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Together We Stand, Divided We Fall: Building Alliances with Combat Veterans

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/soundings.95.3.0284

2161-6302

Lisa Carlton,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Hey you! would you help me to carry the stone?Open your heart, I'm coming home.Hey you! don't tell me there's no hope at all.Together we stand, divided we fall.—roger waters I've never opened an essay with an epigraph before. It looks strange floating up there out of context like a piece of litter on a perfectly manicured suburban lawn. But it is actually quite meaningful to me, so I will leave it there—floating at the top of the page to inspire me as I write. I hope that what follows will help contextualize the meaning(s) I ascribe to it. The words are lyrics from the song “Hey You,” performed by the famous English rock band Pink Floyd. Like many of their songs, this one takes the perspective of the protagonist, Pink, who desperately calls out to members of society from behind The Wall—a place of loneliness and isolation.1 The song's sentiment of lonely existence resonates broadly with the privatizing logic of neoliberalism that has become the dominant ideological framework guiding contemporary social, cultural, and political practices. By neoliberalism, I refer to a logic of individualism and privatization of the public sphere. As Henry Giroux recently argued, “privatization has run rampant,” shifting the responsibility of socially produced problems onto the overburdened individual (2011, 10). This individualistic orientation is fundamentally incompatible with some of the nation's most precious democratic, communitarian ideals.2Over the years the neoliberal impulse has inspired several accompanying rhetorics of individuation such as that of the “self-made man” of postindustrial America. According to Dana Cloud, the rhetoric of the “self-made man” masked a growing polarity between socioeconomic classes in this era, disguising the fact that success attained through self-determination was often only a remote possibility for members of the working class. The language of individualism and the rhetoric of personal responsibility persuaded members of the working class that they were individually responsible for their social and economic standing (Cloud 1998, 24). In this way, individualizing rhetoric diverts attention from larger social ills by narrowing focus onto the local, personal level rather than promoting examination of broader systemic structures.One of the most significant social and political problems presently facing humanity is war. If the overriding question for politics is how we can live peacefully together without eliminating diversity, war represents a direct challenge to the political project as the ultimate expression of political antagonism. The United States is currently enduring the longest military conflict in recent history, the toll of which accumulates daily. A significant social challenge created by an era of perpetual warfare is the proper “management” of returning service members. Like the economic disparities of the industrial age, the present return of combat veterans has been cloaked in an individualizing rhetoric that I describe as “pathological.” As discursive patterns, rhetorics of pathology function similarly to the therapeutic discourse prevalent during the first Gulf War, which translated “social and political problems into the language of individual responsibility” (Cloud 1998, 1).For Cloud, rhetorics of therapy were used to inhibit public dissent during the Persian Gulf War. She argued that the media privileged groups who supported the war in order to cast blame, guilt, shame, and anxiety on those who openly opposed it. But when Cloud was writing in the 1990s, she was describing a relatively new rhetorical situation that was an outgrowth of “Vietnam Syndrome,” the phrase used to describe public reticence to support the war. She argued that “yellow ribbon stories” served to allay a public wary of war. These emotionally charged news stories described families coping with the anxiety and risks of war. By focusing on the intimacy of family struggle, conversations about the war shifted focus from the public political realm to private, domestic spaces. According to Cloud, these stories functioned as therapeutic discourses by quelling dissent and by appealing to idealistic patriotism in order to reassure the public of their nation's martial superiority. The yellow ribbon rhetoric of the 1990s effectively sutured support for the troops with support for the war effort.Two decades later the suture remains. America's Vietnam Syndrome is in apparent remission as the United States leads a global military campaign against terror. Unlike the rhetorical situation described by Cloud, who in the 1990s faced a post-Vietnam era of disillusionment in which public dissent from war was manifest in a lack of support for the troops themselves, today public support for the troops in war is practically