Kelly Kennedy, George Carlin, and the Reason for Traumatized Iraq Veterans
The late George Carlin did not like the phrase "post-traumatic stress disorder." He famously said,
' I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't like words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I'll give you an example of that.
There's a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It's when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to it's absolute peak and maximum. Can't take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap.
In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves.
That was seventy years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn't seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock! Battle fatigue.
Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, we're up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It's totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.
Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it's no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we've added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder.
I'll bet you if we'd of still been calling it shell shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I'll betcha. I'll betcha.'
I have concluded that Carlin was right about that issue. Being traumatized by war is not a disorder. In fact, if you are not traumatized by the sight of body parts flying all around you as you are splattered with the blood of people you know, then you would have a disorder. Why not just say "war-traumatized"? Or better yet, "war-scarred"? The PTSD phrase has the unfortunate effect of making it seem abnormal for people to be negatively affected by wartime violence.
It is like the phrase "Vietnam syndrome," in which the understandable reluctance of the Baby Boom generation to launch big, long-lasting land wars in Asia was medicalized, as though there was something wrong with them that they were not warmongers. Why not say that they had 'learned the lessons of Vietnam,' or were 'Vietnam-scarred'? Why suggest that there is something wrong with them for it?
So below is a report from CBS on how the US networks have sanitized the Iraq War for viewers, and how we cannot understand the long-term trauma suffered by US troops who served in Iraq unless we understand what they've been through. Warning: her description of what she and others saw in Iraq is explicit and disturbing. Carlin would be proud of her:
"Army Times reporter Kelly Kennedy saw first hand the horrors of the war in Iraq. She spoke to CBS News about her experiences and about how post traumatic stress disorder is affecting the troops."
Labels: Iraq
posted by Juan Cole @ 6/25/2008 12:19:00 PM
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So, what do the Iraqi witnesses of violent death call their aftermath emotions? Some Arabic expression that does not mean anything in America, perhaps.
Well, I guess it's best to downplay PTSD in "the troops" because too much analysis may bring us to a logical explanation for the next death by IED.
Not forgetting, of course, that millions of ordinary Iraqi civilians do not have any recourse to any of the support provided to US troops.
So you have generations of traumatised people working out their frustration and confusion while bringing up new generations.
The sins of the father become the sins of the son.
A few years ago I saw a story on either CNN or CBS about an alleged massacre of fleeing civilians on a bridge during the Korean War. The location might have been called No Gun Rih. Anyway, some US veterans were alleging that they had been ordered to fire willy-nilly on the people, and they obeyed, killing about fifty. (Senator Bob Kerrey's name somehow came up in this story.) One of the veterans was described as chronically depressed and on prescribed drugs because of the incident. This stops me cold. If the story is true (which it may not be), aren't people who commit massacres, under orders or recreationally, supposed to be wracked with guilt? Isn't the guy who doesn't fell bad about such a thing the one who needs treatment?
War is always disgusting and incomprehensible, and it will always be part of our existence because there are always going to be bullies who take what does not belong to them.
I really appreciate Kelly Kennedy's work for Army Times. The Blood Brothers series was very good. She has a way of bringing you into the heart of the soldiers.
Her piece on 1st Sgt. Jeff McKinney was particularly poignant.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/06/military_suicide_060808w/
I think it is really unfortunate that most Americans are not aware of what is happening to the people of Iraq and to our soldiers.
The PTSD phrase has the unfortunate effect of making it seem abnormal for people to be negatively affected by wartime violence.
Of course it's not an unfortunate effect at all. The name was carefully crafted, at great expense I'm sure, everything to do with war comes at great expense, to have exactly that effect.
Everything about war is wrong.
Everyone involved, directly involved, in war loses the war.
The winners of war are the Carlyle Group, the Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Oil, the War, the Israeli Lobbies...
The losers are all the Iraqi, Palestinian, Israeli and American peoples.
