May 27, 2007

Pat Stone: The complete interview

By RODGER NICHOLS
of the Chronicle

     On Tuesday, May 22, The Chronicle interviewed retired psychologist Pat Stone, a Vietnam veteran who spent 22 years in private practice. Much of that practice involved counseling of veterans who were having difficulty readjusting to civilian life.
     In a talk that lasted more than an hour, Stone offered a number of valuable insights, more than we could fit in Sunday’s story.
     The following is the text of that interview, edited only lightly. A few of the interviewer’s questions have been left in for clarity.

     I was raised on family farm 20 miles north of Springfield, Illinois. We raised grain and hogs and a few cows. I was in 4-H and drove a tractor until I was 18 and left.
     That probably convinced me I should do something other than farming.
     [My wife] Barbara had followed me around to grad school, and I gave her the choice of where we would do my internship if I got a choice. I had one offered in Portland and one offered in Michigan and one in Southern California. Her mom had moved out here, so we decided to come out here.
     We’ve been in this area since 1977. In Lyle 78 and The Dalles in 1980. The Learning House was kind of my first gig, and I did school evaluations.

     I got my bachelors degree from a bible institute in Minnesota called Oak Hills, then went into the military for almost two years. Then went to a junior college and Bryan college in Dayton, Tennessee
     My Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1978 was from Rosemead School of Psychology at Biola University in La Mirada, Calif.
     I was licensed in Washington in 1979 and Oregon in 1981.
     I ran out of money in the first year of school, and I believed I was gong to get drafted very soon, so I took the delayed entry program and went in [the Army] in June 1969.
     My brother, two days before that, just returned from Vietnam, and his first words to me off the airplane in Springfield, Illinois were, “You fool.”
     He was a radio teletype operator and so was in a signal unit.
     When I joined the military, lo and behold, I actually put that I enjoyed camping and the outdoors on my interest form and they put me in the infantry. I went to noncom school and became an instant noncommissioned officer. They were called “shake n bakes,” whip ‘n chills,” “instant NCOs,” “90-day wonders.”
I was sent to Fort Lewis for a couple of months more training, then I was sent to Viet Nam.
     I served in Charlie company, Fourth of the Third, 11th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division.
     The Third is the Third Infantry Division, and the First of the Third guards the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It’s called the Old Guard, so I’m part of the Old Guard, though I never did that.
     I went to an infantry unit to the central highlands around Duc Pho and Chu Lai. That was about two years after the Me Lai massacre, which happened in that same area.
     I lasted about seven months, most all of which was in the jungle. I finally got my own squad, and then we lost our platoon leader., who was a lieutenant, to a booby trap and I became platoon leader. So my job was running the map and running the squad.
     We basically worked in deployment with six or 12-man teams out in the jungle out in the middle of nowhere. The mission was to find the enemy and disrupt their supply lines. And the reality is that we set booby traps at nighttime and then waited for them to go off and mostly were scared to death much of the time.
     And then Nov. 22, 1970, I was wounded by my own grenade, actually. It was a rifle grenade that I shot at an enemy soldier. I had run out of my own ammunition and all I had was these high explosive grenades left. I tried to shoot it closer than I would ever have shot it before, and part of it bounced back on me in my knee.
     It was a million-dollar wound and the happiest day of my life.
     We had other instances where people died. I had seven guys killed in my unit and a number wounded — I never did keep track of that — including several pretty good friends.
     So I spent a week when they did two surgeries on my knee in the hospital, and then they sent me to Japan for two or three weeks. I was really afraid they were going to send me back, but they were afraid of infection, so they sent me home.
     As a sidebar, I actually met the nurse that took care of my that first night in the hospital. (It was pretty dramatic for me, kind of scared and didn’t want to do in the hospital)
     I met her in Kenya 30 years later. I found out that she and I had been in that hospital at the same time. So lots of things have come full circle.
     So I came home and Barb and I got married; we’d been dating before that. She finished her nursing school and I worked on my doctorate until I finished. that’s when we came up here.
     My dissertation was on the effects of anger on cognitive functioning. I was looking at religious differences and male-female differences.

Q: Is it possible for a civilian to understand what it’s like to be in the military during a war?

