LTC (Ret.) Gordon Cucullu was gracious enough to write the foreword for Hidden Wounds: A Soldier's Burden. Gordon visited our Battalion in Baghdad in 2008 and spent a lot of time outside the wire conducting interviews of our Military Police Soldiers. He used this time and the time he spent recently in Afghanistan to document the story of our Soldiers from their perspective. He is a "muddy boots" type personality that gets to the heart of the matter.
Gordon Cucullu, together with his wife Chris Fontana, is co-founder of the Valhalla Project, designed to assist post- 9/11 combat Soldiers. Their most recent book is Warrior Police: Rolling with America's Military Police in the World's Trouble Spots, due for release in September 13th 2011. Learn more about Valhalla at www.valhalla-project.com.
Please read the attached foreword and join us in the discussion.
Nate and Marius
FOREWORD
War does for human emotions what a laser does for light particles: gathers and intensifies them to the point that they can make us blind. Throughout Hidden Wounds: A Soldier's Burden we see how the experiences of war – even over decades – can render one unable to perceive behavior that is obvious to others.A tired cliché says that "time heals all wounds." But for those who have endured the trauma, the seemingly endless passage of time affords one only the dubious opportunity to dwell, relive, question, and regret. Their experience becomes an endless-loop movie that always plays in the forefront of their minds.
A cruel penchant of the human mind is its ability to sow doubt, second-guess, and ultimately despair. While we may acknowledge at the conscious, intellectual level that split-second decisions made in combat cannot bear detailed analysis, our vicious subconscious – that "little voice in our heads" – is always there to undermine our best intentions. Perhaps one of the most oft-repeated themes one hears in talking to those who have endured extreme stress is the frustratingly unanswerable question: What could I have done differently?
Hidden Wounds adroitly explores the ramifications of what can happen to an otherwise outstanding American Soldier when plagued to the point of instability over decades by that terrible voice. All it took in this case was a single, isolated but poignant incident to alter the life of a man and his family. Too often that is the case with returning combat veterans.
Most tragically, much of his anguish was self-inflicted. By his inability to come to terms with the reality of the situation, and by feeding his angst with a secret, constant reminder of that day, his guilt morphed from self-criticism into a self-destructive quest.
The story told in Hidden Wounds is not allegorical: these things happen on a daily basis to American servicemen and women. Haunted by nightmares, struggling to cope with routine civilian activities, troubled by memories that they vainly attempt to alter or erase, they often stumble through their lives, going through the motions but failing to fit back into the comfort zone they enjoyed prior to combat. To some degree or another almost every returning combat veteran – Soldier or civilian contractor – shares that experience.
In Hidden Wounds, we see a Soldier who was haunted by his past but still able outwardly to function. Aside from those closest to him, few others, including his pastor, had an inkling that something deeply troubling possessed his waking thoughts.
By contrast, not all combat veterans are able to maintain even a façade of normality. Others, like the main character, focus inward, and only family and close friends at most feel the effects. Anger, family conflicts, and employment issues trouble today's veterans. Substance abuse – in this story alcohol – is all too common a palliative. Predominantly, they are conflicted by an inability to deprogram themselves from a life on edge, with mortal danger or terrible wounding often seconds away, into what they see as a placid, slow-paced, relatively uneventful civilian society.
Over the past decades, we've called it many things: shell shock, battle fatigue, the thousand-yard stare, and post-traumatic stress disorder. It was once considered a sign of weakness, of cowardice; and the stigma persists despite sincere efforts to mitigate it. Regardless of the label, the issue needs to be addressed, even in – perhaps especially in – those who pretend that they are immune.
After months of living with a weapon always at hand, many feel naked, vulnerable, and helpless. Loud, abrupt sounds send their heartbeats racing, all senses on alert. Everyday problems – entirely routine for a civilian population such as finances, children, relationships, and social events – appear trivial at best, and distracting at worst. Some of the more seriously affected – an unacceptably high percentage – decide that death is preferable to an inability to cope with life. Suicide rates as a consequence are tragically off the charts with returning Soldiers and combat zone civilians – the latter shamefully underreported.
While conventional assistance is available in the form of psychological counseling, some Soldiers reject it as useless, and for many it is. Few professionals have more than theoretical knowledge of battlefield realities and are mired deep in the academic swamps of early 20th century mental health theoreticians. In a flawed, but well-meaning effort to help, their training and temperament guides psychiatrists and counselors to prescribe mood-altering drugs, primarily used to treat depression. "I'm not depressed," several Soldiers have said. "It's what I went through downrange." Many of the medications come with deleterious side effects. "I was taking more than ten prescriptions and the drugs made me impotent," one senior non-commissioned officer said. "And now my wife thinks I'm having an affair." More than one Soldier has died merely by following medical orders and ingesting a lethal cocktail of mixed antidepressants and stimulants.
We send young people away – to camp, college, first job, or boarding school – and marvel at the changes when they return home. Yet inexplicably we persist in pretending that Soldiers returning from the cauldron of war will magically re-adjust and pick up where they left off without missing a beat. In a phrase, that dog won't hunt.
There are as many ways for Soldiers to recalibrate their lives as there are Soldiers. Each usually finds a solution that works best or somehow forces the round peg into the square hole to the point of being able to function. So why do we assume that one solution fits all? Perhaps it is in the nature of a bureaucracy to attempt to standardize and rationalize people in the same manner as is done with equipment. Certainly it is easier, requires less thought, and shows better on a Power Point presentation that way. However, America is smart, innovative, and creative. We can do a better job. Make no mistake: this is not a job for the military alone, or even the massive bureaucracy of government, although those institutions have key roles and responsibilities. This task devolves on us, the 99% of the American population who are quite content to allow the dedicated 1% to perform our heavy lifting in foreign conflicts while we enjoy life here. These are America's sons and daughters and we have a citizen's responsibility to help them. Thankfully, America is seeing a rise in organizations dedicated to assisting combat Soldiers while treating them as responsible, growing adults.
While officialdom is slow to catch on to the trend, already individuals and groups provide Soldiers with a productive work environment among their peers and the opportunity to do something mentally and physically challenging while keeping their dignity intact.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, I too frequently heard what has become a fairly consistent Soldier's refrain: "America's not at war," they say. "We're at war. America's at the mall." It is our shame that we have allowed the situation to sink this deep. We need to take individual action to get involved with these Soldiers. If we are not going to pick up a weapon and stand a watch, then the least we can do is be tangibly grateful – by actions, not words – for those who make the sacrifice.
— LTC (Ret.) Gordon Cucullu
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