Looking Forward to the Battlefront Experience

I just received this email (some identifying stuff omitted) from a nursing student a friend of mine met when she was traveling. She led me to believe this man was an outstanding person with great concern about war.
I was startled to get this email which seems to glorify war as a noble thing. My response follows his email.

Hi Terry!

This is Dennis, ……..Got your name from Naomi and she thinks very highly of your experience in nursing and combat. I'm in my third year in Nursing and told her I was looking forward to some experience in the battlefronts. What do you think? Understand you've interesting things to share along that line.

Dennis




Dennis,
Excuse me for being so late in my reply. Unfortunately, I’ve not been keeping up with email due to some other work I’m doing.
Naomi did speak of you in glowing terms.
I was a combat infantryman in Vietnam with the Marines from December 31, 1967 until February 12, 1969. I wasn’t yet a nurse at that time.
I became a RN in 1985 and have worked exclusively with psychiatric services since that time.
I’m real sure I’d not recommend anyone take part in a “battlefront” experience. It’s not all it’s touted to be, by any means. I work with many Iraq veterans in my activism with peace and justice groups and the stories remain the same horrible nightmares as those in Vietnam I had.
There’s an excellent book by Chris Hedges called “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning”. Hedges eloquently speaks to the myth of war and the narcosis of the experience of war.
Dennis, I know when I walk into a bookstore or library history section I’ll be surrounded by the stories of “heroes” in all the many wars of the world, especially those of the U.S.. If I read a daily newspaper or see a television story about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American soldiers and Marines are portrayed as heroic.
This tendency to portray war in mythic ways goes back to the Romans, the Greeks and is prevalent in the Christian Bible. If I give a presentation about my experience in war I will talk about the squad leader that threw a fragmentation grenade into a bunker with a crying baby. I’ll talk about the effects of napalm on the flesh of innocent children and civilians. We called them “crispy critters”.
The reality of seeing a traumatic amputation by means of an explosive device destroys all the mythic glory of the historians and the promoters of war. The terror of bombs dropping on cities like Fallujah with children in their homes erases the nobility of the cause.
If you’ve kept up with recent events you no doubt have seen the reports of Marines in Haditha killing dozens of innocent civilians in retribution for the death of a fellow Marine. Now there are more and more similar stories each day. These stories aren’t anomalies or “just a few bad apples” as Donald Rumsfeld would say.
In Vietnam, there were daily killings of innocents by angry young men bent on revenge. Wars such as Vietnam and Iraq are wars of survival and brutality beyond anything imaginable until you get there. You live and fight for your friends. All concepts such as democracy and freedom mean nothing in the face of daily survival.
I met the mother of a combat medic who served in Iraq last evening. She told me how her son went to Iraq hoping to help the people of the villages and cities. That’s what he was told his role would be. His reality was treating the prisoners of the American military that had been interrogated. It wasn’t uncommon for some to die.
He also treated a soldier in his unit that was killed by another soldier in the same unit. I met the mother of the dead soldier. They first told her the death was as a result of “friendly fire” that had accidentally hit her son. The next day they returned and told the mother how sorry they were to misinform her of the reasons for her son’s death.
They told her he had actually committed suicide. A hurried investigation was done and closed with the determination the son had shot himself in the forehead with a M16 rifle.
If you don’t know about the M16, it would take the arm span of a very large basketball player to even reach the trigger of the rifle with it pointed directly at one’s forehead. The mother pressed for further investigation and all signs point to a murder by another soldier with a grudge against the son. All possible witnesses have been transferred or left the service.
I spoke with an Iraq vet last Friday in my home. He told me about seeing a RPG hit a commander flush in the face. It decapitated him. The soldier denies PTSD even though I could pick out several symptoms in just the few hours he was with us. He also told me he fears retribution from fellow soldiers, who after several times of drinking and drugging while on patrol, he reported to command. They were punished by being restricted to quarters for a brief time.
Two happen to be snipers. Threats have been made against this soldier by the snipers and other soldiers in his company. He wants to fulfill his final two years of enlistment but fears being killed by his own soldiers more than the resistance in Iraq.
War will take away part of your soul, Dennis. If you have any sense of morality, it will test all of your morality. It takes your spirit into the depths of hell and many are unable to climb out of that abyss.
I work extensively with PTSD survivors. The traumatic experience of war is like a brand seared into the brain’s memory. The physical changes in the brain caused by the “rush” of adrenaline and other neural hormones are permanent in most cases. The floodgate remains open and this is the etiology of the narcosis of war Hedges speaks about.
Once returned from the intensity of combat all other things pale in comparison. This leads to risk taking and self medicating by many veterans. I chose to work in emergency areas of psychiatric care to continue my rush. And I was good at what I did because an emergency in a hospital or controlled setting was nothing compared to moments of madness in combat.
If you went into nursing with the idealism of helping others heal, war isn’t the place to do it. You’ll find yourself in need of healing after you endure…if you endure….what you see as the aftermath of battle. Yes, they will show documentaries of noble surgeons and nurses caring for the wounded. What they fail to show is the effects upon the care-giver once it is all over.
I have a friend who was a medic in Vietnam that’s never left the jungle. He’s constantly using drugs or alcohol to soothe his soul. My best friend in high school was a medic in Vietnam despite my pleas for him not to enter the military. He shot himself in Vietnam.
I’ve told you only a fraction of the stories that prey upon my mind on a daily basis, Dennis. I sincerely encourage you in your nursing career and discourage you from making the mistake of thinking the “battlefront” is anything other than a nightmare.

Terry Leichner, RN
Vietnam Veterans Against the War
Denver, CO
USMC combat infantryman