     Yes and no. If you hadn’t been there, there will never be the emotional punch to it, and that’s what is unique for anybody who’s gone through trauma.
     But I think most people, if they set their mind to understanding what the experience is really about...
     The problem is most people will listen to policy. And this is how most things in the policy world work, that obviously, in the real world, with real lives and emotions [are different.]
     I think you can learn about that by talking to real veterans and by doing a lot of reading — not war stories, but real war [experiences] like journals,
     Not so much from the entertainment point of view, because in descriptions of real combat, there’s nothing glorious about it; there’s nothing courageous about it. It’s really who survives and who doesn’t survive at any given moment.
     Anybody who has been in combat for any given time will be a coward or a hero, just depending on the length of time that they’re there.
     Anybody that wants to focus on courage and honor and being a hero, I’m not saying that’s wrong, but that comes later. That’s not at all what combat is like.
     There’s nothing courageous about picking up one of your friends who has been blown in half, and his body disconnects.
When somebody explodes, there’s misty blood that hangs in the air, and you can smell it for a day or two in the jungle, because the wind doesn’t blow it away. And when you walk through it, and you pick up a rifle that has embedded flesh in it...
     You know, it takes courage to even walk down that trail, because you don’t know if you’re going to be the next one.
     And most people in those situations aren’t thinking about policy. We’re not thinking about fighting communists. We’re basically thinking about living through the next day, being true to our buddies. We’re not even that loyal to the company or the battalion. We’re loyal to our own little group of people that we all just want to [be students?] . We’re 19 years old.
     Your bonds really are to the unit.
     And we can take off on a lot of rabbit trails, but one of the rabbit rails is, if you are the new guy, and you don’t have those bonds and everybody else has bonded, you can be very alienated for a period of time until you’ve earned your place.
     I’ve met some veterans who don’t want anything to do with veterans or their old unit because they were the new guy and they were misused.
     I had a World War II guy tell me he had no desire to see the men in his unit because they were on Okinawa and he was a new guy and they put him on point and he lasted two weeks. He just felt set up.
     Each war experience is individual. There’s no cookie-cutter; there’s no way to understand a veteran. Everything is unique to that person’s own eyeball experience.

Q: How do you take that understanding that there is no cookie-cutter approach when you’re advising on national legislation?

[Editor’s note: Stone was involved as an advisor to the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee in 2003 and 2004]

      There was this piece of legislation that Feingold from Wisconsin was putting out that was going to require every returning soldier to be diagnosed, assessed — and treated, if his assessment required it — very soon after their return.
     What we know from the data is that if you talk to guys coming back, 15 to 25 percent will acknowledge problems significant to require intervention. But if you ask them how many want to actually see a counselor at that point, about three to four percent actually want to see a counselor.
     And this legislation was actually going to force everybody. My fear was, people aren’t ready for it. They just want to get home and see their families.
     Now you ask them six months later and you’ll get a different story. But right when the troops are about ready to get dismissed, nobody wants to talk to a counselor, no matter how much they’re in pain and struggling.
     I didn’t think the military could make it work, because I heard the story of a young man who got up to Fort Lewis a couple of years ago, and first sergeant got them all in one room and said (Southern accent) “We understand there’s probably a few of you who need psychological assistance here, and we’re gonna stay right in this room until every [expletive] of you get the help you need.”
     My point is, unless the culture of the whole military were to take a 180-degree swing, mental health is always going to be a stepchild. You’ve got to be more sensitive; you can’t impose that from the top down.
     So I wrote a set of recommendations challenging the whole presuppositions of this. Even though the intent was really good, because you have this higher suicide rate [this won’t work.] That’s an example.

Q: How did you end up advising senators on veterans affairs?

