Dr. Jillian Davidson reports for Centenary News about a screening of Wartorn to mark Veterans’ Day 2013 in New York.
To mark the occasion of Veterans Day 2013, and with the Centenary of World War One approaching, Flanders House in New York and Army Week Association co-organized a screening and panel discussion of Wartorn 1861-2010. Made by HBO, the documentary explores combat stress and its psychological after- effects on veterans from the American Civil War to the present day.
Mr. Kris Dierckx, the Government of Flanders’ Representative to the US, conveyed the mission of Flanders House through the prism of Abraham Lincoln’s immortal words. To an audience of about 100, Mr. Dierckx evoked Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Speech of March 4, 1865 and confirmed his own government’s sense of obligation and commitment:
“Almost a century ago, the region of Flanders became a mostly static battlefield, for four long years and with hundreds of thousands of dead… The Government of Flanders wants to raise awareness amongst the present and future generations about such themes as tolerance and international understanding…
“It is not only important to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice, but also, to quote President Abraham Lincoln, to care for him who shall have borne the battle.”
These words originally referred to the US Civil War, another four-year long battle, with over a million casualties. In 1959, they became the motto of the US Department of Veterans Affairs. They resonate at least as pertinently today as they did almost 150 years ago.
Veterans thanked
At the end of his welcome speech, Mr. Dierckx invited every veteran in the audience to stand and be thanked for their service by the audience remaining in itheir seats. He asked invited relatives of veterans, followed by friends of veterans, to stand for their round of appreciation. Eventually, everyone in the auditorium was standing united, in a dimly lit room, in which only the poppies worn by one and all stood out.
As part of an ongoing commitment to increase and disseminate knowledge and understanding of World War One and its impact, Nicolas Polet of Flanders House recently took the initiative to form a “Group” of Cultural Centers in New York.
Flanders House co-opted Austrian, Hungarian, French, German and Polish Cultural Centers to collaborate with Columbia University’s Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies, in October this year, on an international and interdisciplinary conference: “The Origins and Impact of World War I.”
As the Director of the Harriman Institute, Professor Timothy Frye acknowledged: “This is just the type of event that we like to do at the Harriman Institute… to take advantage of all that New York City has to offer.” As such, it was an event, which brought together social scientists, international relations scholars and historians from eight countries.
Use of the term “shell shock”
The Harriman conference focused on three specific areas of ongoing research: the immediate outbreak of the First World War and the decision making in the major capitals during July 1914; the effect of the war’s violence on individuals and societies, and thirdly, the question of international law and warfare in World War One.
As part of the study of violence, speakers Jay Winter of Yale University and Michael Matthews of West Point, the US Military Academy, addressed the experience of shell shock in World War I and its legacies. It iwas at this point that the focus of the Harriman conference coincided most closely with the agenda of Flanders House in its commemoration of Veterans’ Day.
Shell shock, after all, appeared as a medical-biological and social term very early on in the First World War. It was Dr. Charles Meyers, an Anglo-Jewish academic scientist and philanthropist, serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps, who first used the term in 1915.
Though given a name, army doctors had no perception of how widespread the diagnosis was going to be or of how it was to be treated. The wounds of war on the mind were less visible, less tangible, less comprehensible and in many ways less curable. According to Jay Winter, “shell shock was one element of the story when war pushed normal, ordinary human beings beyond human endurance, not for the last time, but certainly the first.”
There is a tendency, especially now on the eve of the Centenary, to exaggerate the innovative nature of the event. World War One was undoubtedly the primordial event for subsequent catastrophe and destruction in the twentieth century, but that does not make it the point of origins for everything.
One casualty of looking forward from 1914 to 2014 is a due historical perspective of what came before 1914, an appreciation of the connection between modern beginnings and classical precedents. In short, World War One was definitely not the first time when war pushed its fighters beyond human endurance.
A few years ago, before the avalanche of Centenary hype, the Theater of War project was established to revive the ancient plays of Sophocles to fit present day needs. The updated maladies, anguishings and rants of two Greek warriors of the Trojan War, Philoctetes and Ajax, suggest that the consequences of war have stayed constant: anger, isolation, guilt, grief, helplessness, and at the most tragic, broken families and suicide.
Combat trauma
It’s a point noted by the psychiatrist, Jonathan Shay, who has treated Vietnam veterans for 20 years and is the author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. He insists: “War is war is war, and hasn’t changed in 3,000 years.”
Shown to audiences of military mental-health experts and returning troops across the US is the story of Ajax, shell-shocked in his tent, crying “like a woman”, intent upon taking revenge on his superiors for slighting him over Odysseus, and tricked by the gods into mistakenly slaughtering a field of grazing animals. Overcome by shame, he laments: “Do you see what I’ve done?
“I’ve killed these harmless barnyard animals with my hands. What a joke my life has become, my reputation, my sense of honour!” Ajax’s suicide implores veterans to seek help and caregivers to provide it.
