Special Article: Like Wandering Ghosts (Part 1 of 3)

Edward Tick On How The U.S. Fails Its Returning Soldiers

by DAVID KUPFER

Edward Tick began counseling Vietnam veterans in the 1970s, at a time when the nation was trying to put the Vietnam War behind it and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) wasn’t yet a diagnostic category. Since then he has treated veterans of numerous conflicts, from the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s to the Iraq War of today. His methods are based on his study of worldwide spiritual traditions, indigenous cultures, mythology, and the role of the warrior in society. Key to the healing process for veterans, he says, is for them to experience the emotions that they could not allow themselves to feel in the war zone and to address the spiritual damage that they suffered during combat.

Tick turned eighteen in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, but he had a high lottery number in the draft and did not have to serve. Though he was against that war and active in the protest movement, he says he felt compassion, not anger, toward the soldiers who came home. In 1975 he moved to rural New York State and began working as a psychotherapist. He had not planned on specializing in veterans and trauma, but the region he had moved to was home to many who had served in Vietnam.

Tick has an M.A. in psychology from Goddard College and a Ph.D. in communication and rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is also an ordained interfaith minister and has undergone a thirteen-year apprenticeship with a medicine man. He lives in Albany, New York, where, along with his wife, Kate Dahlstedt, he directs Soldier’s Heart www.soldiersheart.net, a nonprofit initiative to establish veterans’ safe-return programs in communities across the nation. “Veterans need a safety net when they come home from Iraq and Afghanistan,” he says, “so they won’t crash and burn like so many Vietnam veterans did. People in the community should be waiting to catch them.”

Tick’s first book, Sacred Mountain: Encounters with the Vietnam Beast (Moon Bear Press), chronicles his early years working with veterans. Subsequent titles include The Golden Tortoise: Journeys in Vietnam (Red Hen Press) and The Practice of Dream Healing: Bringing Ancient Greek Mysteries into Modern Medicine (Quest Books). His book War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (Quest Books) is used by combat soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as by veterans, military chaplains, social workers, and healing professionals. His latest, Wild Beasts and Wondering Souls (Elk Press), deals with shamanism in the treatment of PTSD.

Tick has led numerous reconciliation trips to Vietnam, not just for veterans and their families, but also for peace activists. He is cofounder of the Sanctuary International Friendship Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps the Vietnamese recover from the damage caused by the war. He and I sat down to talk last October, a few hours before he and his wife were to fly to Vietnam to lead a seventh reconciliation tour. Tick had just spoken on “the warrior’s path to redemption” before thousands at the Bioneers Conference in Marin County, California. We found a sunny spot overlooking the marshland near San Pablo Bay, and I turned on the digital recorder. Like the veterans he works with, Tick sometimes finds it painful to relate the horrors he’s encountered in his profession. At several points he choked back tears.