      I was in Kenya. We’d been there three years. I closed my private practice here in 2000. I’d spent 22 years in my little office and heard thousands of war stories as well as my own, and I felt the older I got, the more I should be able to deal with it, but the reality was the more personal everybody’s stories became, and the more they triggered me.
     So closed the practice, and Barb and I looked around to see what to do and we decided to help out part time at Daystar University [in Kenya.]
     I taught a couple classes, Barb and I helped start a counseling center, and I worked on a counseling psychology program for Kenyans. That actually went through, and has had 60-80 graduates by now. I was only a part of that; I didn’t do the whole thing.
     Kenya’s kind of a dangerous place — a wild west in ways — and there are wars in all the countries around it: Somalia, Congo, Sudan. After a month or so started not doing too well there. You know I’d just get more alert and anxious. Just felt like I was back in a war zone.
     I’d always wanted to be a politician at some level, and I decided I may never be a politician, but I can get some political experience. I applied for the American Psychological Association Congressional Fellowship program. They pay for about five or six people to work in a congressional office in the House or the Senate or the White House or the Vice-President. I got picked for one of those spots, and became the APA senior congressional fellow for 2003-2004.
     Senior because I was bald. [laughs].
     Basically, when you work on a Senate or House staff, you’re a flunky. Even though I’ve got a Dr. behind my name, you know you’re working with 22-33-year-olds and they’re your bosses.
     They had a really nice program where we got to go all through government for the first week or two. [We saw] everything from the Department of Defense to the EOB (Executive Office Building] and we got to meet quite a few people.
     What it comes down to is you get to apply for the position you want. I could have worked for the committee on foreign affairs — and I had a real interest in that — or I had several House offices, but the one that came up was the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.
     I took that one and basically spent the year going to hearings. I tried to focus it — because that’s such a huge area — on the mental health policy of the VA and the mental health policy of the Department of Defense.
     I had hearings and meetings on a lot of the material that’s now coming out.
This is what the army has done. Instead of trying to deny what combat is, they basically have videos and presentations about really what it’s truly like. They’ve got a concept called “battlemind.”

[Editor’s note: there are a number of resources available at www.battlemind.org, including a PDF document that summarizes the program and a 35-minute video is also available for download.]

      The video is just excellent in terms of young guys when they come back [from the war zone] You know, why they startle, why they drink too much.
     Basically the theory is, the ways you learned to cope with your deployment in Iraq is that you have specific skills called “battlemind.” It’s an attitude.
     If you carry those skills into civilian life and civilian relationships, like ordering people around. If you’re a sergeant, you can order your troops, and it will actually help you survive in combat. If you come home and order your kids or your spouse, you’re setting yourself up, because military discipline does not exist outside the military.
     They talk about carrying loaded weapons around, because in combat you go in with locked and loaded weapons. But if you go to the Sunday picnic at church and you’re sticking a gun in your pack — even if it’s legal — why are you really doing that? The enemy really didn’t follow you home, probably. But the whole video is about that.
     Everybody knows that this is true, but this is the first time they’ve put it into language, and part of it is, “fear in combat is common.” “Members of your unit will be injured or killed.” I mean, they just lay it out.
     “Combat affects every soldier emotionally and mentally.” In Vietnam, people knew that to be true, but nobody really owned it.
     “Deployment places stress on families. Combat poses moral and ethical challenges,” You know, civilians get killed. What happens if you’re in a situation where you kill a civilian? You have to make this decision in a heartbeat, and you have to live with the consequences for the remainder of your life.
     I talked about this with Lt. Col. Carl Castro, the guy who designed much of this stuff. I met up with him a number of times in hearings and meetings.
     People are starting to “get it” at kind of the top levels. The problem is you cannot — he’s a psychologist and his boss is a psychiatrist. But that doesn’t mean the colonel next door gets it.
     I followed the case of Andrew Pogany — he was the coward and Jessica Lynch was the hero.
     They showed up on the cover of either Newsweek or Time. I heard about Andrew in September when I started. He had come over [to Iraq] with a Special Forces unit, and within four days he was sent home and charged with cowardice.
     When I heard that, I decided to see if I could help. It turns out, he had basically come over and had to strip a shot-up soldier — an Iraqi — looking for intelligence. He’d been on an airplane for 20-some hours before that.
     He actually had a panic attacks and couldn’t stop them. He requested help and his unit commanders didn’t give it to him. Finally, they sent him to a psychologist, who diagnosed acute anxiety, with the recommendation that they give him some space where he could kind of get re-established.
     The command would not hear it. Basically, in front of all his peers, they read him the riot act. Finally, they sent him home, treated as a criminal, and charged him with physical cowardice under fire, which is a death penalty offense. So here’s this guy who had a brief reaction he could have gotten over with, charged with a death penalty offense.
     He was finally exonerated, but it took seven or eight months, and he was under house arrest most of that time.
     The point is, mental health is an inconvenient truth for military operational commanders because they want bodies on the ground to do their job. And everybody’s scared, and they’re afraid if they pay much attention to the mental health aspects of it, you know, it’s going to spread to the unit.
     In the Pogany situation, his commander, this sergeant-major, who was one of the key irritants, was killed about two months later, I think in January. He was actually in the news because he was dragged out of his car an beaten up by the crowd and killed. Then two months later another of the warrant officers came home to Fort Collins and shot himself.
     These are eight or nine-man units, and here two of them were killed. And under some circumstances that suggested poor judgement. That was one of the things that helped [Pogany’s exoneration].
     But that was the kind of thing I worked on, plus I actually worked on legislative issues. like this proposed legislation.

