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.

Steve was a Senior Vice President in sales at a pharmaceutical company. He was always calm and centered. People loved to work with him because of his easy manner. He had been through enough in his life that being in a safe setting where the most he had to battle was the morning traffic and competitors prices was a piece of cake.
Steve wanted nothing more than a good job, a loving family, and time to play golf. He had all that. He also felt he had handled coming back from the tensions of a war zone to the security of his suburban life with great ease. Life, as he told me, was good.
I was asked to be his executive coach. He wanted another perspective about who was ready for promotion and how to talk with those who would be left behind. His questions were smart and his manner direct. He was wonderful to work with.
Then one day I received an emergency call. That was not Steve’s way. Emergencies did not exist in his world. His voice was shaky and he was on the verge of tears.

Here is what happened:  The company was in the midst of a major re-organization and the entire sales team, hundreds of people, had gathered to hear about the new work design. Steve left shaken and confused. He felt sick and agitated. Yet, this was not such a big deal.
All that had happened was some folks would be in different business units and some would have the opportunity to relocate; nothing to get that upset about.
Yet, here he was back at home unable to concentrate, unable to eat or sleep. He told me he thought he was losing his mind, and over what, a reorg?
I asked him to search back to another time when he had these same disorienting feelings and within a few minutes Steve, big, strong Steve was sobbing.
“I got it” he managed to say between great big gulps of air. “This took me back to my time in in the military. I was put in charge of my men and I promised to take care of them, that no one would be harmed. Kinda stupid, huh, since I could not really promise that. Anyway, three of my men didn’t make it and I kept thinking it was my fault.”
He stopped, lost in his memories. When I asked how that impacted his sales meeting he became silent. I waited. Then he said “Wow, Sylvia, I thought I had packed all those feelings away. At the meeting lots of my direct reports kept coming up to me and with a pleading look in their eyes said ‘Please, Steve, will you take care of me’. Some wanted to move others wanted a promise they could stay where they lived. I kept saying ‘Yeh, yeh’ knowing their fates were out of my hands.”
More silence. Then “I just connected the dots. I couldn’t keep my men in the war safe, so how the heck could I keep these folks safe. I felt like a big failure.”
I let Steve talk and talk. He told me about the war, the fear that had gone underground, the anger, the hurt, the disappointment. Then he began to cry, really cry. When he could finally hear me, I told him the tears were the part inside that had been frozen beginning to defrost.
When he was once more, calm, cool Steve, he shared with me the power of what he had just learned, that hidden feelings will come out eventually, there really is nowhere to hide.
Steve was instrumental in helping us create the “Total Leadership Connections” program that has at its foundation a section to look at, really look at what forms us: family, culture and crises. Hidden feelings are better when observed, understood and transformed, rather than left to fester in silence.
Sylvia Lafair, Ph.D., author of the award winning book, “Don’t Bring It to Work” and “Pattern Aware Success Guide”, is President of CEO, Creative Energy Options, Inc., a global consulting company focused on optimizing workplace relationships through extratordinary leadership. Dr. Lafair’s unique model has revolutionized the way teams cooperate, relate and innovate.
She can be reached at sylvia@ceoptions.com or 570-636-3858; www.sylvialafair.com

Since I held my book launch on January 20th, the days have turned into a blur. I went to Atlanta where I had the amazing opportunity to speak on CNN about how a soldier brings their trauma home after the war is over and how that trauma becomes the children’s inheritance. I also got to speak on how critical it is that veterans have the space and safety of speaking the truths they carry within them and how we civilians must be present to hear those truths.

