The Largely Ignored Trauma of War
Lawrence Tritle, Loyola Marymount University
In considering the impact of war in the light of Middle East violence and an impending attack by the Bush administration on Iraq, I will start with two illustrations of the trauma of war and then conclude with an American tragedy resulting from the war in Vietnam. At the battle of Marathon in 490 BCE, an Athenian soldier named Epizelos was fighting for his life when he saw out of the corner of his eye the man next to him cut down. The last thing he then remembered seeing, before becoming instantly blind with fright, was a giant warrior so tall his beard draped over Epizelos’ shield. In the killing fields of Cambodia in 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge began their genocide of their fellow Cambodians that would take a million lives. Today in Long Beach, California, live a group of women who survived this violence, who watched husbands, children, and parents killed, and who were themselves raped numerous times. As was the case with Epizelos, these women are blind without having suffered wounds.
These survivors of violence are just two examples of the millions past and present who have seen the horrors of war -- horrors that threaten to engulf a new generation if President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, defense advisor Richard Perle, and other hawks get their way. Ironically, these individuals, and those like them in the media, are naïve regarding the horrors of war: overwhelmingly, they dodged the opportunity to serve in the military to when they had the chance during the Vietnam War.
The horrors that accompany war, however, are rarely taught in schools at any level. While it makes sense not to subject the young to the horrible realities of what happens in battle, I am dismayed to see impressionable youngsters of 12 years of age and younger taken to bloody movies such as Black Hawk Down (2001). At the college level such silence is more difficult to explain though I believe it is tied in to an ivory tower disdain for teaching “drum and bugle” history. As a consequence, the violence and resulting trauma of war are almost entirely omitted from the syllabi. Yet violence and war have always been an important part of the history of the world and therefore should not be ignored.
Where does this leave us? On the one hand we have leaders at the national level who have no idea of what war means at the human level. This recently came up when retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni noted to the press that those who were talking most about having a war were those without experience in war. The poet Pindar had preceded Zinni to this realization by 2000 years: “War is sweet to those who have never experienced it.” At the same time, we have young people today being educated without any understanding of what happens in war and it is these who will be first encouraged by their ignorant leaders to enlist, and then drafted when enlistments fall off on account of casualties. It is only right that they should have some idea of the consequences of the violence they might face and what this can do to them.
This is where Epizelos, the Cambodian women, and a Marine killed in 1999 are relevant. The first two survived their trauma and had their stories told, the former by the historian Herodotos, the latter by filmmaker Tran T. Kim-Trang in Ekleipsis (1999). The dead Marine’s name was Manuel (Manny) Babbit. A veteran of the siege at Khe Sanh in 1968, Babbit fraudulently enlisted (he was functionally illiterate at the time) but served honorably in Vietnam where he saved a fellow Marine’s life (for which he was decorated later -- while on death row). After returning home Babbit shared the misfortunes of thousands of other vets, and not only of the Vietnam War but others going all the way back to classical Greek antiquity (think of the Ten Thousand who went off to fight in Persia because fighting was all they knew), turning to alcohol and walking the streets.
Babbit ended up in California where in 1980 he killed a defenseless grandmother when a flashback brought him to the terror of Khe Sanh. Even his staunchest supporters, including his own brother, made no effort to deny his action. But what remained pointedly ignored, from the trial judge in 1981 to California Governor Gray Davis in 1999, was that Manuel Babbit suffered severely from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) -- the result of seeing too much violence in Vietnam more than 30 years before. Manny Babbit was executed May 2, 1999, after Davis, who likes to brag about his wartime service (he repaired radios in Saigon), refused clemency and allowed the execution to stand. In running for re-election this fall in California, he continued talking about his wartime service, how he understands the veteran population. His actions speak differently.
Many people today think that post-traumatic stress disorder is a bogus claim made by the irresponsible trying to escape responsibility for the bad things they’ve done. In some instances this may be true. But in the aftermath of the horrors of Oklahoma City; Littleton, Colorado; and now 9/11, we all would do well not to rush to judgment. As we learn about PTSD we find it is something that can affect anyone, combat soldier or not, and that if not treated quickly enough, can further destroy lives. This includes not only those who experience the violence firsthand, but those with whom the survivors of violence come into contact -- their wives/husbands and children in the so-called “ripple effect.” This is the reality of war’s violence for those who survive and will be a lifelong legacy for any who survive, just as it was for Manny Babbit after Khe Sanh.
It might be interesting to ask professors why it is that war and violence, including the ongoing trauma of war, are so seldom subjects of discussion in their classes. For it is only through teaching of the fates of Epizelos, the Cambodian women in California, and Manny Babbit that young people today hearing their uninformed national leaders talk about war as if it were a walk in the sun will be able to judge for themselves what is the right course of action in Iraq and elsewhere in the world.
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