Q: Let me take you back to that moment when you killed the teenage Vietcong soldier and wounded yourself. How did that change you?

      The truth is, I’d changed before that. Having friends killed in circumstances where you really think you’re going to die, it suddenly changes.
     The thing that changes you is that as a 19-year-old or an 18-year old, you think you’re invulnerable. And once you have friends killed...
     It’s interesting. As long as nobody died in the unit, you could still kind of feel it as a game, even with serous injuries. And our unit didn’t get casualties (they had wounded, but not killed) until August.
     I got into the field in June. We went about a month and a half without anybody getting killed.

     [When it happened]I as a teenager learned that life is fragile, and most people don’t learn that until they’re in their fifties or sixties and their friends star to die.
     That’s a huge change right there.
     And a second change is that combat is so arbitrary. Lots of guys in Iraq, a car comes towards them. The guy may have just turned the wrong way, got confused, and then if you see a bunch of soldiers, you’re going to get even scareder. But if they keep coming, you have to decide whether it’s a bomber.
     I was in several circumstances like that. We actually had a lady walk into our booby trap. And this was at evening time, and she was moaning in agony, and I just thought it was an enemy soldier. My lieutenant orders me to take two guys and “Shut them up” And so I walk down and I was still new enough I wasn’t calculating at this point. If it had happened three months later, it would have been different. But the guy behind me shot the person. And the reason is, we didn’t want this person to give away our position.
     There’s no way a helicopter is going to come out and rescue a Vietnamese person. They’re going to come out and risk their lives for an American, but not for a Vietnamese. And it turned out this young woman may have had two or three children. And that night, I remember — I didn’t know if she had children, but it was a young woman who had no weapon, and she may just have gone down to the stream to get some water, and I promised myself I’m going to never, ever take an order like that.
     Well ,the next day we found another woman and these children. We feed and watered them and ask if we can’t take them out of this area, which is a free-fire zone.
     When the choppers came in, there was only enough capacity for us. So we get on the choppers and head out, try to scare them away.
     But before we get a half mile, they have operating procedures with cluster artillery. The feeling was [our presence would draw them into a concentration worth attacking].
     And the reality of it was the only people I knew were there were these kids and this other woman, and so for the second time in 24 hours, I was a part of something...
     You know, combat is messy. They talk about “surgical strikes.” There’s nothing surgical about a bomb, even if it’s laser-guided with pinpoint accuracy.
All the kind of funny ways that we soften reality. There’s a policy way of talking about combat.
     You see, policy isn’t what gives you PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder); it’s reality. It’s really what happens because of policy. And that’s where the evilness of man, how you can be associated with evil, absolute evil. You can be involved [in something that] in another time and place, under another legal system, might be called murder.
     But in combat the decisions are made so quickly and they’re so final.
     Even the impulse that gets acted on. You just don’t get a chance to act on impulse in civilian life. In combat, you’re carrying a gun and you can reach out and touch someone 150, 300, 500 yards away, with just a thought. And it shows you as a young person how terrible things can happen.

Q: Other people didn’t have the same reaction. Do you know why?

      The thing is, it would be a mistake to think that’s the only reaction to have.      When you’re shooting a machine gun, and you’re moving through brush.
     When I got wounded, the guy next to me about a minute before I was wounded, we were shooting into the brush. And he looked at me and said “Stoney, why are you smiling?” And the truth of it, I was embarrassed by the smile, because I knew we were killing people. But there’s excitement, there’s adrenaline. You’re finally doing what you’re trained to do.
     In that case we were “winning.” It’s different when you’re losing. When you’re on the receiving end of it, life can be very different. But you know, it can turn any second.
     So even within myself I had this whole host of reactions to a combat circumstances.
     Why don’t other people? Other people were brought up differently. I was brought up in a very conservative Christian home. That certainly was a part of my internal reaction.
     You know, we have soldiers who are ADD. You have soldiers who are sociopaths and psychopaths, you have normal people.
     Most soldiers have the same distribution [of mental disorders] as the population. The problem is, if somebody who is a sociopath gets into a leadership position, that person’s lack of conscience can have a ripple effect and kill a lot of people.
     In fact, the lieutenant who told me to shut that person up, if I saw him today, I don’t know what I’d do in terms of my reaction to him. I don’t mean hitting him, but it would not feel easy.
     I’m a person who really likes to come full circle and make amends. I think I would, but it would be a hard meeting initially.

