Words matter. Words help us make meaning out of experience; they give us something to hold onto. If we had had the term “post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)” in earlier wars, those soldiers might have had something to hold onto. But there was no post-traumatic stress disorder in 1937 or 1945—not even in 1969.
We forget that PTSD was not named as such in Vietnam—not even when our Vietnam veterans started coming home. It wasn’t until 1972 when psychologist Chaim Shatan wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times and used the term “Post-Vietnam Syndrome” that people started to take notice. And it took another eight years for post-traumatic stress disorder to become an official diagnosis, five years after the Vietnam War officially ended.
A diagnosis can be a gift. Sometimes people with a mental illness say they don’t want to be labeled; they don’t want to be “in the system” and they don’t want to be identified as mentally ill. There are good reasons: stigma, fear, and often shame accompany a diagnosis.
But it can help enormously when you have words—when you can put a name to feelings and behaviors and thoughts. Say you come home from war and you are happy to be home and proud of your service, but then you notice you are jumpy, feel scared, and see danger everywhere and don’t know why; you can think you are insane. You don’t understand why you can’t go to the mall, take your kids to a movie, or make love to your wife. You just feel bad—bad about yourself—and it is a horrible and ruined kind of bad. But maybe if someone hears your list of symptoms and tells you that you are having this bad time because you have a disease, then you have a starting place. But until then you are out of order: you are broken and in disrepair.
It is important to think about what a diagnosis is. A mental illness diagnosis can sound scientific or definitive, but it is an outcome of language—of language and politics and even economics, as we’ll see later. This is especially true with military mental illness. Military trauma, with its many synonyms, shows us how language shifts and adapts to culture, and so what we believe and how we react to “bad behavior” shifts as well.
When I went looking for Donald’s story, I met veterans whom no one had talked to about their war experiences. They were men who had been both cruel and kind. They could be hard on people around them, but they were gentle with each other. They ran businesses, sold cars, and taught school. They were war heroes. I met Frenchy and Bones who cared about Donald, and Cliff Wells and George Howe who never judged him.
My mother loved Donald. When my brothers first learned his story, they were furious and wanted him out of my mother’s life. But over time, they came to care for this odd man who had joined our family.
And me? I liked Donald when I met him. He was quiet, polite, and kind, and in truth, I was glad my mother had someone to focus on, someone who would take care of her and give me some relief. But I had my own craziness. I didn’t escape the trauma of my mother’s addiction, and it caught up with me. It affected my thinking, my self-image, and my relationships. When I was thirty, I tried to kill a tree. I was so jealous of my first husband’s ex-wife that I tried to kill the tree they’d planted as newlyweds by watering it with bleach every day. The tree kept on blooming. I didn’t.
While I looked fairly good on the outside, my insides were filled with constant anxiety, and I had plenty of secret ways to manage all that pain. Just like Donald, I had no words for what was wrong with me, so the “home remedies” I used to “treat” my trauma were alcohol, food, and overwork. Then, feeling bad about that, I piled shame on top of shame.
Trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk talks about trauma as pieces of residue that get stuck in the body and brain. “There is no narrative,” he says, “only pieces.” The very nature of trauma, according to van der Kolk, is that inside us there are these pieces, and they are all out of order.
But for Donald, a way to have a sense of order meant joining the Marines. The United States Marine Corps is one place where taking orders and keeping order are a way of life.
CHAPTER FOUR
For God and Country
Donald was a Marine. He was a Marine decades ago in China, and he was still a Marine fifty years later in Pennsylvania. Though he was on active duty for only three years, it was true: “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”
I was familiar with that saying, but it took me some time to catch on to what this meant. Thankfully, early in my process of researching Donald and asking how to meet ex-Marines, another Marine tipped me off that I should refer to Donald as a former Marine; there are no ex-Marines. It would seem that you can be discharged from all of the military services for a myriad of reasons, but you never stop being a Marine.
“We stole the eagle from the Air Force, the anchor from the Navy, the rope from the Army, and on the seventh day when God rested, we overran His perimeter and stole the globe. And have been protecting our shores ever since.” This is just one of the many sayings that suggest the special regard Marines hold for themselves. Marines are aggressive, proud, and loyal; Marines are first in and last out; Marines never leave their dead; they have a code of conduct; esprit de corps is Marine culture. In basic training, Marines are taught that “The US Army is chickenshit in combat, the Navy is worse, and the Air Force is barely even on our side.” Marines alone among the military services bestow their name on their enlisted ranks. The Army has officers and soldiers, the Navy has naval officers and sailors, and the Air Force has Air Force officers and airmen—but the Marines have only Marines.
It doesn’t take much to draw a line from Donald’s Marine duty in China and the prewar days in Shanghai through the Rape of Nanking and then home to Western Pennsylvania and a double murder. If Donald’s story happened today, we’d be more sympathetic and maybe say, “Well, that’s a tragedy, yes, but he’s a vet.”
But that’s today, and that’s how we see things through a lens colored by history. For Americans, World War II was heroic and successful. It was a war with fighting on two fronts: Europe and Asia. We loved our boys who served their country and did their duty. True, a number of them were never quite okay again, but we didn’t talk about that much. Our understanding of, and sympathy for, battle fatigue and war neurosis evolved over the course of America’s military history.
The other layer of my understanding why there are no ex-Marines came into full focus as I began to correspond with other men who had been in China with Donald. I started my search by subscribing to the magazines Marine Corps Gazette and Leatherneck. I laugh now when I think about what my mail carrier must have thought as Leatherneck began to arrive along with my subscription to Vogue. But I also worried whether my liberal judgments could flex enough so I could understand what it means to be a Marine.
Marine training is about learning to follow orders. Marine training also means working as a unit. Being able to respond without thinking is a tool that can save lives. Marines are strong and proud, and yet, paradoxically, they submerge themselves in unity.
Basic training in the Marine Corps is tough and is designed to break men down in order to rebuild them as fighting units. The goal of boot camp is to erase individuality so that recruits will function as a unit. The message to recruits who are becoming Marines is “You are not alone—you are no good alone.” And the celebratory message to those who make it is “Now you are a Marine; you can go anywhere, fight anyone, and survive anything.”
Aboard the USS Chaumont Heading to China—1937
His heart was pounding. The men around him were laughing, swearing, and teasing. There was friendliness among the men. He could see it, but it seemed very far away. It made no sense. They were pushed together—barely an inch between him and the man lying above him. He opened his eyes, and above his face was the curve of a man’s buttocks making the canvas curve down toward him. His eyes shifted left, and quickly he closed them again. Another man was next to him, and then more men beyond him.
He’s trapped. Trapped. Trapped. He took a deep breath. I’m all right, he told himself, I’m all right; we’re just on a ship, going to bed, just gonna sleep soon, real