a given. Thus, the type of rhetoric I describe in this essay is slightly different from that described in Cloud's work on rhetorics of therapy, though I am influenced by her work. At its most basic, “pathology” differs from “therapy” on a definitional level. Whereas therapy emphasizes treatment, a rhetoric of pathology highlights the process of defining or diagnosing a condition or set of behaviors as clinical.My first conscious encounter with a rhetoric of pathology occurred in July 2010, when the Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it was relaxing its policies on claiming benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Under the new policy, veterans are no longer required to have extensive records supporting the incidents causing the “disorder.” As one article's headline proclaimed, “PTSD patients no longer need to prove trauma” (Cabalo 2010; see also Kennedy 2008; Love 2010). As a great-granddaughter, granddaughter, daughter, and sister to four generations of combat veterans, I was initially pleased by the new policy. I felt the change in legislation marked a much-deserved public recognition of the traumas of war. But then I began to consider what it would mean to “assume trauma” and interpellate veterans as patients—a social role with a very specific institutional identity. Clinical language sets up an interpretive framework not only for how civilians should understand and interact with returning service members, but also for how returning service members should make sense of themselves.The next encounter with pathologizing language provided my critical awakening. A few months later in November, the Combat Paper Project arrived in my hometown, Iowa City. This nonprofit organization travels around the country partnering with institutions like the University of Iowa to facilitate workshops in papermaking. In the workshops, veterans participate by cutting up their uniforms, literally beating them to a pulp, and then forming them into paper. In the local press, the project was heralded as offering a unique medium through which combat veterans can begin to reconcile their wartime experiences. The press coverage as well as the project's website used corrective medical language such as “coping,” “catharsis,” “cure,” “wounds,” “healing,” “recovery,” and “reintegration.”What is striking about both of these cases—the new PTSD policy and the Combat Paper Project—is that they are oriented toward helping the veteran population. But in so doing, they define the veteran as pathological—in need of a cure. The implications of such a diagnosis are severe. First, defining the veteran as afflicted positions him as carrying a “psychological syphilis brought home from the front,” leaving him to deal with his disease by himself (Turner 1996, 10). This leads to a second, directly related implication. When social problems are categorized as psychological or medical, they become individual. This categorization ignores the fact that trauma, particularly war trauma, is a social experience (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997, ix). While I recognize that trauma, pain, and disorder are health conditions, they are also political and cultural matters and should be perceived as such.Invoking a medical discourse to interpret social, political, and cultural events perpetuates faulty logic. For example, if we think of our veterans as “sick,” we can maintain the fantasy that they will get better and relieve ourselves of any guilt for sending them into combat in the first place. In this way, rhetorics of pathology do a double disservice to veterans. First, the diagnosis of “disorder” obscures the normal grieving process. According to Veterans Affairs (VA) psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, such a diagnosis carries a social stigma among veterans and discourages them from seeking support for naturally occurring mental and emotional fatigue.3 Additionally, by placing the burden of healing squarely on the shoulders of individual veterans, rhetorics of pathology allow the civilian public to ignore the fact that they themselves are morally implicated in acts of war.When war is framed as a cultural trauma, however, accountability shifts outward, off the individual and onto a shared plane of civic responsibility. As the opening epigraph espouses, together we stand, but divided we fall.4 Our first step toward this end requires a reframing of war as a collective, political, public trauma rather than as a private, individual one. Over the years, war has become so steeped in rhetorics of pathology that it is approaching de-politicization. When returning from war is imagined as an individual journey of “reintegration,” we miss opportunities to share the burden of trauma and the loss of innocence.5 When the combat experience is pathologized, we are free to overlook our civic obligations to one another.According to political theorist Danielle Allen, ignoring democratic responsibility is a bad “habit” of contemporary citizenship. She argues that a lack of mutual