Q: Are there some things soldiers can’t reconcile, or shouldn’t reconcile?

     Everything that happens in our lives is a part of us. Even the definition of reconcile implies that there’s some finish to it.
     My guess is most traumatic events are always alive in some fashion in our hearts, whether we’re the victims or the perpetrators. And killing a person is an additional form of combat.
     Let’s define combat. It’s everything from being sniped at a once or twice, or having a grenade, or just being in a place where it happens. And you have degrees [up] to D-Day. The fact is, if it were D-Day all the time, nobody would survive.
     There is a problem sometimes when we talk about the combat soldier, we are not being really sensitive to those who are in support positions, who also faced life and death; maybe at a distance, but on a daily basis. And that affects them in their own way, every bit as much as it affects the infantryman or special forces person.
     Everybody who comes back, or who has a family member who comes back, should be aware that whether you’re a cook or an infantryman or a helicopter pilot or a jet pilot, that exposure to combat is going to be a lifetime effect.
     And that’s where we get back to reconciliation. Reconciling is a lifetime act, a lifetime series of acts that we handle in different ways at different stages of our life.
     One of the reasons — there are probably hundreds of reasons — I went to Africa. One of them is I wanted to understand a couple of people I was involved in killing. They were Montagnards.
     I didn’t know anything about primitive cultures, and in Kenya I was able to and visit the Pokots and Turkana tribal groups —which are just out of the Stone Age — and got a sense of how they treated each other, what their relationships were like.
     I got to see how they treated their returning warriors, which was really fascinating. They have a much more elaborate way of reintegrating their warriors than what we do in the West.

     Like the Pokots. If you had killed somebody, they let ‘em come back to the edge the community but you can’t come in.
     It’s no a discipline thing; the men of the tribe go out and talk with them over a period of weeks; the women feed them. They can’t be involved in relationship.
We perceive numbing as a negative thing. They actually prescribe numbing. They can’t be sexual. You basically have to spend time on the edge of the community while the community comes and kind of greets you and hears your story.
     Usually after 30 to 60 days, if the others feel you’re ready to rejoin your rightful place, they’ll have some kind of celebration and integration ceremony that everybody has been a part of. Not just one or two, but everybody. And then you’re brought back in.
     And if you’ve killed somebody, they’ll do a blood ritual. They will tattoo a shoulder, and that signifies the spilling of blood. It also creates a visible mark for the rest of your life.
     If you go into the home of a pregnant woman, you stand outside and say, “I’m Joe Blow, the killer of —,” if you know the name of the person you killed or the tribal group and then the woman gets to decide whether you come in, because they believe if you kill somebody, you carry their spirit. And they have to decide if that spirit will be harmful to the unborn baby,
     Since they don’t wear tops, this kind of badge — and it’s not a badge of honor; it’s just a badge of acknowledgement. Your identity is worn on the outside.
     We wear our identities on the inside, mostly. But there, their body is tattooed to give information about who you are and what you’ve done. And it’s not a bad thing and it’s not a good thing; it’s just a factual thing.
     The benefit of that — and I don’t think we should do that for our troops — is that you don’t have to hide anything that you’ve been through. There’s no secrets.
     These people would say (and I heard it more than once) is “The one thing we don’t understand about Americans is how you can kill people you don’t know. When we kill people, we do it for personal reasons.”
     They don’t understand killing for policy reasons, killing is always for personal reasons.
     That’s the things we don’t understand about the [?] people. We don’t under stand their traditions; we don’t understand the people; we don’t know how their elders interact.
     I don’t know how you change a society just by force if you don’t know the underlying [mores] — and not just know it, but really appreciate it and understand the benefits and the consequences.
     Part of the reason I went to Kenya is to give me a glimmer into that family [in Vietnam] that I believe died. It helped me prize who they were as people.
That’s my definition of reconciliation; it’s an example of truly understanding the implications of your doing some action. Not just over a moment in time, but over a lifetime.
     My mom was just here, and she said “Our family has really been a family of war.” Because my dad was in World War II, and I had an uncle at Iwo Jima, and my brother was in Vietnam and I was in Vietnam.
     What she was saying was how our family, a farm family, has been so affected by war and by the policies of the United States. And how, without exception, all of us have gone into the service. We don’t feel ashamed of our service. We feel honored to have served, and we men shared a camaraderie of having been in the military, which is the same culture.
     But when I killed somebody in Vietnam, like that family, that’s where that generation ended. And three weeks ago we were in Boise with my dad and he met up with a buddy he hadn’t seen in 61 years. The last time they were in China. They served on the same ship for about a year and a half and they split up in this China. Dad was in the engine room of an LST on Okinawa, and the buddy had watched a Japanese torpedo go underneath their boat. An LST is a shallow draft boat and it went right under it.
     And the thought occurred to me that the ship was full of munitions, and had the torpedo been a couple of feet higher, me, my son, all my grandchildren would have never happened.
     Part of reconciliation is me understanding that I was part of it in Vietnam as well. It’s not just alike; it’s more than alike, because of all it affects.
     A lot of people don’t take it that far, and I don’t think everybody should obsess about it, but I think part of healing is acknowledging all that it is. That’s why I think people that just tell war stories or those people who can’t tell their stories at all and have to drink too much or they have to keep living the combat life; they feel isolated.
     I used to work with one guy who lived in a tepee with his family, and he went on patrol every night. He couldn’t get past being 21 years old.
     I think part of healing is as you mature, you’re able to take a larger view of life events, and I think that kind of requires us to develop understanding.
     I think it’s lifetime, not something you do once; you do it in pieces as life unfolds.
     As I told my dad, now that I’m retired, i think a lot more about those days than I ever did as a younger man because I was so busy, and now I have time to reflect.
     I worked at the Veterans Home in The Dalles for a little while, and that’s a quote I heard up at the Veteran’s Home. They’d be talking war stories or military language, and these guys are in their 80s.
     So it’s not something that you purge from your life; it’s something you more fully become, I guess.