The HBO documentary Wartorn takes a similarly broad historical look at the psychological effects of war in America. As its subtitle 1861-2010 suggests, it examines the development of trauma in America’s conflicts from the Civil War to the Iraq War. Its opening quote is taken from Homer’s The Odyssey: “Must you carry the bloody horror of combat in your heart forever?”
The HBO documentary ‘Wartorn’
With haunting archival footage, photography, narration, subtitles, interviews and original score music, the film focuses on individual case stories, which appear in a significant order. First, we learn about the case of Angelo Crapsey, who committed suicide August 5, 1864, aged 21, shortly after being discharged from the Union Army.
Second, comes the suicide of Noah Pierce. After two tours in Iraq, he wrote: “I’m freeing myself from the desert once and for all.”
Next, and from a group discussion among World War II veterans, is Corporal Abner Greenberg, of the US Marine Corps, who came back from the killing field of Iwo Jima : “…it’s like you have a camera in you,” he says. ” How do you explain to anybody the horrors that you saw and touched and just soaked into your whole body, your brain, your mind, everything? It finally consumes you, if you let it.”
There follows Corporal Akinsanya Kambon, a 20 -year- old combat illustrator in Vietnam, who still wakes up screaming about the images of those killed, images which won’t go away.
Then, in “The Unheard Cry of Jason Scheuerman” which results in suicide in Iraq in 2005, Jason’s brother explains: “It’s not just the soldier that’s in combat that comes down with PTSD, it’s the entire family.”
After that comes the case of Nathan Damigo, who, one month after returning from Iraq, attacked a Middle Eastern taxi driver at gunpoint.
Only after all these tales, 48 minutes into the documentary and only lasting for 6 minutes, does a section on World War One appear. Enveloped between the subtitle of “Spring 1918” and photos of jubilant homecomings, is the story of Colonel Herbert B. Hayden, a story entitled “Shell-shocked and After,” which originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1921.
On November 1, 1918, at the front, Hayden records: “I heard the most terrifying thing I had ever heard in my life, the malicious scream of a big shell, I dropped. I crumpled up. I simply collapsed on the ground.
“But I did not get there fast enough. As I was falling, the whole world blew up. Blue layers of smoke were lying all about me… Then, my eyes rested on what was left of the boy who had laughed at me, the blood pumping out of his body like red water from an overturned bucket.”
Subsequent headaches, an inability to eat or sleep, nightmares, feelings of alienation, depression and suicide brought Hayden to the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington in 1921.
Wartorn narrates a basic chronology: “Civil War doctors called it hysteria, Civil War doctors called it melancholia, Civil War doctors called it insanity…. In World War I they called it shell-shock. In World War II they called it combat fatigue…In 1980, PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) became an accepted diagnosis for veterans with psychological wounds.”
James Gandolfini, the actor who played Tony Soprano, a Mafia boss seeking psychiatric help for his depression in HBO’s drama The Sopranos, was the co-executive producer of Wartorn and its principal interviewer.
After the first case history of Angelo Crapsey, Gandolfini appears at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center to clear up the confusion around PTSD. He inquires of Colonel John Bradley MD, Chief of Psychiatry: “Is there anybody that you can honestly say was in a great deal of intense combat and comes back completely fine?” The response is simple and terrifying: “I would say that nobody is really unscathed… everybody [as Homer implied] carries something with them.”
A panel of experts
After the screening of Wartorn, there was a panel discussion of experts moderated by Ms. Jen Wilson, Chief Operating Officer of Army Week. Army Week Association, surpassing the better known 3Rs on the rudiments of education (reading, writing and arithmetic), embraces a bold 5R platform: to Recognize, Reintegrate, Remember, Respect and Revitalize veterans of the US Armed Forces and their families.
The four panellists were:
– Patrick Allegaert, Artistic Director of the Dr. Guislain Museum in the Belgian city of Ghent. He is also the curator of its “Soldiers and Psychiatrists” exhibition. This focuses on the evolution of the concept of trauma, from shell shock to PTSD, from 1914 to 2014.
– Tina Atherall, represented Hope For The Warriors, of which she’s Executive Vice-President. The non-profit organization was found in 2006 to support wounded US service personnel, their families, and families of the fallen.
– Frances Cheever, retired US Army Nurse Corps, is an administrator at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and screenwriter for Veterans in Film and Television.
– Dr. Jo Ann Difede is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York, and Director of the Program for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Studies.
Each panelist was invited to impart messages from the evening to inform and empower the audience.
Although Patrick Allegaert stressed a noticeable difference of perspective in Belgium, where the dialogue on veteran welfare was on the two World Wars, and not, as in America, on the Vietnam War, for the main part there was a consensus that the members of the audience should take whatever lessons they had learned from Wartorn and the panel discussion, to carry those lessons away with them and educate others, veterans and carers alike.
Especially with the holiday season approaching, they encouraged their audience to tell veterans and non-veterans gathered around the festive table about the hope of intervention and the wealth of resources now available.
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