I'd never heard or read that bit from George Carlin before, Thanks. It's perfectly stated.
Orwell made a related point in his preface to Animal Farm:
The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
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You are to be commended, as always, for your single-handed attempt at a CONSTANT reality check for all of us. Yes, Ms. Kennedy's descriptions of this slaughter of human beings, American or Iraqi, is gut wrenching.
This is the exact sort of business we should be forced to witness or hear about until the denial of the inherently grotesque nature of war is no longer possible. Let alone that such exposition reveals the abomination of THIS war, in particular; launched on total fabrication and fraud to fulfill the jackdawed agenda of some of the most vile people ever to wrest control of armies.
God help us. There will be hell to pay for this.
"The PTSD phrase has the unfortunate effect of making it seem abnormal for people to be negatively affected by wartime violence."
Most excellent observation, Juan.
While the term PTSD may seem clinically euphemistic, it is apt in its depiction of the temporal displacement of an effect.
Does it sanitize the horror of combat or actually mark its permamence on the psyche?
The Pentagon and our legislators have a fix... Moral Lobotomy, AKA The Psychological Kevlar Act.
IOW, pre-drug our soldiers with medication intended specifically to treat battle rattle.
Do they REALLY believe if you can't feel the problem there IS NO problem? Those soldiers will most likely be on those meds for the rest of their lives.
The Nation magazine posted an excellent article about George Carlin.
Here's a quote, with at least one of the '7 words' in it:
[...] “But I’ll tell you what they don’t want, They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.”
Carlin did not want Americans to get involved with the system.
He wanted citizens to get angry enough to remake the system. [...]
In Full, George Carlin: American Radical, John Nichols @ The Nation
The US soldiers who die in these wars, nor the civilians in the razed lands we leave in our imperial wake of destruction are "In the big club" either.
It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.
I love George Orwell and 1984 and Animal Farm. I may have read this at one time. I was just wondering why couldn't they mention trousers? I realize the Victorian era was very touchy about sexual matters. But men couldn't talk about pants in front of women?
The Victorian Age thought far more about sex than we do and enjoyed it much more, perhaps because it wasn't alluded to in any way (in contrast to the present day when sex is shoved at one continually), at least by the upper classes.
I cannot agree that what was called "post traumatic stress disorder" (PTSD) after the Vietnam War was the very same condition as what had been called "shell shock" during World War I.
In war, men suffer a wide variety of traumatic events, and react to them in a wide variety of ways. In World War I, people looked at those who displayed a certain range of symptoms and applied the term "shell shock" to them. During and especially after the Vietnam War, people looked at those who displayed a somewhat different range of symptoms and applied the term "post traumatic stress disorder" to them.
"Shell shock" was primarily defined in terms of symptoms making men unable to continue functioning as combat soldiers. PTSD was primarily defined in terms of symptoms making men unable to function well in a non-combat environment, after they left the war zone. There was a lot of overlap, but by no means 100% overlap, between those who became unable to function in combat in Vietnam (which by World War I standards would have produced a diagnosis of shell shock), and those who were unable to function in civilian life years later in the United States.
It has been years since I read ACHILLES IN VIETNAM, by Dr. Jonathan Shay, but if I recall correctly, he wrote that when he was treating patients who were suffering from PTSD as a result of service in Vietnam, he questioned them about their past histories, and concluded that volunteering to remain in combat in Vietnam, at the end of a soldier's original tour, had often been a sign that the soldier was beginning to suffer from what would later be diagnosed as PTSD. If you had tried to tell a World War I psychiatrist that volunteering to remain in the front lines should be considered a possible indicator of shell shock, he would have thought you were crazier than his patients.
On another matter, when you write that being traumatized by war "is not a disorder", you are using a very strange definition of "disorder". "Disorder" does not mean moral failing. I can see no implication in the phrase "post traumatic stress disorder" that the problem is somehow the fault of the people suffering from it.
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