     About half of my practice was with Vietnam Veterans, some World War II and some Korean War. I really felt honored to do that work until it became burdensome to me and I had to stop. I really feel blessed to have done that, and I feel honored by the stories that I’ve heard.
     The stories entangle you. In some ways they become my stories; it’s not something you just forget. That’s part of it; I was accumulating too many stories.
We call “compassion fatigue,” and we call it “vicarious traumatization.” Both terms are used. And I think it’s true, because I think it’s what I experienced as well.
     When you think about it, stories — memory stories, I’m not talking war stories, which aren’t really stories, but disconnected stories, alcoholic stories, bragging stories.
     True combat is not a lot to brag about, except that somehow you were surviving. Some of it was your choice, but a lot of it wasn’t your choice, whether you survived or not.
     The thing about having stories, and prizing stories. In other cultures, those stories are the identity of a person. And they’re honored. I sat around fires in Kenya and listened to the stories. That’s how it’s passed to the younger children and becomes part of the culture.
     In our culture, if it doesn’t get written down and you don’t tell it, it kind of goes with the person. As a counselor and psychologist, I felt privileged to hear all these stories.
     There’s a helmet [indicates] that has a bullet hole in it. I remember the story, and that was told to me probably in 1982. It’s my story now, and I wasn’t wearing the helmet.
     Here in the West we are so material and thing-oriented, and in Keyna and South America and the tribal areas it’s really more about relationships. Those relationships then are really a series of stories about life unfolding. There’s a continuity to life.
     Stories are stories. That’s who you are. I have no regrets about my career. That’s what I was called to do.

Q: You still keep your hand in with workshops at George Fox.

      Yes, and I have to think about that, because the problem with doing the workshops is it throws me way back in that kind of murky water. And there’s only so much you can live there. If I do a workshop, the night before and for sure the next day, I tell stories as a part of this workshop, and you sort of relive part of the events an there’s just kind of an overlay of sadness to all those memories.

Q: I would be interested in passing on to the readers would be some very general advice about how our readers could be helpful, now that we have another generation of people are coming back with problems. If you have a member of your family coming back with what you think are problems, how can you help?

