Positive Voice Award 2009

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Doonesbury at War

“He understands the issues, he creates the scenarios, and he transmits them to a nation-wide audience in a way no one else can do.”

Thanks to Mr. Trudeau and Universal Press Syndicate for permission to reproduce Doonesbury at War.

It makes me a little uneasy to be recognized for merely describing what other people are actually living and enduring, often with astonishing courage. The honor seems a bit misplaced. I’m not living in the world of people traumatized by violence – I’m just a visitor who’s been given a lot of access and multiple opportunities to notice as much as I can.

I don’t say this with undue humility. As all of you know, humility is the only available response to what one encounters on the wards of military hospitals today.

Let me give you an example. The first wounded soldier I ever talked to was on Ward 57, the amputee ward at Walter Reed. Her name was Danielle Green, and she was a tall, elegant young woman, maybe 25, former basketball star at Notre Dame, and she was missing her left hand and part of her forearm. She invited me to come sit next to her, and with very little prompting, this is the story that she told only a few days removed from the battlefield:

Specialist Green was an MP, and she’d been sent up alone to secure the roof of an Iraqi police station. Just as she was settling in behind the sandbags, a rocket streaked over her shoulder, exploding on the wall behind her. Her training immediately kicked in; she flicked off the safety and raised her weapon over her shoulder to return fire, but as she did so, a second rocket sliced through her position, severing her arm and burying her in a mound of sand. Her teammates rushed up to the roof, pulled her out, carried her downstairs and placed her on the hood of a Humvee, where the team medic frantically worked to stop her bleeding.

What was her most vivid memory? It was of her sergeant and another soldier, returning to the roof against orders, digging through the sand, finding her severed hand, removing her engagement ring, carrying it downstairs and placing it in her remaining hand.

She told me: “I know it’s just a thing. I could have bought another ring. But it meant the world to me that my guys would do that.” And then she smiled – it was a tale of gratitude, of soldier-love, not loss or anger.

These sorts of stories, told without self-pity or guile, can take your breath away. Of course, what this story doesn’t tell you is what kind of shape this young woman would be in six months downstream, when the effects of trauma are more likely to be expressed and the reality of her loss sinks in.

And there’s something else we don’t know about that story, although it didn’t occur to me at the time. From the way it was told, I had no way of knowing what gender her teammates were. I’ve since learned that many women were MP’s, so her “guys” weren’t necessarily men. It does seem unlikely that an all-female MP detail would have been sent to secure an all-male Iraqi police station, but how intuitive is it that a male sergeant would have perceived the critical importance of a ring in the aftermath of a firefight? And if he had, would he have taken the same risks to retrieve a wedding band for a fallen male comrade? Probably not, so now we’re into issues of gallantry, of viewing female teammates as little sisters, of assuming a protective role, which, of course, has profound implications for readiness.

What I’ve come to appreciate from stories like this is the social complexity of the blink moment, that second when decisions are made, and its implications for what it means to have somebody’s back.

But no matter what is included or left out of a story, what strikes an outsider right away is the soldier’s need for narrative, the need to make sense of what has happened to her. For many of the survivors I talked to, not only was there no resistance to telling that story – early in the recovery process they often were their story. That’s where they were stuck. To tell it was to begin processing it, to own it before it owned them.

I had known none of this when I was first invited to visit with wounded warriors, over five years. It was after the first battle for Fallujah, when American casualties had been high, and I made the editorial command decision to inflict a grievous wound on B.D., one of the strip’s central characters, then serving as a public affairs officer in Iraq. As always, I did this on the fly – never-ending deadlines don’t leave much room for contemplation – but I knew I was setting in motion a story arc of loss and suffering and readjustment that could take years to play out. But I also knew I had an opportunity to keep front and center the story of sacrifice – what America’s wars were costing those duty-bound to fight them.

Perhaps out of concern that I was highly likely to get it all wrong, the DOD reached out to me the very day B.D. lost his leg. I was invited to visit Walter Reed, and later Landsthul and Brooke and various VA hospitals and Vet Centers around the country to talk with both patients and the full range of their caregivers, initially to try to get my arms around the amputee experience, but subsequently to try to understand the invisible suffering of warriors with PTSD. And because the symptoms of PTSD can overlap with those of other kinds of trauma injuries like MST and TBI, it wasn’t long before I felt drawn into those stories, as well.

I believe the first time I heard the term Military Sexual Trauma was during a visit to the National Women’s Trauma Recovery Program at Menlo Park. At the time, I was focused on PTSD, and I didn’t see how I could weave gender-sensitive mental health care into the existing storylines. But then I came across another term that instantly caught my attention – command rape, the seeming paradox of consensual assault. As I learned more about it, not only did it make my blood boil, but it occurred to me that it would also have to particularly offend anyone who honored the core values of military leadership, someone like B.D. Now, LT B.D. can be emotionally obtuse, to be sure, but he also has a leader’s deeply ingrained belief that subordinates are to be taken care of, not taken advantage of. And he was also on the mend, recently rescued from self-absorption, and ready to reach out to a fellow wounded warrior.

