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.”
Kupfer: Tell me about some of the other veterans you’ve worked with.
Tick: I know a forty-year-old army captain who’s been back from Iraq just a few months. He’s a history teacher and has studied warfare all his life. He says he joined up because he wanted to be at a battle like the Bulge, the Somme, Gettysburg, or Thermopylae. He wanted to experience one of the great human adventures, something unforgettable, something with meaning. But all they gave him was “this dirty, stinking little war in Iraq, meaningless, based on lies.” He felt betrayed.
Another soldier, age twenty-one, has done three combat tours — two in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. This young man was able to resist committing atrocities when others in his unit were committing them. Sometimes he’d put himself between soldiers and civilians, or he’d get the information the soldiers wanted without killing anyone. He held his ptsd in check until he returned stateside. Then he lost it on his base and destroyed some property. At his court martial, the military prosecutors did all they could to deny and disqualify ptsd as a defense. The military’s position is that elite troops don’t break, and the atrocities he witnessed never happened.
Another Iraq veteran carried his personal camera everywhere in-country to document the lives of the Iraqi people. Some of his buddies made fun of him, but he says that getting to know the people and taking their pictures was his best protection against dehumanizing them. It reminded him that the Iraqis are fascinating people with a rich and ancient culture. By protecting their humanity, he was also preserving his own.
I’ve worked with an Afghanistan combat marine who was the first person in his state to enlist after 9/11. He saw severe combat, but he also learned to speak Pashto and in his off time dressed like an Afghani and made friends with the villagers. He, too, would not let himself dehumanize them. Upon his return home, he developed an obsession with guns and began collecting them — a common symptom of ptsd. He was busted by a federal agent who posed as a Vietnam combat vet with ptsd and asked to buy a gun, claiming he needed one to feel safe. The marine thought he was helping a brother. Now he is fighting federal weapons charges as part of our “war on terrorism.” He is a sweet, sincere, harmless, patriotic young man who deserves our gratitude and support, but he may go to prison instead.
Kupfer: Would you say that most veterans’ injuries are psychological?
Tick: Disabled American Veterans says the PTSD rate in modern wars is 100 percent. It’s not whether you get PTSD; it’s how severe your case is. The va, of course, tries to keep the numbers low, but they are counting only the cases they have allowed into the va system. Everybody who goes through a war is traumatized, unless they were already psychopathic or sociopathic.
Kupfer: Are the symptoms you’ve witnessed in combat veterans also present in the American civilian psyche?
Tick: All the symptoms of PTSD — substance abuse, domestic violence, sexual promiscuity, child abuse, employment difficulties, intimacy problems, high divorce rates, suicide, homicide — all are epidemic in our population. If we can diagnose an entire culture with ptsd, then the U.S. has it. The illness of the culture may be related to the way we are practicing war against other countries and the planet while denying responsibility for it.
Moral and spiritual trauma is at the core of PTSD, and no matter how well-intentioned various therapies are — such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, stress-reduction techniques, and medications — none takes on the moral and spiritual dimensions. Therapies like these can sometimes be helpful in restoring everyday functioning, but they do not bring healing. We need public apologies, public confessions, and public grief for all that we have done to our veterans, to other nations, and to the earth. When my wife and I make trips to Vietnam, we are not just trying to help our own wounded, but also giving back what we’ve taken from that culture and from the earth itself.
Kupfer: The title of psychologist James Hillman’s most recent book is A Terrible Love of War. Is there something in us that loves war?
Tick: I am convinced there is much about war that human beings love, seek, and crave. War provides challenges and rites of passage. It unites people who would otherwise be at odds. It gives us our most intense adrenaline-rush experiences. Nothing, not even the most passionate sex, comes near the intensity of the combat experience. War fosters the strongest brother- and sisterhood bonds that most people ever experience. There is an erotic dimension to war, to the taking of life, to having so much power at your command. It is seductive and addictive.
So, yes, there truly is a terrible love hidden in war. One Israeli paratrooper told me, “I both love and hate war. I both love and hate my ptsd. How can I heal from it when I still feel so much love for it?” We must develop peaceful practices that bring us as much love and solidarity and purpose as war does.
We could have a huge national service corps and train people to serve the planet in dangerous situations. We could call them into service during peacetime. We need people to work with gangs in the inner cities. We need people to respond to the crisis the earth is experiencing. We need people to go to disaster areas like New Orleans and repair the damage. But we have a long way to go, and we have to heal from wars as a first step on the way to peace. Since we have not had a generation without war, we don’t even know what peace really looks like.
Kupfer: What approaches do you take when you work one-on-one with veterans?
Tick: I use treatments given to warriors in traditional cultures, which expected that the invisible wounds of war would be deep, penetrating, and transformative. Indigenous cultures limited the extent of warfare and its damage, and they watched over their warriors in the midst of battle and after their return. For example, among the Papago people of the American Southwest, after a warrior had his first experience of combat, they held a nineteen-day ceremony of return. He might have been in battle for fifteen minutes, and for that he’d get almost three weeks of ritual healing and community support. He’d be put in isolation and not allowed to touch food or feed himself, because he’d been poisoned by the war experience. He couldn’t see his family, and he certainly couldn’t have sex with his wife, or else he would bring the war pollution back into the community. Elders and medicine people used purification techniques to cleanse him, and also storytelling techniques, which we would call “expressive-arts therapy.” The war dance wasn’t what Hollywood portrays it as: a bunch of savages whipping themselves into a frenzy before battle. It came after battle and was a dramatic reenactment of the conflict for the tribe.
Instead of having a parade and going shopping, we could use our veterans’ holidays as an occasion for storytelling. Open the churches and temples and synagogues and mosques and community centers and libraries across the country, and invite the veterans in to tell their stories. Purification ceremonies and storytelling events are also opportunities for the community to speak to veterans and take some of the burden of guilt off them and declare our oneness with them: “You killed in our name, because we ordered you to, so we take responsibility for it, too.”
The final step is initiation into the warrior class. We need to train our veterans in the warrior tradition and not just expect them to behave as typical civilians. Many of them can’t, but they are looking for ways to be of service. Labeling a veteran “100 percent disabled” only ensures that he or she is not going to do anything for the rest of his or her life.
Traditional societies understood that warriorhood is not soldiering but a path through life — a “warrior’s path,” not a “warpath.” In traditional societies, warriors strove to live up to the highest moral standards. They hated the destruction caused by war, and they sought to preserve what was precious to them. They served as police during times of peace and used violence only as a last resort. They had responsibilities that kept them busy throughout their lives, including mentoring younger men.
We could have a veterans’ service corps that would help other vets or go into the inner cities and the schools. The ability to serve on the home front would give the war experience meaning and let veterans demonstrate that they still have skills we value. When I take veterans back to Vietnam, we engage in philanthropic activities. When a Vietnamese child calls a veteran “Uncle” or “Grandfather” and thanks him for giving the community a school or feeding the child’s family, that is transformative.
(The final part appears in next month's blog)
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