
The night is cold: my little spark
Of courage dies. The night is long;
Be with me God, and make me strong.

I love a game; I love a fight.
I hate the dark; I love the light.
I love my child; I love my wife.
I am no coward. I love Life,

Life with its change of mood and shade.
I want to live. I'm not afraid,
But me and mine are hard to part;
Oh, unknown God, lift up my heart.

You stilled the waters at Dunkirk
And saved Your servants. All Your work
Is wonderful, dear God. You strode
Before us down that dreadful road.

We were alone, and hope had fled;
We loved our country and our dead.
And could not shame them; so we stayed
The course and were not much afraid.

Dear God that nightmare road! And then
That sea! We got there—we were men.
My eyes were blind, my feet were torn,
My soul sang like a bird at dawn.

I knew that death is but a door.
I knew what we were fighting for:
Peace for the kids, our brothers freed,
A kinder world, a cleaner breed.

I'm but the son my mother bore,
A simple man, and nothing more.
But—God of strength and gentleness,
Be pleased to make me nothing less.

Help me, O God, when Death is near
to mock the haggard face of fear,
That when I fall—if fall I must—
My soul may triumph in the Dust.

Honoring the Warrior, Not the War

by Aidan Delgado

I still think of Veterans Day as Armistice Day, its original name, commemorating the end of World War I. The nations that founded the holiday did so to celebrate the end of what they believed was the "war to end all wars" and thus to symbolize the end of war itself. In America, Veterans Day is now associated with honoring US war dead and remembering the sacrifices of veterans in all our conflicts. This is good and very much in keeping with the original spirit of the holiday; for remembering the terrible cost of war is the best way for us to appreciate the peace we now enjoy. For me, Veterans Day embodies two moods at once: somber reflection on the sacrifices of soldiers and gratitude for the blessing of peace.

Yet these days, Veterans Day often makes me sad. It seems that this holiday in particular almost can't help becoming politicized, particularly in the midst of a controversial war. This is a holiday about celebrating the end of war; I don't want to see it become something like a "Support the Troops" bumper-sticker. I want people to look at all the tremendous sacrifices made by veterans and draw the right lesson from them: that war is terrible and we must do everything we can to prevent it. In honoring the warrior, we should take care not to honor war in itself. Remember that beneath the memorials to individual soldiers, the laurels for their courage, there is a subtle message to the younger generation: you should grow up and become soldiers too. I don't think that's the message that should be sent on Veteran's Day. This should be a holiday about remembering the price of peace, for no soldier joins to perpetuate war. All veterans served and fought in the expectation of eventually regaining the peace, and enjoying a measure of it themselves. If we want to truly thank veterans, then we should not only honor them as individuals but honor the thing they fought and died for: the return to a peaceful society. We should remember that Veterans Day was once Armistice Day.

Aidan Delgado served with the U.S. Army Reserve in Iraq and is now an active member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. He is the author of The Sutras of Abu Ghraib: Notes From a Conscientious Objector in Iraq. Listen to an interview with Aidan Delgado on WAMC.

Female Vets Fight Another Battle at Home: Restoring their Spirits

by Helen Benedict

Over this past year, I have talked to forty or so women soldiers for my forthcoming book, The Lonely Soldier: Women at War in Iraq, and it has become clear to me that they have a set of needs quite different from those of men. All soldiers must deal with the roadside bombs, mortar and grenade attacks, and gunfire that are a part of daily life in this war, where the front line is everywhere and not even bases are safe; and all soldiers must cope with seeing the dead and wounded close up and with, perhaps, having killed. But women have additional burdens: they are sexually harassed by their male comrades day in and day out; one in three is sexually attacked or raped; and they are pressured every minute to conform to a military culture that is intractably male. "The Army consistently tries to make women into men," as Sergeant Sarah Scully of the Military Police wrote to me. "Any sign that you are a woman means you are automatically ridiculed or treated as inferior."

Casualties on the Home Front: The Epidemic of Vet Suicides

Penny Coleman, the author of Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War and Village Elders, lives with her family in New York City. For more information, visit her website at www.flashbackhome.com.

On November 6, the Joshua Omvig Suicide Prevention Bill became law. The bill was named for a 22-year-old Iowa reservist who took his own life eleven months after coming home from Iraq. Though Josh is one of hundreds of combat veteran suicides since the wars began in 2001, it is his name that has become symbolic of this campaign. Thanks in no small measure to the advocacy of his parents, Randy and Ellen Omvig, the Department of Veterans Affairs will soon be required to develop and implement a comprehensive suicide prevention program at each of its medical facilities, including mandatory staff training in suicide awareness and prevention, a designated suicide prevention counselor in each facility, and a 24-hour suicide hotline.

With the exception of the unspeakable images of Abu Ghraib, which were e-mailed home by soldiers themselves, for six years Americans have been effectively insulated from the human cost of our wars. This insulation is not an accident: it is policy. Images from the Vietnam years, like the naked child trying to outrun her own burning skin, or the anguished women and children waiting their turn to be executed at My Lai, were catalysts that helped turn public opinion against that war. This time, the government wanted to ensure that would not happen. On the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Pentagon issued a directive to the media forbidding any coverage of returning American coffins. No coffins, no funerals, no wounds, no tears. No empathy.

Randy and Ellen Omvig’s success in drawing long overdue attention to the issue of veteran suicide in an environment that has dismissed or derailed other worthy causes, can be explained, I believe, by their insistence on going public with the most intimate details of their tragedy. They complicated and humanized a debate that has been stalled for decades in a morass of misinformation, disinformation and other evasion tactics.

