This was on a NPR program, Tell Me More. The host is Michel Martin; Susan Selke is the mother of the late Marine Clay Hunt. Jake Wood is a veteran Marine and friend of Hunt. Alison Buckholtz is a military wife whose 2010 op-ed in The Los Angeles Times helped inspire the new public service announcement campaign. She’s also the author of the memoir “Standing By: The Making of a Military Family in a Time of War.”Here are some quotes from the discussion:

MARTIN: Jake, I wanted to ask you. You fought side by side with Clay Hunt and you worked with him at Team Rubicon. His concern that his efforts to get help might mar his military record, is that something that you hear other people talking about? Is that still a concern?

Mr. WOOD: It’s absolutely a concern for a lot of reasons. Guys like Clay don’t want to be taken out of – they don’t want to be taken out of their platoon. They don’t want to be removed from the infantry for having sought help and for being diagnosed with PTSD. For people coming out of the service it’s also a problem because many of these guys want to go and continue their careers of service both, you know, in police or, you know, fire and rescue.

And men and women are concerned that with something like PTSD on their records that that’s going to hurt their chances of getting employed when they leave the service.

MARTIN: Jake, I wanted to ask you in the couple of minutes that we have left, you know, you heard Alison say that the country as a whole is not taking (the suicide of troops and veterans as seriously as it should. Do you share that point of view? And what do you think would make a difference in saving the lives of people like your friend Clay Hunt?

Mr. WOOD: Well, I think it’s very convenient for the country to not know and I guess not care about what’s happening with our veterans and our active duty service members and the suicide epidemic that is growing. And when I say that I mean that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a front page issue for a number of years.

And they’ve since gotten off the front page and they are now buried in the middle of the newspaper. But I don’t think there’s anything more important than, you know, the fact that our nation is at war and we have been for almost 10 years. You know, this issue needs to be front and center at the highest levels of our government and there needs to be a very open and candid conversation at the highest levels of elected officials as to what this problem is, what caused it, and the best way to move forward on how to fix it.

And I don’t think that conversation is happening, and if it is, it’s not getting the attention it deserves.

www.npr.org/2011/04/28/135803874/marines-suicide-renews-focus-on-military-families

I was eager to meet Si to learn how art helps to heal trauma. But what I would learn from Si is that while art has created meaning for his life and brought healing, it does not erase trauma. And that more than any other aspect of his life, Si speaks of his relationship with Rennie, his wife of seventy years, as having been the singular greatest source of healing. Yet for all their closeness–which was evident when I visited with them–Rennie only learned about Si’s having been brutally beaten in Central Park and his experience at Buchenwald when she transcribed his memoir. And, like all the other liberators, he has never directly told his daughter about his time in World War II. “I only learned about it from listening to you give talks about it for your exhibition ‘The Journey’ (a seventy drawing depiction of witnessing Buchenwald).
Si’s silence confounded me, upsetting the theory that I so want to believe that art can heal trauma.
“Did you not tell Nina (his daughter) or Rennie because you wanted to protect them?” (This was my other theory: that the silence of veterans is to protect their families.)
“No,” he answered, “you just don’t talk about it.”

The way Si talks about his trauma is as though he can neither diminish nor dampen it. Rather than erase his trauma or cure him of it, Si’s art nourishes and fortifies the rest of him so that he can prevail in spite of the trauma. I think of the words of another liberator whom I met in January. Like my father, he was among the liberators of Nordhausen. At the end of our 75 minutes of talking, he turned to his wife and said, “”I have struggled to stay alive every day since Nordhausen.” For Si, creating art, living amidst color, is central to that struggle. During our interview, he showed me the wall of his bedroom that he wakes up seeing every morning. Fifty canvases of color. Deep, rich color.
“This is what I need to wake to. I need color as much as I need oxygen and water.”

