The Things They Cannot Say

Killing turns everything on its head. Watching people being killed, especially those you know, is a memory that can’t be erased. But actually doing the killing or being fully complicit in it is a lifelong sentence to contemplate the nature of one’s own character, endlessly asking, “Am I good, or am I evil?” and slowly growing mad at the equivocation of this trick question whose answer is definitively yes.

When someone kills in war there’s a psychological triage that occurs. The individual must find meaning in the act. Because killing is the ultimate refutation of our own humanity, there must be a justification, to prevent the mind from defaulting to the judgment of murderer.[2]

It’s Private Joker trying to explain to the angry colonel in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, a 1987 film about the war in Vietnam, as to why he’s wearing a peace symbol on his body armor while he’s written “Born to Kill” on his helmet:

Private Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.

Colonel: The what?

Private Joker: The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.

In his book What It Is Like to Go to War former Vietnam War infantry officer and Rhodes scholar Karl Marlantes ruminates on the killing he did and the dying he watched on his deployment to that nation during America’s ten-year conflict there. He learned, in the years after his service, that coming to terms with death is essential, but it has also become increasingly difficult in our age of modern warfare, where death, for many of those meting it out in Iraq and Afghanistan, has become an abstraction.

“Today a soldier can go out on patrol, kill someone or have one of his friends killed and call his girlfriend that night and talk about anything except what just happened. And if society itself tries to blur that as much as possible, by conscious well-intended efforts to provide all the ‘comforts of home’ and modern transportation and communication, what chance does your average eighteen-year-old have of not being confused?”

Marlantes believes that grief and mourning for those a solider has killed as well as for the friends and comrades he’s lost is key to the transformation that enables the warrior to find peace in the aftermath of battle. The absence of that grieving, which is often blocked by the numbing devices of alcohol, drugs, violence and empty sex, leave the warrior mired in the past, living in the midst of his “sins” and in endless judgment of himself, hopeless and without salvation. And with more than two million Americans having served in one or both of the decade-long conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, if society does not address that problem, it could have crippling social and economic consequences for the United States, including substance abuse, domestic violence, crime and the staggering medical and mental health care costs of providing for those veterans after their return and into old age.

“What is at stake is not just the psyche of each young fighter, but of our humanity,” according to Marlantes. He continues:

So ask the twenty-year-old combat veteran at the gas station how he felt about killing someone. His probable angry answer, if he’s honest: “Not a fucking thing.” Ask him when he’s sixty and if he’s not too drunk to answer, it might come out very differently, but only by luck of circumstance—who was there to help him with the feelings during those four long decades after he came home from war. It is critical for young people who return from combat that someone is there to help them, before they turn to drugs, alcohol, and suicide. We cannot expect normal eighteen-year-olds to kill someone and contain it in a healthy way. They must be helped to sort out what will be healthy grief about taking a life because it is part of the sorrow of war. The drugs, alcohol and suicides are ways of avoiding guilt and fear of grief. Grief itself is a healthy response.

But grieving by its very nature requires remembering the past, recalling difficult memories and confronting the ugly truths of what the soldier has seen, done or failed to do in war. Denial becomes the mistaken coping mechanism for both the warrior and society.

A psychologist deeply immersed in the world of returning war veterans, Dr. Edward Tick, writes in his book War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that denial, rather than protecting us, widens that chasm in our mind about the good and evil of our nature and helps perpetuate our delusion that we really are only one or the other and cannot possibly harbor within ourselves both forces.

“What are we denying about our warmaking? We deny our own complex human nature,” writes Tick, “including our capacities for greed, evil and doing harm, clinging instead to the belief in our own innocence and goodness.”

Headlines from the war front reinforce this notion. When we learn of a U.S. Army “kill team” staging fake ambushes to kill Afghan civilians for a thrill, or Marines videotaping themselves urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban and then posting the clip to YouTube, paratroopers staging macabre photos with the body parts of suicide bombers, or an Army staff sergeant leaving his combat outpost in the middle of the night in southern Afghanistan and proceeding to kill sixteen civilians, including nine children, our first reaction is, “That can’t be our people. We’re the good guys.” And as Tick and other experts point out, the next step in the process for communal and individual self-preservation is to try to forget the incidents ever happened. The attorney for the man accused of the massacre of Afghan civilians says that Staff Sergeant Robert Bales himself has no recollection of his killing spree.

Understanding the grim mystery of war and surviving its aftermath seems more easily distilled once you scrub away the blood, dirt and disbelief, and expose it to the relentless logic of open and curious minds.

This is what we must know:

What is it like to kill? What is it like to be wounded or to die? What is it like to watch others wounded or killed in combat? And ultimately, how does one successfully cross the bridge from conflict back to peacetime society?

Though as I’ve revealed, I’m not a soldier, I’ve spent most of the last decade in war zones and the rest of the time trying to understand my experiences there and make sense of them. I have both carried the wounded and walked away from the dying. But more than anything else, I’ve had to watch and bear witness. I’ve seen the killing of human beings at nearly every point on the spectrum of our existence, from small children to wrinkled octogenarians. I’ve watched killing from great distances, bombs dropped from the sky. I’ve watched killing within the distance of an embrace, one man executing another. And these images, both as I captured them and as I contemplated them after, have changed me forever. They continue to define me and imbue me with a sense of importance and even swagger, while they also kill me slowly in the moments when I fully consider my complicity.

While I wrote this book with a desire to find answers to the questions above, it has been a hugely difficult and at times fruitless quest. My goal was to contact many of the soldiers and Marines whom I’ve reported on in the past and to trace the arc from that moment of our first meeting to where they are now. Perhaps I would learn that they’ve experienced some of the same reentry problems as me; it was quite possible they were also grappling with war-fractured narratives of their current lives. I wanted to talk to and learn from them, but I also had information that might help them: I discovered through writing my first book, In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars, and the speaking engagements that surrounded it, that sharing the burden of my wars and the mistakes I made in them helped me, at least initially, to understand and to heal. Surely, if I could get them to tell me their own war stories, it might do the same for them. In my research, I found support for my theory. It was, the experts confirmed, about storytelling, finding a way to release warriors from the bonds of their own silence and help them say the things they felt they could not say.

“A large part of treating PTSD is simply getting the veteran to remember and talk about what happened to him,” writes Marlantes in What It Is Like to Go to War. And once the talking begins there’s a shift that makes the burden more manageable.

“Storytelling also knits a community together. It records or recreates the collective history and transforms actors and listeners alike into community witnesses,” according to Tick in War and the Soul. He continues: “Veterans’ stories need to be told in a way that transfers the oral weight of the event from the individual to the community.”

And in his book Achilles in Vietnam, former Veterans Affairs psychiatrist Dr.