     I think just pay attention. Are they drinking too much? Are they isolating themselves? Are they quick-tempered? Do they seem depressed or suicidal? Are they willing to speak about what happened?
     And to the degree that they’re isolating and drinking, a very strong encouragement to get help, whether through their church, a professional counselor or the veterans administration,
     The quality of listening is an important topic. It’s one thing to ask, ‘How are you doing?’ as a casual greeting, but not really have the time to actually hear what they have to say. And often times, when it’s somebody who’s been through trauma, we ourselves are not sure we want to hear what really happened. My encouragement is people can hear a lot more than we give ourselves credit for.
     So genuinely ask and generally listen to what they have to say. Don’t accept a policy answer; accept a human answer. How would you feel if you’d been gone for a year or you had to kill somebody? What emotions would be playing in you? How would you be sleeping at night? How would you be reacting to your friends asking this question?
     Put yourself in their shoes. It doesn’t take much, a couple of those questions.
Don’t be intimidated by an abrupt answer; be a little more persistent than that.
It takes time to do this. Take the person out to copy. Work at re-establishing the relationship. If they’ve been gone a year, but you were good friends before they left. it’s going to be easy, because you’ll already have got new friends, and you’ll have changed, and the person coming back will have changed and have gotten new friends. So it will be important to create time to re-establish and reconnect.
     In World War II, about 12 to 15 percent of the population in the U.S. was directly involved in the war. In Vietnam, it was two percent; in Iraq now, it’s .5 percent.
     So these men and women that come back have a much better chance of being isolated. Especially guard units, who come back to real communities; they don’t come back to their bases. All their college friends or high school friends will not have gone, so there’s not a shared experience they can gravitate towards.
     The Vietnam guys felt pretty out of place when they came back in the VFW because there were so few of them compared with the WWII guys. Now they’ve taken over the VFW and the Legion, but it’s still going to be hard for the new guys for the same reason; there are so few of them.
     I guess be careful about being too honorific. How do you relate to somebody who’s honoring you?
     I’m not saying we shouldn’t have parades and we shouldn’t say nice things about the soldiers. But for the actual soldiers coming back, it doesn’t connect. If anything, it might be offensive. I couldn’t even go to high school graduations. I couldn’t be there; my mind wasn’t on that. I’d see them because I wes really young, and I’d be thinking about the next two years, what’s going to happen to these lives, to watch those innocent young people going out into the world.
     The other thing is don’t criticize in your comments. Most people don’t survive a war through the politics of it; they survive through the personal connections.           And you don’t know where a soldier is politically; you don’t know if they’re for the war or against the war, Republican or Democrat, you can’t see any of that.
Just because they’ve done what their country told them to do doesn’t speak to their politics. So to make it political early on [isn’t wise].
     I think people just need to take time to learn the person who’s come home and find out who they are and what their needs are now, and that’s going to change over time. But that takes effort.
     There are stereotypes, and there’s nothing wrong with a stereotypes. We’ve got to see whether they’re e accurate or not.
     When I did my workshops, I ask a series of questions just to find out what your prejudices are. The first is “I could never work with somebody who said they enjoy killing. True or false.”
     If somebody started talking about what a blast it was to go out and kill somebody, how are you going to respond to that?
     Because there’s an adrenaline rush under certain circumstances.
     There’s a wonderful quote by a lieutenant out of a book called “One Bullet Away.” He was followed around by a journalist who wrote for Rolling Stone magazine and they were getting ready for an operation and he said, “The good news is we get to go out and kill people tonight.”
     It’s a way to get people kind of energized, because if you think about it, what’s the alternative? It’s a good night to go out and get killed? How do you motivate people to go out and do something like that?
     He applied to a college for a master’s degree. He’s an excellent writer; it’s a great book, and the admissions committee called him, and they’d seen that quote. On the phone, this lady said, “We have this quote that you said it would be a good night to go out and kill somebody.”
     And his response to her was, “Did I mean I’m going to be somebody in a clock tower and snipe people? No. Absolutely not. Do I owe you any further explanation for my behavior? No, I do not.”
     That’s what I’m saying. It takes a little time to understand the nuances of where a person’s going to come from. Because politically correct doesn’t work either. That’s a stereotype. If you stay at that level with people, you’ll never understand who they are.
     Lots of people go back and forth across cultures. That’s a very difficult thing to do, to go back and forth between cultures, especially when you’ve been gone for a while and kind of adapted to one. Then you add the military on top of that, then you add the traumas that are possible on top of that. So you get kind of a quadruple whammy, particularly if you’re 19.