respect, accountability, and sacrifice fosters distrust among citizens. Allen considers distrust to be the fundamental ailment plaguing contemporary civic relationships. She argues, “Citizens no longer think it sensible, or feel secure enough, to place their fates in the hands of democratic strangers. Citizens' distrust not of government, but of each other leads the way to democratic disintegration” (2004, xvi). Allen uses a set of historical case studies surrounding race relations in the United States to illustrate the nature of distrustful civic relationships. Following Allen's analysis, one could imagine how similar distrust could fester between civilian and veteran populations. A recent survey commissioned by the Coalition for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans and conducted by Cohen Research Group (2010) confirmed that less than 1 percent of Americans serve in the armed forces. But perhaps the most upsetting finding was the existence of “[a] very real and disturbing disconnect among the majority of Americans in understanding how deployment contributes to economic, social, and familial stress.” Considering the lack of sacrifice required of the civilian public, and their apparent indifference to the struggles faced by service members and their families, it would not be incorrect for veterans to feel like they are making disproportionate sacrifices. In order to rebuild relationships of trust and establish a feeling of reciprocity, Allen calls on us to perform political friendship.6 She writes that “friendship is not an emotion, but a practice: a set of hard-won, complicated habits used to bridge differences of personality, experience and aspiration. Friendship is not easy, nor is democracy” (2004, 3). For Allen, friendship begins with the recognition that we have a shared life—not an identical life—but a shared life with common events, climates, and built-environments.One of the first steps toward establishing the political friendships described by Allen is to acknowledge the fact that war is part of our “shared life.” We are all morally implicated. The aftermath of war should weigh on all of our minds. As civilians, we can begin taking responsibility for war by refiguring the way we talk about the bodies/minds of warriors in our shared civic space.7 This demands an examination of the way power is socially configured.Currently the dominant discourses surrounding combat veterans conceptualize power as a product that can be granted, denied, withheld, and so on. The VA's new and relaxed PTSD policy transfers power to veterans through the constitutive act of recognizing trauma. In social philosophy, recognition designates an attitude toward specific features of a person. This attitude can confirm or even constitute important aspects of his status as a person within a shared social and political community as well as his personal understanding of himself.8 The constitutive power created by recognition positions the veteran subject within larger discursive formations, over which he has little (if any) control. Following Foucault, Stuart Hall explains that on some level, an individual must identify with the position as discourse constructs it, “subjecting” himself to its rules, and hence becoming the subject of its power/knowledge (1997, 56).On its face, the VA's recognition of trauma appears to be a good thing. Veterans deserve this recognition. In fact, many passionate citizens fought tirelessly for governing agencies to acknowledge the mental and emotional battle scars of Vietnam. But my concern is that the current pervasiveness of clinical language used to describe war trauma is overcompensation for the preceding neglect. Pathological rhetoric becomes a way to avoid the mistakes we made with the Vietnam generation and assuage any nagging moral culpability. The subject position of “traumatized” or “clinically disordered” imposes a set of prescribed opportunities and constraints; the veteran is expected behave accordingly.This new pathological rhetoric produces a market-exchange model of power. When veterans are constituted as “disordered,” they are positioned as power-deficient and in need of the resources provided by powerful institutions like the VA. In this example, power, in the form of recognition of pain, clinical diagnosis, or rehabilitation strategies, operates as a product that can be granted, withheld, obtained, or forfeited. This “product model” of power is central to most rhetorics of individuation.9In what follows, I will describe the relationship between the product model of power and a rhetoric of pathology. Then I will illustrate how power as a product exists discursively within the Combat Paper Project. Although I will critique the project's language, I am not criticizing its goals. Instead, I hope that highlighting existing rhetorical limitations will reveal untapped resources of opportunity. The paper will conclude by considering an alternative model of power and recommend practices for establishing trust and political friendship with returning