I have three sides to my personality. I suspect most combat veterans and first responders are similar to me in this. I believe this is why we have what I will call for simplicity's sake the "Civilian-Military Divide" in communication in American society. But understand, I am including anybody that works to protect the populace from physical violence, not just soldiers.
The first component is the funny teacher. I am considered an excellent instructor not because I am better at executing the tasks being taught than others, but because I make learning enjoyable and entertaining. I'm funny. Not everybody thinks so, but those who do think I'm the funniest guy they know. But the humor is dark. Military personnel, like cops and paramedics, develop twisted senses of humor. It's a defense mechanism and a reflex that eventually becomes the dominant component of one's personality.
To shield us from the second component, a morose and dark view of the world. The humor allows us to maintain our sanity in insane situations. Joe Galloway in the opening to We Were Soldiers Once... And Young, wrote, "Those of us who have seen war will never stop seeing it..." What some mentors of mine would call "Asocial Situations," not as in wall-flowers at a party "asocial," but rather situations defined by the absence of society. What I would refer to as "anarchy," or the absence of social norms. Combat is anarchy, which is not really how humans are designed to live. War is only traumatic because it is the complete lack of social order or structures of continuity that our brains have evolved to crave and create. Humans are social creatures, so "Asocial Anarchy" is not our natural habitat. This morose view of life in a state of nature--anarchy--is the honest view of human nature outside of social constraints, and it is terribly depressing. Somebody once said depression is seeing the world as it actually is. This is why the humor is so critically important to people in life and death professions, because it shields us from those horrors. But it offends many people outside of those professions.
These two components are readily understood in the civilian world, at least intellectually if not through experience. I think one of the big problems with our mental health industry is they only know how to treat this second component really well. They miss the component that truly divides the military from civilians: violence.
The scary third component to my personality, and those of other warrior professions, is the capacity for and the nonchalant attitude towards violence. This Divide is not a lack of support for troops, this generation of warriors is far better supported than the previous. Nor is it always an unwillingness of veterans to talk about it. Many don't talk about it, and that's a tragedy, because that is what leads to post traumatic stress coming back to haunt people decades after combat. But even those who are willing to talk about it, who recognize the need to talk about it and purge the trauma from our systems, rarely find an audience willing to listen. That is the Civilian-Military Divide in modern America.
Twenty-first Century Americans are divorced from death. The insane panic currently gripping and destroying the country is a great example of that phobic reaction to death most Americans born after the Second World War have inside. By contrast, the guardian class of our society, are intimately familiar with death and violence, and NEED to talk about it. For the first ten years after I got out of the Army, the VA could not diagnose me with PTSD because I did not avoid talking about combat. That's one of the diagnostic criteria of PTSD, an intense avoidance of the subject. Finally after ten years, one VA psychologist asked if I thought I had PTSD, and I said I did, as I had claimed it seven years earlier when I couldn't sleep, and she explained that I had all the symptoms except that avoidance of talking about violence. That seems absurd to me, because I knew that the worst way to treat traumatic experiences was to bottle them up for four decades and keep having nightmares, as I had witnessed. I know enough about psychology to know that the key to overcoming PTS is to divorce the memories from emotion, and the best way to do that is to talk about it.
But the modern American civilian doesn't want to hear about dead bodies and missing limbs. They are horrified by the mental images brought up by veterans casually talking about the effects of Hellfire missiles on human beings. Or .50 caliber sniper bullets entering chest cavities. Or pictures of the effects of IEDs on the limbs of young Americans. That is a problem. It is not a new problem, and perhaps it's the natural state of a civilized and successful society that the protected are not just protected from the physical dangers of the world, but also from the mental horrors of their protectors. But if natural, it is certainly unhealthy for the protectors. Which is not the point I'm trying to make, about veteran/first responder mental health, but rather the underlying cause of the problem: lack of communication between the two worlds. I think we do a great disservice to our protectors by not allowing them to speak without being horrified by their stories.
But more importantly, and the true purpose for this essay, is the disservice it does to everybody else. This Civilian-Military Divide caused by the horror of the third component does not just disallow the protectors opportunities to therapeutically express their experiences, it disallows the protected from learning the truth of the world outside our borders. This Divide reinforces dangerous illusions most modern Americans have about safety and security. That is why I am writing about it. The political, personal and personality issues aside, we have a society that is delusional about violence. Most Americans today do not believe in evil. Those that do believe violence itself is evil, not individuals. This is terrifying to me. This is the Appeasement mentality that almost lost Europe to Hitler. A revulsion to all violence is the foundation of subjugation. Hitler was not defeated by Appeasement nor pacifism, but by greater, more righteous violence. That most Americans today do not believe in the concept of righteous violence, directed towards evil people, victimizing innocent people, is truly scary to me. This is an effect of the divorce from death that our society has engaged in since 1945. Everybody except the first responders, the warriors and the evilly violent criminal elements of our society who victimize the naive.
I'm writing about the Divide because I can be the funny instructor. In engaging and humorous ways, I can teach people how to shoot cardboard, I can teach them how to stab training dummies, and I can teach them how to punch heavy bags or even spar against another "fighter." However, I cannot teach them how to truly defend themselves if they do not believe in the concept of righteous violence. One way they can learn is to listen to veterans and cops. Not just passively, but actively seek out and talk to people who have survived life and death struggles through the use of righteous violence. If you want to save yourself, or greater still save this country from physical or even psychological invasion, then the mentality of a killer has to stop being abhorrent to the average American. Sealing the Divide is the best way to accomplish this.
Some say I advocate violence. I do. I advocate righteous violence against evil people who attempt to harm the innocent. Many (I hope not most) in twenty-first century America believes that makes me, and people like me, the evil ones. Those who believe that, 1) "sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf," (hypocrites) and 2) worse, are simply waiting to be victimized because the "rough men" can't be everywhere. The wolves are starting to outnumber the sheepdogs. So the sheep better start growing some horns: "If you're gonna be sheep, be a bighorn sheep!"
Brian Soule
Captain, US Army (Ret)
Easy 6
www.easy6training.com
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