Just days after the CNN interview, I had the humbling and exhilarating chance to experience the full truth of what I said about how speaking their truths enables veterans to heal. I spent four days at a Soldiers Heart retreat in the soft mountains of Georgia. Dr. Ed Tick and Kate Dahlstedt, the directors of Soldiers Heart, led a group of six veterans from the Viet Nam War, one from the Gulf War, and four veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through a ceremony of coming home. Eight civilians welcomed and accompanied them during those days, provided a safe environment in which the veterans could open up and tell their stories and the civilians could received and agree to own the stories. We were there to own the suffering of our veterans, because as Dr. Tick writes in War and the Soul, “Society disowns the suffering war creates for soldiers, and the abandonment of them is as much a cause of PTSD as is the war itself.” We surrounded the veterans with our presence and absorbed their stories so that their memories can become collective rather than personal. That makes it possible for them to recover their souls.
Before the weekend, I thought I was able to imagine war. I thought I had a good enough imagination, aided by all the war movies I’ve seen, all the books I’ve read. And most of all by all the interviews I’ve done of WWII veterans.
But during those four days, I learned how all that enabled me only to imagine the surface of what our veterans have lived and now carry.
When a veteran sits present among fellow veterans within such a community, he or she will tell stories of a whole other depth than when they are by themselves.
Many of the men and women spoke of shame, of deep shame and fear that the civilians present would see them as monsters if they revealed the truth of what they had done or had desired to do. They often spoke the words “monster” and “beast-“ the part of themselves war gave birth to or revealed that now causes profound feelings of self-loathing, even while that part still feels powerful and seductive.
The veterans needed assurance we would not turn away from them after such truth. And how could they know we wouldn’t? Their courage as much as their pain opened my heart.
In telling their stories, in hearing us civilians vow to hold their stories in our hearts as our own stories, the veterans began leaving the wilderland that war exiles soldiers to after it breaks their hearts and souls. Seeing our faces and ears take in their stories of death and loss and anguish, these men and women re-entered community and saw the possibility of purification, atonement, reconciliation. The transformation in their faces from Thursday evening to Sunday afternoon astounded me. One veteran said, “I am leaving with hope. On Thursday I wanted to bolt; I thought none of you could possibly understand. But now you are family. And I feel I might still be alive.”
All our veterans need the experience of this veteran. All civilians need to have the experience I and the other non-veterans did. To begin healing the wounds that occur in our name. May all our soldiers and veterans know such healing.

Gated Grief officially launched on Thursday evening to a crowd of 150 people!  I would have been thrilled if 75 people had arrived, so when at 7pm the room suddenly was buzzing with dear friends, I felt stunned and humbled.

Though I had been nail biting anxious for days beforehand, once I began describing my journey of the last six years, the words flowed from me in a steady stream.  I hadn’t anticipated the audience’s deep engagement—people’s faces focused, alert, alive.  When I finished, people were standing up–to applaud.  I lost my composure, because I saw that my work has meaning for others.  Its story is the story of others as well as my own.  I can’t think of a word for the joy that makes me weep but that is what I experienced Thursday night when the storyteller and the audience completed a circle and created something greater than the sum of our parts.

I am in Atlanta now to speak on Wednesday night with a man who has been one of my heroes for the last few years- Dr. Ed Tick, author of War and the Soul.  I am humbled again.  As I embark now on speaking to strangers rather than to my friends, my community gave me an invaluable gift.  They showed me that they hear their story in mine; my story makes them wonder about their own; they are reconsidering their fathers’ wars; their mothers’ struggles; they have a whole new way of seeing their families.

May our community continue to grow and to share our stories…..

This is the story of John Ward who lives in Australia.  HIs father was a veteran of WWII and was among the liberators of Bergen Belsen.

He would come out of the darkness, lost somewhere in a fog of morphine and over-proof rum. He would rave, scream, shouting and crying reliving things he experienced during the war. He was a drunken, abusive, violent bastard and he was my father.