service members.The architecture of pathological rhetoric is built on a product model of power. When power is conceived of as a product, we become stuck in a linguistic trap of needs and deficiencies. We are forced to think of social relationships within the paradigm of a market economy. This model of power is central to rhetorics of pathology. When a person is pathologized, she is “granted” power through the acknowledgement of her pain, suffering, or trauma. She “acquires” the social, institutional status of patient. This relational transaction reflects Titus Stahl's definition of “institutional power”: “the power persons acquire through their position in a stable and integrated system of social rules” (2011, 350). Stahl explains that by assigning status functions to objects, actions, and persons, institutions create normative properties and designate certain behavior as permissible or obligatory (351). By inhabiting the subjectivity of a patient, then, an individual is expected to use the resources made available by the power-granting agency to overcome her deficiency.When a person is “hailed” a patient, she is individuated and it becomes her responsibility to attain the cultural capital necessary to produce “healing,” “cure” or “normalcy.”10 An alternative model of power might provide a remedy to the individualizing market-exchange version currently in place. The alternative model in mind views power as a caring relation (see Bloome et al. 2005; Noddings 1986). A relational model of power is reciprocal and multidimensional, involving action, effort, accountability, respect and responsiveness. It has the potential to bring people together for mutual benefit.11 It is the ideal model of power upon which to establish political friendships.Acknowledgment of the pain of combat, however, has historically operated according to the product model. This is best exemplified by briefly reviewing the language used to talk about the bodies/minds of returning warriors over the last several decades. In the First World War, veterans were described as suffering from “shell shock.” In World War II, the same condition was called “combat fatigue.” The men returning from Vietnam were experiencing Post-Vietnam Syndrome (PVS). In 1980 the formal diagnosis of PTSD was recognized by VA hospitals nationwide.12 And by 2011, because PTSD was perceived to be so widespread, the burden of proof was lifted. The rhetorical trajectory from general “shock” and “fatigue” to a more specific “syndrome” and eventually a clinical “disorder” coincides with the individuating logic of neoliberalism more broadly, and the medicalization of pathological rhetoric more specifically. Fred Turner notes that “the framers of the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder carefully pared away the social ‘intangibles’ that had characterized early descriptions of post-Vietnam syndrome” (1996, 61). In this way, messy combat experiences are sanitized through the language of medicine. Medicine is a powerful bureaucratic transformer of the existential, moral, aesthetic, and even religious sides of suffering (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997, xx). Complicated stories based on real events are reduced to a single cultural image of the solitary victim-patient to redress social experience in sterile, medical terms.To exemplify the insensitivity of this reductive process, I will point to an example from the popular 2006 documentary film The War Tapes. The documentary follows the yearlong deployment of three New Hampshire National Guardsmen from Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 172nd Infantry Regiment (Mountain) before, during, and after their deployment to Iraq. In a post-deployment interview, one of the “characters,” Sergeant Stephen Pink, or “Pink” as he is referred to in the film, describes his relationship with the VA: I'm locked into the VA. I went there … and I don't know, they say I got asthma, and hearing loss, and post-traumatic stress disorder … which is all right, I mean, I don't know … (Pink 2007) Unfortunately the documentary edits out the rest of Pink's commentary, but what is striking about this short excerpt is that he describes himself as being “locked into the VA.” The term “locked” conjures up a feeling of confinement, exclusion, or fixity. When one is “locked” into a bureaucratic system like the VA, one is certainly not in a position of power. Pink goes on to describe the diagnosis process using the phrase “they say I got.” This indicates that the power to interpellate him as an afflicted patient is in the hands of anonymous medical professionals, and all Pink can do is accept their verdict. Yet his acquiescence comes with equivocation when he relents, “which is all right, I mean, I don't know.” In the video, Pink's reservations are much more palpable than can be represented in transcript form. But even without assigning emotion to his utterance, the words in the text suggest that Pink's relationship to the VA is mechanical and unfeeling. Power operates as a product rather