Odysseus in America (53 page)

²⁰
E-mail, December 13, 2001.

²¹
E-mail, December 12, 2001.

²²
You would not believe the vehemence of the controversy that this subject has aroused. Veterans have reacted as though their personal honor hinges on the empirical question of whether the suicide rate among veterans is smaller, the same as, or greater than the rate among demographically matched civilians. John Tegtmeier has assembled a specialized bibliography of publications related to suicide and mortality from all causes of American Vietnam vets:
www.vwip.org/articles/T/Tegtmeier-John_USVeteranPost-ServiceMortalityAndSuicidesBibliography.htm
. Readers should be aware of the following, not included in Tegtmeier's bibliography:
Mortality of Vietnam Veterans—The Veteran Cohort Study 1997,
Australian Department of Veterans Affairs, 1997, on the Web at
www.dva.gov.au/media/publicat/mortall.htm
; T. A. Bullman and H. K. Kang, “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and the Risk of Traumatic Deaths Among Vietnam Veterans,”
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
182:604-10 (1994); and P. Arhaud, L. Weisaeth, L. Mehlum, and S. Larsenn,
The UNIFIL Study 1991-1992, Report: I. Results and Recommendations
(Oslo: HQ Defense Command Norway, Joint Medical Service, 1993). The definitive methodology applied in the Australian mortality study has never been tried in the United States. The Australian study found a cumulative mortality from all causes of the Australian Vietnam Veteran cohort as of December 31, 1994, to be 6.5 percent, including combat deaths. I share the widespread belief that there has been a very large number of suicides among Vietnam veterans. Michael Kelley, a vocal critic of this belief, estimates the cumulative mortality from all causes among American Vietnam theater vets to be 10.16 percent (Michael Kelley, “The Three Walls Behind the Wall: The Myth of Vietnam Veteran Suicide,”
www.vwam.com/vets/suicide.html
). Kelley proclaimed the Australian study to be “perhaps the most important study of Vietnam veteran mortality to date.” When it suits his rhetorical purpose, he cites and applies the Australian estimates. But apparently he is neither shocked nor curious that the cumulative mortality from all causes was 56 percent higher among American Vietnam Vets than among Australian Vietnam Vets, according to his own numbers. He sets up an estimate of “150,000 [American Vietnam vet] suicides” as a straw man to knock down and ridicule the whole idea that there was a significant “excess” of suicides. The most commonly heard guess, “as many [suicides] as there are [KIAs] on the Wall,” is one I readily believe. This number would not be astonishing in the total 300,000 cumulative, all-causes cohort deaths by 1994 that Kelley uses, especially in light of being more than twice the Australian mortality. I believe that until the
definitive methodology used by the Australians is used in the United States, we simply will not know how many Vietnam vets have killed themselves.

²³
My colleague Dr. James Munroe, whom we met in the last chapter, calls this the four Vs offered by communities of veterans: validation, venting, value, and views. “The loss and Restoration of Community: The Treatment of Severe War
Trauma
,”
Journal of Personal and Interpersonal Loss
1:393-409 (1996).

²⁴
faculty.buffalostate.edu/fishlm/folksongs/nvrleave.htm
.

²⁵
Discussion list courtesies call for members to indicate in the “subject” line what the new subject is that's on their mind, rather than just hit the “reply” button with the old subject line and start writing about the new one.

²⁶
The other members of the VIP team are well aware that the veterans are resourceful and have most likely gotten their home phone numbers anyway.

¹
F. D. Jones, “Psychiatric Lessons of War,” in Jones et al., eds.,
War Psychiatry
(a volume of the new
Textbook of Military Medicine)
(Washington: Office of the Surgeon General, Borden Institute, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, 1995), p. 13. These graphs are extremely faint and require strong light and close inspection to see the two curves on each chart. Reuven Gal,
A Portrait of the Israeli Soldier
(Westport: Greenwood, 1986), p. 214.