Color is medicine for those who have suffered trauma. Si’s wall brought tears to my eyes, as it showed me why I crave color . Why I saturate my house in it.
I think of the words of Charlotte Delbo, a French resistant fighter whom the Nazis imprisoned in Auschwitz. In her remarkable book, Auschwitz and After, she talks about her trauma as always living alongside of her, contained in a permeable membrane.
I have often observed people resist acknowledging that they have been traumatized. As I wrote Gated Grief, I struggled with understanding this resistance. I decided that the underlying cause is that we do not want to admit that we have lost the pure spirit with which we were born, that our spirit has suffered an unalterable scar. Some call trauma a psychobiological wound- which connotes how the psychological wound changes us biologically, a fact that repels us. Who can bear to accept that forces beyond our control have altered us on a cellular level?
We become mute in the face of that horrifying alteration. A traumatized person literally cannot speak and must fight to regain the ability. Can we reclaim the voice we had before the trauma, if that voice was part of the self we lost?

I am still answering that question.

I do know that color has been essential to my own struggle to speak my history. Because before I could speak, I first had to enliven my spirit.

We non-veterans must do what we can to aid veterans in their struggle to speak their truths. While art might not be able to restore the lost aspects of themselves, it can support them. And it teaches and heals the rest of us. As Si wrote to me, “I believe in the healing power of art–and not just for the artist.  We need art to light up life’s dark moments.”

We need to understand healing is a journey, even while we cannot arrive at a destination of being healed.

An Interview with Artist and World War II Veteran, Si Lewen

I met Si Lewen’s art before I met him. A friend who learned about him through the documentary “The Ritchie Boys” suggested I go to his website to get a sense of his art. The art I saw amazed me: canvases exploding with color, vibrant, pulsing with life. The art became even more amazing when I read the story of Si Lewen’s life.
He grew up in Lublin, Poland and knew from the age of five that he wanted to create art. He fled Poland when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, and through the good graces of Senator Byrd who was grateful to Si’s uncle for having sponsored the senator’s brother-Admiral Byrd- in his expedition to the Antarctica, was able to get to the United States. But Si quickly discovered the dark side of the new world, when, during a walk through Central Park, he was robbed at gun point and beaten by a policeman who hissed “You goddamn Jew bastard” in his ear.
When World War II began, Si enlisted and became a Ritchie Boy, a member of a special military intelligence unit chosen by the Army because of their fluency in German and familiarity with Germany. They entered Europe on D-Day and undertook covert operations. Si saw action from Normandy through France and back into Germany where he was among the liberators of Buchenwald. There he witnessed what could have been his fate.
But upon returning home, he did not feel able to create art. “When I returned from the war I was disgusted. I wanted nothing to do with that experience. I didn’t even want to paint.” But he found himself drawn to the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York where he began taking classes and painting landscapes, still lifes and nudes. His work sold and was exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

But scenes from his war experiences haunted him. “I would wake up with these nagging images,” Si said, “images that would not go away.” He turned to art, creating “A Journey,” seventy black and white narrative drawings that turn the viewer into a witness of Nazi concentration camp. The lack of color in the drawings expresses how in terrifying moments, color disappears. “Even blood was not red.”

The drawings convey the shock and horror the liberators experienced on a level that I had not experienced before, even after hearings over scores of veterans recount their stories. Towards the end of “The Journey,” the commandant of the camp invites the visitor to a dinner of death, and when the visitor refuses, they become another victim. But the last drawings show the visitor’s spirit flying away on the wings of a bird.

to be continued in Part Two

watch?v=WQsURs_1xUo&feature=relmfuEmily Warn, daughter of a D-Day paratrooper

Being a teenager is an exciting time…more independence, time with friends, budding romances, new opportunities, and eventually, a driver’s license! Such freedom. But, adolescence can also be one of the most challenging times for young people, due to raging hormones, negative peer influences, bullying, greater academic challenges, peer pressure to use alcohol and street drugs, greater responsibility (sometimes holding down a part-time job or caring for younger siblings), and big life decisions (Will I go to college? Get a job? Go to a technical school). Did you also know that adolescence is also a time that young people are at risk for developing emotional problems such as depression and anxiety? It can be a stressful time!

Now…think about the additional challenges faced by our military teens. Their parent(s) may be deployed once, twice, or even multiple times, to a war zone. The parent may miss out on important events, such as prom, the school play, the state basketball tournament, and birthdays. Research is mounting showing that most teenagers are resilient – bolstered by support of the military, community, church, and relatives/family, most do well! They are inspirational and deserve our thanks. However, some teens are struggling, as research is showing increased rates of anxiety, sleeping problems, behavioral problems, and even use of mental health medications. What does this tell us? Although teens may be busy with their full schedule of school, work, extracurricular activities, and socializing, they are affected by their parent’s deployment.  We need to listen to them, provide resources, and make services available.

