Hell Healing Resistance — Veterans Speak, Daniel Hallock. Foreward by Thich Nhat Hanh.

Michael Uhl is a writer and Vietnam veteran living in Maine. He spent the decade of the ’70s organizing fellow veterans around the issue of American atrocities in Vietnam, seeking universal amnesty for war resisters and deserters of that war, attempting to unionize GIs, and documenting and publi­cizing the plights of veterans exposed to radi­ation during open-air atom bomb tests of the '40s and '50s, and to Agent Orange, one of the chemicals used to defoliate Vietnam.

Recently, I came across an astounding fact, that the request to the American Psychological Association for new standards in treating patients came in the late 1940s from the Veterans Administration to “assure that service personnel returning . . . from World War II received competent mental health care.” Just another of history's many metaphors, you might say, for the longstanding alliance between war and madness, which is the true subject, if not so blandly stated, of a valuable new book by Daniel Hallock, Hell, Healing and Resistance: Veterans Speak (Plough, 1998, 456 pp., $25).

Tales of war-spawned madness abound in this text, beginning with a charged Preface by Phillip Berrigan, which gave me pause. I oppose those tactics which Berrigan and his comrades employ in bearing witness to the insanity of warfare, most recently, with their attacks on a Naval ship at Bath Iron Works in Maine. It's certainly not about “destruction of property” for me, but something to do with “vanguardism” that I find counter-productive as political education within a democracy.

Berrigan was a combat soldier, a “good killer,” he reveals; thus, when he takes a hammer to something even as hateful as a Destroyer, I see, not a reasonable act of moral witness, but the violence—the compulsion to keep fighting—the evil genie which war unbottles in soldiers, so hard to recap when the shooting stops. Having read the personal account of his battlefield, I feel greater sympathy for Phillip Berrigan, and extend the hand of comfort from a fellow vet and victim of war-bred-trauma; perhaps he to suffers from the same disease.

Berrigan might react, quite rightly in some respects, that his individual victimization is insignificant in relation to the dangers of human extinction he and others are desperate to bring to our attention, and justify their tactics accordingly. And yet, Hallock's interviews with veterans show nothing if nor the patterns of psycho-social dysfunction among a collectivity of individuals whose violence in battle washes over so many seemingly controlled actions of their postwar lives, often most extremely in acts of violent self-destruction.

Despite the author’s inclusion of participants from US military adventures that span World War I through the Persian Gulf, the central focus of Hallock’s study remains, unavoidably, the Vietnam experience, since its veterans have been privileged to exhibit so much more systematically and publicly than other groups of former combatants, exactly how the grammar of war shapes the syntax of potential lifelong madness in civilian life. Two manifestations of these phenomena are suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which, not surprisingly, are indexed in Hallock's book only with reference to the impact of war on Vietnam veterans.

Through no fault of the author's, these exclusionary juxtapositions represent historical fictions. PTSD is not new with Vietnam; soldiers from time immemorial have suffered this disorder. The record is ample, often most clearly recognized and stated, not in the literature of medical or social science, but in works of the imagination. In a poignant moment from Somerset Maugham's The Razor’s Edge, a Chicago matron, disappointed in her daughter's fiance just home from World War I, bitterly recalls how Civil War veterans, too, “were never good for anything” for the rest of their lives. Anecdotally, war stress has been known by a variety of euphemisms, including nostalgia, homesickness, battle fatigue, and shell shock. Yet war madness—to strip PTSD of its clinical camouflage—was not officially entered into the diagnostic manual of mental disorders by the American Psychiatric Association until 1980.

I suspect that the logic of recognizing PTSD as a condition common to soldiers of all wars applies as well to the question of war-related suicides, and I have no doubt that suitable studies would reveal an over representation of self-destruction among, say, World War II veterans every bit as dramatic as that among those who fought in Vietnam. It is a short empathic step, though seldom taken, to then recognize beyond the ranks of former soldiers the wider circles of others traumatized over their lifetimes by war; the most obvious and immediate being the innumerable non-combatant civilians who populate the scenes of battles. And of course Hell, Healing and Resistance is well stocked with accounts of how veterans bring the uncorked violence of war back to the homefront, where dysfunction breeds dysfunction, overflowing the dockets of domestic law and police blotters throughout the land.

Hollock's is a timeless tale of the tragedies unleashed by war. Yet, even if the accounts of horrors always seem to overshadow healing and resistance, there is much good news in his book as well, among those vets, for example, who've found humanity through their pains, and now contribute to it. Here are lesson learned, as Hollock discovered among many of his interviewees, that a rational society ought to place in wide and continual circulation–the ever urgent task to teach the truth about war and madness. Thic Nhat Hanh expresses this urgency with great simplicity and power in a Forward to the book: “We can not imagine the long-term effects of watering so many seeds of war.”