Kupfer: Though you treat PTSD, you’ve said that it is not a mental illness. Why do you believe this?
Tick: We pathologize everything in this culture. We think anything that ails us must be a medical condition that can be treated. Veterans are angry or sad because they have been through horrors, but we say it’s got to be a pathology. This is exacerbated by a profound alienation between our warrior class and our civilian class, which have almost nothing to do with one another. We don’t even think we have a warrior class, and we don’t teach our service people to think of themselves as warriors, even though societies throughout history have almost all had warrior classes and reciprocal relationships between warriors and civilians. Soldiers have a responsibility to defend their country, and it is our responsibility as citizens to heal those who have put their lives on the line for us, even if they fought a war for the wrong reasons or for lies. And we’re not doing that. Many sincere people in the veterans’ healthcare system want to do well, but the system is doing an awful job. We need to keep veterans in the community and develop new ways of responding to their pain and suffering.
Kupfer: Besides the inherent medicalizing of suffering, is there anything else wrong with a ptsd diagnosis?
Tick: PTSD is presently classified as a “stress and anxiety disorder.” But “stress and anxiety” does not begin to describe the emotions people experience during warfare. We don’t really have words for it. Also PTSD classifies veterans as “disabled” by how far they are from the civilian norm. But veterans are not disabled civilians. They are war-wounded soldiers and have different values and expectations about life. When we require that they get on with “business as usual” now that they are home, we put the blame on them for having broken down in the first place, and we pressure them to take sole responsibility for their healing. But everyone who participates in a war is changed. No one comes through unscathed.
My best understanding of what we call “PTSD” is that it is an identity disorder and soul wound that has its source in moral trauma. It is also a social disorder arising from the broken relationship between our society and its veterans. The standard clinical viewpoint on PTSD is that there can be management and control of symptoms and readjustment to life, but no healing. I believe, though, that if a veteran makes the difficult inner pilgrimage to discover the sources of the suffering, and works hard to give meaning to the wounding, and finds ways to reconcile and forgive, then healing is possible. I have seen a number of veterans fully heal their PTSD. They have satisfying lives, marriages, and jobs. They are of service to their communities. And they sleep like babies.
Kupfer: Is there a stigma attached to having a “mental disorder” rather than physical wounds?
Tick: Yes, mental disabilities are far more difficult for both the survivor and the society to accept. Veterans often feel they should be stronger, or that their loved ones don’t believe they are suffering because there’s no visible wound. Many veterans hate the PTSD label and prefer other terms, like the Civil War–era expression “soldier’s heart,” because it is symbolic rather than medical.
Kupfer: Vets used to be honored in this country. When and why did that change?
Tick: Actually veterans in the U.S. have been honored only while they are serving, to keep the patriotic fervor up, but not after a war is over. The World War ii veterans’ welcome home is the exception, the only time in U.S. history when vets were thanked and honored and given decent benefits. The typical treatment of veterans, from the American Revolution to the present, has been denial of their pain and refusal of support. Veterans of World War i were not given benefits, and when they protested in the streets of Washington, D.C., some of them were shot. There are two holidays honoring veterans in this country, but we have betrayed their sacred meaning. A lot of veterans are angry that Veterans Day, which was originally called “Armistice Day,” has become an excuse for patriotic displays. We have a parade and shoot off fireworks, which scare the hell out of many veterans. A better way to honor them would be to listen to their stories. We should give them new ways to serve and an honorable place in our communities.
Kupfer: How did you get into this work?
Tick: In the mid-1970s I heard a public-service announcement on the radio. The U.S. Veterans Administration [VA] was looking for volunteer therapists to work with returning Vietnam veterans. Though my regional va did not need me, they passed my name on to Vietnam Veterans of America [VVA]. One veteran who came to me for therapy was an old high-school friend I had last seen on the softball field. He and I had similar backgrounds, but when he walked into my office, the difference between us was obvious. War had turned him into a ravaged shell of a person.
I was so disturbed by the suffering of the veterans I was treating that in December 1980 I wrote an editorial for the local newspaper about how difficult Christmas was for them. Post-traumatic stress disorder had just been added to the diagnostic manual, and the president of the local chapter of the VVA read my editorial and invited me to talk to the veterans about this new diagnosis. I said I wasn’t qualified: I had treated only a handful of veterans. He said, “That makes you a regional expert!” No other doctors or therapists in the area wanted to touch the issue. When I told him I just couldn’t do it, he said nobody had asked him if he wanted to go to Vietnam; he’d been drafted. The moment he said that, I felt called to serve.
I wanted to know more about what my peers’ experiences in Vietnam had done to them. I certainly didn’t love war, but I did have a deep love of warriors, and I saw important values in them: self-sacrifice and devotion to each other and to some higher ideal. These are values that we need as a society, but the ends to which they are applied in the military are often horrific. On the other hand, many civilians and people on the Left desire good ends but lack self-sacrifice and discipline. I take my values from both camps, and a lot of vets have told me that I am proof a civilian can understand them.
Kupfer: Even though you’re opposed to war.
Tick: Yes, I am still protesting the Vietnam War, and all war. There are two things we have to do as a culture to end war: One is to take full responsibility for our wounded. It’s not enough just to “bring the boys home,” because they aren’t boys anymore, and getting them home physically does not do it. We need to help them heal and help shoulder their burden. The other thing we need to do is take responsibility for the damage we have done to other countries and their people. I bring veterans to Vietnam to heal not only them but also the Vietnamese. Americans do not realize the monstrous damage we do with technological warfare. I want to bring that reality back home and educate Americans about civilian suffering in war. 
Kupfer: Do you think veterans have been made scapegoats for the U.S. government’s foreign incursions?
Tick: Yes and no. Certainly the Vietnam veterans were made scapegoats for many of the illegal and brutal tactics of that war. Then there are the veterans of all the little forgotten wars: Grenada, Somalia, Lebanon, El Salvador, the secret ops in Africa and Eastern Europe. They are like wandering ghosts, neither honored nor recognized. Many of them are not even classified as combat veterans. I worked with one man who’d been in Somalia and taken part in the fighting around the U.S. Black Hawk helicopter that went down there. He isn’t classified as a combat veteran, and other combat vets don’t accept him because he was “in the shit” for only thirty hours. But anyone who knows the story of what happened that day in Mogadishu can see that it was enough to traumatize anybody.
The one thing we may have learned from Vietnam is not to blame the veterans for decisions made by our leaders. By and large the country is not blaming Iraq veterans for this war, but they still suffer terrible neglect upon their return. The burden of this war is falling on the shoulders of a relatively small number of people, who are sent on multiple deployments so that our leaders don’t have to institute a draft. This itself is a form of scapegoating.

Part 2 continues in next month's blog)