So this was my way in, and I went to work on the character of Specialist Melissa Wheeler, whom some of you may have met for the first time yesterday out in the lobby. But in very short order, I came up against the limits of my own imagination, which happens often. B.D.’s awkward, good intentions overlapping Melissa’s need for treatment for MST was a start, but it wasn’t an actual story.

Again, the military treatment community came to my rescue, and after some initial briefings about MST with then-Colonel Loree Sutton, Commander of Darnell Medical at Fort Hood, I went to a Vet Center training retreat in the Adirondacks to talk to women about their experiences.

Some of what I heard was truly shocking, and there’s no real need to repeat it here. You all know better than I the abuse that military culture has traditionally either condoned or overlooked. It’s obviously been a rougher transition to an integrated force than is commonly perceived. I believe that the proportion of women in the service has nearly doubled in recent years to 15%, but we know a group has to hit 20 to 22% to become a viable minority in terms of taking root and thriving. If the military follows the pattern of other large organizations, it needs to reach this tipping point before cultural norms will shift in meaningful ways.

This was certainly reflected in the stories women told me. While many felt they had found ways to adapt successfully, just as many reported feeling isolated and poorly equipped emotionally to deal with abuse, especially if it was part of their life experience before the military. They signed up, went to war, and to their profound disillusionment discovered that on a daily basis, the enemy wasn’t the bad guys – it was their own unit. Porn was everywhere in the field, unwelcome comments from males unrelenting, and commanders were preoccupied with maintaining unit cohesion, not understanding how much sexual harassment and unwanted contact affected readiness.

And the double standard was SOP. If a soldier received a serious physical wound, there was no discussion. He left theater, his commander dealt. But if a woman was raped, receiving a grievous emotional wound, she was re-victimized by either being held in place, forced to serve alongside the perp, or if she reported, she was made to feel she had betrayed the team and risked ending her career.

Of course, these terrible stories were only part of the picture. I didn’t want Melissa’s tale to only be about loss, it had to also be about hope to be useful. And there was plenty of that to be found. As I sat in a circle with ten active duty and veteran female soldiers, the other side of the female military experience – the bonding, the humor, the sheer variety of coping strategies came tumbling out as well.

Many women simply arrive in the military with the mindset to not just ensure their own wellbeing, but to maximize opportunities for success. I suspect they score well on the Comprehensive Fitness Test. They’re smart and confident and project an aura that they are not to be trifled with and they’re not. Listen to what I have in my notes. This is from Meg, an Air Force NCO who served in Afghanistan:

“I felt stronger over there, much too busy to get scared. I was promoted in front of my peers. When I turned into their supervisor, it was hard for them to adjust, to find the new line. When they called me a bitch, I would reply, “That’s Sergeant Bitch to you!” All eyes are on you. You have to be twice as good. When I finally went home, after days of thinking about what I would say to my husband when I saw him on the tarmac, the first thing that fell out of my mouth was, “Wow, you’re short.” (Her husband was literally shorter than life). We’re on different levels now. I had all these more powerful bonds. I loved my battle buddies. Once in a minefield, we all walked back in each other’s steps. The joke was: “What couldn’t you have bigger boots?” What am I proudest of? Just going and coming back safe. I feel like there’s nothing I can’t do. If someone says ‘no’ to me, then I’ll find someone else, because ‘no’ is the wrong answer.”

“No is the wrong answer.” There’s the signpost for one way back for traumatized women. Reconnecting to that strong, valiant person who signed up in the first place. In Melissa’s case, it’s that person who could take apart a helicopter in the dark. As one MST therapist told me, “I don’t generally work with a pathology-based model. The medical model says, tell me what’s wrong so we can get it fixed. If I talk in terms of defects – of something being wrong with them – women will hear defects. I talk in terms of wellness. These women are often a shadow of their former selves. It’s important to tell them you’re still here. You survived. It’s all about strength. It was strength that carried them into the service in the first place. Strength wasn’t issued by the DOD. If they didn’t issue it, it’s still yours.”

“If they didn’t issue it, it’s still yours.” This is the message of Cora, Melissa’s Vet Center counselor. And over time Melissa internalizes it and returns to duty. Is this a good outcome? I think so, but I can’t promise it. Writers never quite know where their characters will lead them. And like anyone who writes about this kind of stuff, I worry I might not be getting it right. I’m not writing soap opera, I’m writing satire, and satire is a black art. It mostly plays offense. It usually does a much better job causing grief than describing it.

So that’s been the challenge – to listen to these often grim stories and then turn them into humor – which is after all the agreement I have with readers. I can take them to dark places – as long as I find away to make it bearable. I don’t always succeed, but just as a classic therapy strategy for trauma victims is to get them to revisit tormenting events and reframe them to diminish their power to harm, it seems important to be part of an effort to detoxify the psychological wounds of this war by increasing public awareness of them. And I also have to find a way to do it without contributing to the pain that so many of these young veterans are already enduring. It’s important that both the wounded and their caregivers understand that the stories of B.D. and Melissa and Toggle are not told at their expense – they are told in their honor.

Eighth Conference on Women in the Military

Garry Trudeau’s remarks

accepting the Positive Voice Award