²
I examine the
reasons
that trust is a combat strength multiplier in “Trust: Touchstone for a Practical Military Ethos,” in Donald Vandergriff, ed.,
Spirit, Blood, and Treasure: The American Cost of Battle in the 21st Century
(Novato, Calif: Presidio, 2001). These reasons can be summarized into two headings: Trust reduces the impact of “external” or Clausewitzian “friction,” and lubricates the “internal” or self-generated forms of friction analyzed by the late Colonel John R. Boyd, USAF, in his famous Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action formulation. For a comprehensive introduction to Boyd's thought, see his writings, commentaries, and links to published and forthcoming books on Boyd in
www.belisarius.com
.

³
The two traditional topics in military ethics,
jus ad helium
(lightness in the aims and circumstances of war)
and jus in bello
(lightness in the conduct of war), are much in need of enhancement by a third,
jus in militaribus
(lightness in the policies and practices of military institutions), which interacts in numerous ways with the first two.

⁴
Possibly in response to the chorus of criticism, the Department of Defense has adopted for 2000 and 2001 images that do include service members. In 2002, however, the Department of Defense reverted to type. See
www.d-n-i.net/fcs/comments/c443.htm#afd
for images of the 1987-2002 Armed Forces Day posters.

¹
This chapter is greatly indebted to and inspired by the late Faris R. Kirkland, Ph.D., a Korean War and Vietnam War combat officer, who in retirement from the U.S. Army made himself the leading historian of Army leadership doctrine and practice. As a senior social scientist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, he played key roles in the field studies of COHORT (COHesion, Operational Readiness, Training) in the 1980s and was lead author on many of the reports of this effort. He was a generous mentor and teacher on military institutions and became a treasured friend and critic. His last completed work will appear posthumously as “Honor, Combat Ethics, and Military Culture” in T. E. Beam et al., eds.
Military Medical Ethics,
vol 1, in
Textbook of Military Medicine
(Washington: Office of the Surgeon General,
U.S. Department of the Army and Borden Institute, 2001), Chapter 6. In press. His friends, fellow reformers, co-workers, and admirers are working to bring to publication a small fraction of the innovative and valuable work he left unfinished when he died at the age of sixty-eight. This chapter is a shortened version of a paper by the same title, which formed part of the
Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study, 2000,
and is available in its entirety on the Web at
www.belisarius.com/author_index.htm
.

²
E-mail, January 21 and 22, 2002. Dennis Spector writes further about himself: “I did nothing to be ashamed of in Vietnam and I was not going to be condemned by people who knew nothing about it and I had become against the war myself. So I buried everything deeply and got on with my life. The trauma eventually won. Ten years later, I had to be treated to understand and overcome it. When I read ‘Odysseus in America' [in manuscript], I finally understood the universally unavoidable human call combat made on my psyche. Trust was broken, no matter what, and we have trouble ever again trusting and relaxing—our ready-to-fight level of awareness is always there. I have seen from the story told in your book, how so many of my characteristics and beliefs center around ‘TRUST,' the search for ‘TRUST,' the need for ‘TRUST,' the refusal to live my life without ‘TRUST,' and the violent reactions and hatred I develop for those who ‘BREAK TRUST,'” Quoted by permission.

³
One fine officer, who is currently an important armored cavalry commander, recalled a joint exercise in which the company he commanded received a radio message from a Marine unit maneuvering “jointly” with his own. He passed the message around to his staff—Can anyone make this out? The language was surely English, but no one could decipher its meaning. Perhaps the Army and Marine generals were making jointness work, he said, but the troops and subordinate leaders who actually have to achieve a common purpose were not exercising together enough to understand each other's language.