They described how his tour in Iraq had changed him, how he suffered all of the symptoms they now recognize as classic PTSD: the nightmares, the shaking, the dark moods and consuming fears. They admitted that they had failed to convince him to go for counseling, accepting his argument that the stigma would wreck his career plans. And then came the morning when Ellen discovered him locked in his pick up truck. He had a gun. As she tried frantically to reason with him, he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. It's a horrific image: she, banging on the window, terrified, pleading, while, on the other side of the glass, her son tells her he will always love her, but that now she must leave. "Go!" he says, and when she refuses, he raises his gun, angles his head so the bullet will not hit her, and fires. She was powerless to stop anything, the hand, the gun, the bullet, the blood. There must have been a lot of blood.

In spite of a suicide rate among solders that has now reached a 26-year record high, and contradicting the evidence of their own increasingly ominous studies, the Army continues to insist that they have yet to find a connection between combat stress injuries (PTSD) and suicide. They trot out self-serving anecdotes about "Dear John" letters, incompetent parents, and what they call "underdeveloped life coping skills" to blame active duty soldiers for their own deaths. As for veteran suicides, there has never been any official attempt to track or count them.

The virtual epidemic of veteran suicides that followed the war in Vietnam has remained largely beneath the radar of public awareness because there is still such irrational fear and shame attached to a self-inflicted death. Families, military and otherwise, have far too often tried to cover up the circumstances of such deaths, hoping to shield both the living and the dead from blame and condemnation. What has often been called the "most secret death" has afforded the military a convenient and virtually impenetrable cover for decades, allowing them to keep combat-related suicides a theoretical, statistical, deniable issue.

Josh Omvig was not able to keep his war theoretical. He and hundreds of other veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and thousands of Vietnam vets carried home memories of friends lost, bodies blown apart, and lives touched by real horror. Their wars were up close and personal, and when their memories became too much to bear, they chose to die.

Both as a war widow and as the mother of a boy who, like Josh, is in his 20's, I heard the Omvigs' story, saw it and felt it, through the lens of my own experience. My husband Daniel returned from Vietnam with memories he could never bring himself to share. They haunted him and they haunted our relationship. Was his death an execution? Euthanasia? Or was it my fault? What did I do to that poor man? In the years since, unbidden memories of the swirling red lights, the sirens, the pumps, the drains, and the blood have infiltrated who I am. I rarely if ever talked about Daniel, but I learned to tiptoe around everyone I love, hoping not to do it again, hoping not to kill someone else by mistake.

So I am enormously grateful to Ellen and Randy Omvig. I do not find their story inappropriately intimate. I do not think it is in bad taste. Or exploitative. Or sensationalist, though those are all excuses that are proffered in defense of the bloodless numbers, the numbing statistics and the endless slogans. It is, in fact, a vital antidote to the guilt, the silence, and the isolation that is typically experienced by the families of suicides. It invites empathy, which is the corner stone of common cause activism. It makes the personal political.

The Omvigs let their grief feed their activism. They insisted that behind the statistics there are real human beings whose suffering is monumental, and monumental as well for the people who love them. For me, and I imagine for a host of others who have been moved to help push this legislation forward, the impetus came, at least in part, from the courage it took for them to share the raw emotional intimacies of a son’s death. The bill that bears Josh’s name is perhaps a small victory, but it will make more of a difference to veterans than any parade.

Note: The bill, as currently written, no longer requires the VA to screen all its patients for suicide risk factors and make an effort to keep track of at-risk veterans, an important element that was dropped because otherwise one senator, Tom Coburn (OK-R), threatened to block its passage indefinitely. Coburn feared that such a database could also be used to deny veterans who have sought help at the VA for mental health issues the right to purchase a gun. Too bad, but even so, it's a start.

Vets need help back home

Repeated and long deployments, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and traumatic brain injuries are contributing to high rates of homelessness among veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The numbers are disturbingly high for a war that’s still being waged:

Some advocates say the early presence of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan at shelters does not bode well for the future. It took roughly a decade for the lives of Vietnam veterans to unravel to the point that they started showing up among the homeless. Advocates worry that intense and repeated deployments leave newer veterans particularly vulnerable.

"We're going to be having a tsunami of them eventually because the mental health toll from this war is enormous," said Daniel Tooth, director of veterans affairs for Lancaster County, Pa.

With such a high number of homeless veterans, "advocates say more financial resources still are needed." Also adding to the financial costs of American fighting overseas: health care. The mental and physical health care needs of returning vets is likely to strain our health care system, according to Physicians for Social Responsibility, who estimate the long-term costs of caring for returning vets as over $650 billion.

The liberal group, which shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, estimated that the long-term financial burden to care for a new generation of veterans will far outstrip the amount of money spent on combat operations in Iraq. (From The Boston Globe)

My Angel in the Desert: One Soldier's Story of War

by Marcus Eriksen

Veterans Day seems pointless, just a bunch of old vets telling war stories.  There is no Hallmark set of instructions to hint to a gift you might submit to your favorite war hero.  It’s partly a recycled holiday due to another, Armistice Day, rendered obsolete by time.  But to this veteran it has a point. Veteran’s Day is years of pride and pain softened to a plea.

On Feb. 24, 1991, a truck filled with a dozen marines making a steady beeline for Kuwait City stopped the convoy when I yelled, “Hey look a body!”  The paralyzed figure of an Iraqi soldier lay 50 feet from the incinerated jeep he was blown from.  His knees were bent, eyes and mouth open, and his intestines poured out from under his shirt.  Both he and I were covered with specks of oil from the fires nearby, and soaked by the rains that made me miserable, yet washed his face clean.  Before he died he must have waved his arms, like the way kids make snow angels. He made wings in the sand.  My angel in the desert.