than as a network of caring relations.The power to acknowledge the pain of the combat experience is in the hands of the VA, Congress, the American Psychiatric Association, and other governing apparatuses. Granting acknowledgement of the traumatic experience of war (through clinical diagnosis or otherwise) transfers power rather than shares it. As Jeffrey Jay (1978) argues, “The veteran's [psychological] conflicts are not his alone, but are bound to the trauma and guilt of the nation. And our failure to deal with our guilt renders the veteran the symptom-carrier for society and increases his moral and emotional burden” (quoted in Hagopian 2009, 74). By focusing on individual suffering, the American public can overlook the collective nature of war. In this way, the veteran serves as a “psychological crucible of the entire country's doubts and misgivings about the war” (Lifton 1973, 556). The “plaintive discourse of wounds and healing” represents “a flight from critical judgments of the war” that ultimately evades the question of national policy (Hagopian 2009, 400–402). And as Turner points out, rhetorics of pathology “help us elide questions of historical responsibility—questions that entangle all of us, and not only those who fought the war” (1996, xii).In addition to avoiding a confrontation with our national morality and historical responsibility, constituting the combat veteran as suffering from a medical disorder allows us to believe that the “illness can be ‘cured’ within existing or slightly modified structures of institutionalized medicine and psychiatry” (Tal 1996, 6) rather than to imagine the veteran as suffering from a social ill best addressed in a social forum. And on the occasions when social forums are proposed, such as the Combat Paper Project, they are forced to adopt a rhetoric of pathology in order to receive funding. Recently I was invited to participate in a meeting concerning a grant proposal for a veterans' writing workshop and was frustrated to hear the clinical undertones of the project's justifications. To receive funding, social forums must present themselves as offering a tangible good to a quantifiably despondent community. Thus, workshops are described as offering a unique “treatment” for an afflicted veteran population.Another problem with a logic of individual pathology is that if a combat veteran does not identify as sick, or if he does not actively seek help or healing through the resources “granted” to him by governing agencies like the VA, he is considered a “bad veteran,” and perhaps more significantly, a “dangerous citizen” who poses a threat to the health of the polity. It is considered his civic duty to make himself well so he can rejoin the rest of us in our shared civil space. This narrative is marked by words like “reintegration” or “rehabilitation” and is the logical fallout of a product model of power where skills like “coping” or verbalizing pain are transformed into social goods. Individuals who do not work to acquire these skills risk being designated as psychologically dangerous (Bloome et al. 2005, 162–63).Images of violent, traumatized vets are pervasive in mainstream media. After Vietnam, Hollywood depicted the Vietnam vet as a rampaging lunatic in films like Taxi Driver (1976), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Apocalypse Now (1979). In response to these images, a disabled Vietnam veteran named Robert Brewin wrote, “If I acted according to what I have seen on television in the last six months or so, I would be harboring extreme psychopathic tendencies that prompt me to shoot up heroin with one hand while fashioning explosives with the other as my war-and-drug crazed mind flashes back to the rice paddy where I fragged my lieutenant” (quoted in Turner 1996, 46). Brewin's critique points out the injustice of the pathological stereotype. But the “troubled vet” archetype lives on in recent blockbuster films like The Hurt Locker (2008) and The Messenger (2009). The popularity of the angry, traumatized veteran might suggest an anxiety over our own morality, which we project onto veterans. In his essay “Back from Vietnam,” Murray Polner (1971) writes that the American public felt a sense of moral corruption, alienation, and guilt, but rather than addressing those feelings, we assigned them to the veterans. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on, my fear is that we are falling back into a similar pattern—shirking our democratic obligations and perpetuating bad civic habits.13The Combat Paper Project, founded in 2007 and based in Vermont, is a traveling nonprofit organization that partners with universities, veterans organizations, and art studios to host free papermaking workshops for veterans. On its website, the project describes itself as follows: The Combat Paper Project utilizes art-making workshops to assist veterans in reconciling and sharing their personal experiences…. Through papermaking workshops veterans use their uniforms worn in combat to create cathartic works of art. The uniforms are cut up, beaten into a pulp and formed into sheets of paper. Veterans use the transformative process of papermaking to reclaim their uniform as art and begin to embrace their experiences in the military…. The work reflects both the anger of the past and hope for the future. (Combat Paper Project n.d.) From the first sentence, an underlying product model of power becomes evident. The veteran is described as in need of “assistance,” thus establishing a social hierarchy. When power is conceived of as a quantifiable commodity, empowering others means “improving” the “powerless” by giving them the cultural capital to allow them to be more powerful. This is a deficit model. Defining the veteran as needing assistance positions him as insufficient. According to the excerpt, the veteran's deficiency is his inability to “reconcile” and “share” his “personal experiences.” Highlighting the personal nature of wartime experience coincides with the neoliberal ideology undergirding this type of rhetoric. Subsequently, then, reconciliation is conceived of as a personal enterprise. In general, the prescriptive call for personal reconciliation presumes the veteran has not come to terms with his wartime experiences, and that sharing personal experience will help him achieve reconciliation and/or recovery. Among other things, the emphasis on “sharing”—outward expression—reflects a Western association of voice with power and silence with powerlessness.14 This is a paradoxical relationship that I will examine in more detail later.The description's next sentence depicts the central activity of the project: “[v]eterans use their uniforms worn in combat to create cathartic works of art.” No other symbol could be more personal or more singular than the veteran's own uniform. According to the project's website, shredding and transforming the uniform promotes (individual) ownership. This imagery perpetuates the idea that war trauma is individual. Additionally, the artwork is described as “cathartic.” Typically, catharsis refers to the process of releasing pent-up emotion. This excerpt suggests that veterans harbor feelings they wish to express, and that upon expressing them through artwork they will feel “cathartic” relief.The excerpt goes on to explain the process of cutting and beating the uniforms—the physical actions that presumably lead to catharsis. Describing the way veterans “beat” their uniforms “into a pulp,” in conjunction with the word “anger” used to describe the emotion the artwork is meant to reflect, channels the dominant stereotype of the resentful, hyperviolent vet depicted in popular films like Taxi Driver (1976) or Born on the Fourth of July (1989). This is a problematic caricature, and it overlooks the fact that not all veterans will want to dismantle and physically assault their uniforms.The next line of the statement reads, “Veterans use the transformative process of papermaking to reclaim their uniform as art and begin to embrace their experiences in the military.” Here the project writes a prescription to embrace military experience. It also assumes that the veteran has disclaimed his uniform and that deconstructing it and reclaiming it is the “transformative” experience he needs to embrace his military service. On the whole, the veteran identity described by this mission statement reflects the archetypal troubled veteran of Hollywood film. He is deeply disturbed by his war experience, left powerless without an expressive outlet to provide the cathartic, transformative process that will ultimately lead to reconciliation and acceptance. Lawrence Langer (1991), a prominent scholar of Holocaust literature, argues that attempts to explain suffering are naïve, and that efforts to cure survivors of their trauma are misguided. This is not to say that the Combat Paper Project is claiming to “cure” veteran suffering, but it is certainly caught in the product model of power and subsequently the language of pathology and healing.The press surrounding the papermaking project adopts the same dominant discourse. When the paper project came to Iowa City, the University of Iowa's student newspaper, the Daily Iowan, ran an article called “Healing the Vets with Art” (Busse 2010). Likewise, the citywide paper, the Press-Citizen, covered the event with the headline “Making Art out of Combat,” writing, “people who deal with conflict directly need an outlet to express it and understand it” (Wise 2010). And finally, an online article for Eastern Iowa Life described the workshop as follows: A nationally known non-profit organization, “Combat Paper Project” facilitates art workshops where veterans can transform their uniforms into paper. Once the paper is made, art work is printed on or made out of the sheets to help veterans reconcile their emotions and war experiences. (Pennington 2011, emphasis added) These publications perpetuate the troubled veteran stereotype and frame the veteran population as needing assistance. They adopt the dominant discourse of trauma, a rhetoric of pathology that positions veterans as deficie