⁴
I give a more comprehensive account of cohesion in my “deliverable” for the
Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study,
available on the Web at
www.belisarius.com/author_index.htm
. The heading here is taken from the title of Colonel William Darryl Henderson's book,
Cohesion, the Human Element in Combat: Leadership and Societal Influence in the Armies of the Soviet Union, the United States, North Vietnam, and Israel
(Washington: National Defense University Press, 1985). At the time of its writing, Colonel Henderson was at the U.S. Army Research Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences.

⁵
Ardant DuPicq,
Battle Studies,
trans. J. N. Greely and R. C. Cotton, in
Roots of Strategy, Book 2, 3 Military Classics
(Harrisburg: Stackpole, 1987), p. 136.

⁶
Samuel Haber,
Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 68-69. See Major Donald Vandergriff,
Path to Victory: America's Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs
(Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 2002).

⁷
Martin van Creveld,
Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939-1945
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982), pp. 78-79. For a detailed and sophisticated comparison of U.S. and German performance in World War II, see Appendix E of Colonel Trevor N. Dupuy's
A Genius for War: The German Army and General Staff, 1807-1945
(McLean, Va.: Nova Publications, 1984).

⁸
Stephen E. Ambrose,
Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944-May 7, 1945
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), pp. 285-86.

⁹
Jones, “Psychiatric Lessons of War,” pp. 13-14.

¹⁰
Personal communication.

¹¹
Nora Kinzer Stewart,
Mates and Muchachos: Unit Cohesion in the Falklands/ Malvinas War
(Washington: Brasseys [U.S.], 1991), Chapter 2.

¹²
Albert J. Glass,
Neuropsychiatry in World War II,
vol. 2 (Washington: Surgeon General of the U.S. Army, 1973), p. 995.

¹³
See Jones, “Psychiatric Lessons of War,” and Reuven Gal and Franklin D. Jones, “A Psychological Model of Combat Stress,” in Jones et al., eds.,
War Psychiatry,
pp. 133-48; Reuven Gal, A
Portrait of the Israeli Soldier
(Westport: Greenwood, 1986).

¹⁴
William Ian Miller,
The Mystery of Courage
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), reached me too recently for me to do more than scan the table of contents. I hope to turn my parts of the
Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study
into a short book, and shall have a chance to digest it then.

¹⁵
Steven Pressfield,
Gates of Fire
(New York: Doubleday, 1998), p. 380. A real Spartan Dienikes (or Dionikes) is mentioned in ancient stories as having fallen at Thermopylae.

¹⁶
First Friday Defense Lunch, March 1, 2002. Quoted by permission.

¹⁷
For a detailed refutation of the belief that emotion and reason are in all ways antithetical, see Damasio,
Decartes' Error.

¹⁸
“Cohesion,”
Commandant of the Manne Corps Trust Study,
p. E-5.

¹⁹
When leadership is good,
otherwise the cohesion may turn the group's motivation and attitude against the chain of command. Cohesion and esprit de corps are related, but different, phenomena, the former being a purely face-to-face phenomenon, the latter being possible between people who have never met. See my “Cohesion” paper for the
Commandant of the Manne Corps Trust Study
for more extended discussion and references to the social science literature online at
www.belisarius.com/author_index.htm
.

²⁰
1 John 4:18 (KJV).

²¹
Elite formations tend to be firm believers in the “right stuff” theory. They tend to overlook the fact that elite formations get the right resources—of stability, competent leadership, and prolonged, cumulative, realistic (state-dependent) training. My personal fire-in-the-belly mission is to see these good resources provided to
every
combat arms and direct combat support service member in
all
parts of the U.S. armed services.

²²
Gerald F. Linderman,
The World Within War: Amenca's Combat Experience in World War II
(New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 45, emphasis added.

²³
Henderson “was there” and fought and suffered, and earned the right to speak about winning or losing that war. Henderson speaks in his Preface of “the U.S. loss in Vietnam.” And yet, with some reason, many American Vietnam vets say we “won every battle.” See
Achilles in Vietnam,
p. 7ff, for a veteran becoming enraged with me for referring to the Vietnam War as a defeat.