Due to the absence of resources specifically for teenagers, my mother (a teacher) and I have created two resources for military teens (in my personal life), including:

Finding My Way: A Teen’s Guide to Living with a Parent Who Has Experienced Trauma
Examines the teenager’s experience of having a parent who has endured trauma-ranging from military combat to domestic violence to 9/11 to natural disasters.  We are extremely honored that the National Guard is distributing it nationally as part of the Beyond the Yellow Ribbon Program.

My Story: Blogs by Four Military Teens (just released in late 2009)
A series of blogs which gives a voice to the teen experience before, during and after parental deployment to Iraq/Afghanistan

The mission of our books is to empower teens by:

*    Providing essential information
*    Normalizing a variety of reactions
*    Encouraging open communication
*    Supporting healthy coping
*    Offering comfort and hope

Our books are highly interactive, containing numerous activities, open-ended sentences, short stories depicting healthy coping, and opportunities for reflection. To learn more about our books and see sample pages, please see our website:

www.SeedsofHopeBooks.com

Although there are a few books on the market written for young children dealing with parental emotional problems or PTSD, the literature is relatively barren for teenagers. Thus, our work fills a major gap in the available literature.

Michelle Sherman, Ph.D. has committed her career to supporting families/youth affected by mental illness and trauma/PTSD. She directs the Family Mental Health Program at the Oklahoma City VA hospital, and is a clinical professor at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. She co-chaired the first American Psychological Association Presidential Task Force on Supporting our Military Families, and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Military Child Education Coalition (MCEC).

A new biography of J.D. Salinger, the author of The Catcher in the Rye, has been published.  Unlike previous portraits of Salinger, J.D. Salinger: A Life by Kenneth Slawenski emphasizes Salinger’s World War II service in Europe where his division—the 4th Infantry—landed on Utah Beach on D-Day, fought across France and then at the Battle of the Bulge, and then liberated hundreds of Dachau’s subcamps scattered in the forests outside of Munich.

Slawenski sees the presence of Salinger’s war experiences in his stories “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “For Esme – with Love and Squalor.”  In both stories the protagonists suffer mental anguish from the war, anguish that their families ignore or trivialize. They don’t want to be bothered; they want to enjoy life.  In “For Esme – with Love and Squalor,” the sergeant’s brother asks for war souvenirs—“a couple of bayonets or swastikas—” for his kids, while the sergeant is struggling to stay alive. “He ached from head to foot, all zones of pain seemingly interdependent.  He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective.”  Seymour Glass of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” ends up taking his own life.

The great majority of the many World War II veterans I have spoken with shared the experience of finding families and friends back home uninterested in hearing about the veterans’ pain, in hearing their horrible stories.  They all described to me how this indifference isolated them, intensified their feelings of disassociation and having no option than to go silent.

Even with all we have come to acknowledge since World War II about combat trauma, our society continues to deny its presence throughout our culture. This is evident in a review of J.D. Salinger: A Life.  David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times writes that Slawenski’s conclusion that Salinger witnessed a Nazi concentration camp is “conjecture.”  “Too much remains unknown.  It’s not just the war years, which clearly scarred the author; in July 1945, still I Germany, he checked himself into an Army hospital for treatment of what was probably post-traumatic stress disorder.  Indeed, it’s not a stretch to suggest, as Slawenski does, that Salinger’s time in battle rendered him fatalistic and had a lot to do with the direction of his later work.”

“Not a stretch?”  I’d say it’s clear as a day after a cold front that being in the D-Day invasion, fighting at the Bulge, being anywhere near a subcamp of Dachau traumatized Salinger.  Fatalistic?  Strange word to use.  I can think of many words to describe the effects of trauma, but “fatalistic” wouldn’t be one of them.  And “later work?”  How about what he wrote in the years right after the war?

Ulin criticizes Slawenski for not having proof positive of Salinger’s experiences.  I’d say Slawenski does.  And I’d say it’s time we stop pretending that war—any war—doesn’t disfigure the souls of its participants. Salinger was lucky; he found a way to process his experience and speak his truths.  It’s also clear he knew we would resist hearing them.