We huddled in the front upstairs bedroom in 32 Probert Street , Camperdown an inner city working class suburb of Sydney . Mum, Patty Lorraine, baby sister Joy and me, with a galvanised bucket in the corner to urinate in, waiting for him to smash his way through the door to get at us.
When he began noisily climbing the stairs towards us, I remember the sounds of everything about me turning down as if some unseen hand had turned a knob on a radio down and down.
I have never been so frightened and powerless in my life. Here I was at about eight or nine years old and there is a slobbering cursing stranger on the other side of the door.
I am in primary school ‘supposedly’ in my mind having to protect my family from someone who was four times my size, and had already bashed most of us with his fists, and his vacant eyes and foul beer or rum soaked breath; left a horror a sensory imprint on brains for life.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“When I grow up I will never drink and my family will always sleep safe in warm beds…..I’ll make sure they are protected and never go hungry”…..I promised myself.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The two-story house was part of a terrace. No doubt ‘gentrified’ by now. Many families lived within earshot around us.

So ultimately they suffered the same sleepless nights and ineffective school days when he started up having come home from the pub after the six o’clock swill the swearing and shouting would begin and the cry would go up from the neighbours; “The f——g Wards are at it again” and soon after the wallopers would arrive. He would put up some resistance, they would give him a thump or two and he’d be off to the cells in Newtown Police Station for some time.

We missed a lot of school or slept through a lot of lessons after finally getting to bed sometimes after 4 am. It all came to a head one night when he began shouting at the foot of the stairs and patty threw the night’s accumulated **** bucket over him as he climbed upstairs. She actually thought that would deter him?

Everybody rushed into mum’s room and bolted the door. Mum is by this time screaming “help us, help us” my sisters are reduced to tears, his fist crashed through the panel of the door and reached in for and pulled open the bolt, that is when I literally shit myself. My legs couldn’t move, my eyes were open so wide, no sound came out of my mouth and that almost solid silence filled the room.

Mum and the girls ran out around and behind him and he came straight for me. I fell back he fell on me and began choking and punching. Some how I slipped from his grip, he was after all soaked. I clearly remember thinking I was in a place where I couldn’t be any lower as a creature on this god’s earth. Terrified, smelling of other people’s urine, my own faeces down my shorts legs, I ran into the night not seeking my family but simply as a coward fled. I sat into Camperdown Park in the cold, frightened and shivering till I woke with the dawn and crept home like a mongrel dog that I was. I remained shamed by this all my life.
I learned that most times you don’t know how you will react to life’s situations until you are confronted. And then again you may react differently the next time the same thing turns up.

The Police took him away again and he ended up in Concord Repatriation Hospital for some weeks getting electric shocks to his brain to control his behaviour. He was a bit of a zombie for a while and mum got pregnant with Rhonda.

About this time I wagged school a lot and wandered into the city. I remember seeing the AWA radio tower in Clarence Street as probably the tallest building in Sydney , wow!

You may remember newsreel footage of the mid 40′s early 50′s as you grew up, and how that footage let us know (in a visual form) what was happening around the world; weeks after the event of course. Well those news reels were my escape. Down by Wynyard station and at the State Theatre in Market Street you could watch a whole hour of news reels for sixpence. Plus the series of newsreels started over again so I managed to pass the hours learning about the aftermath of World War Two.

The thing that has stayed with me was the first images of British soldiers entering Bergen Belsen concentration camp. The stick figures in vertically striped pyjamas, the stunned look on the soldiers faces as their bulldozers pushing 20 or 30 skeletal, naked cadavers into a trench and I’m thinking at the age of 10 or 11 “this is where he has been and this is why he is such a bastard?”

For me that was some sort of comfort because I could make sense of the horror and rage he let out when he was so drunk or off his head. I warmed to him a little when he was sober, but could never look on him as a person I could love.

The turning point for me to get back to school and stop being a truant came from one newsreel of a comical offering illustrating the Archimedes principle.

The narrator explained in, at that time, a familiar yank drawl, “the weight of water displaced by a floating vessel, [in this case the Battle ship Missouri ] is equal to the total weight of the vessel and contents, say 50,000 tons”.

He then went on to show a very large lady in a full bathing suit and bathing cap, standing back on to a claw foot bath, full to the brink. “Mary has a displacement of 190 pounds” he says, then she falls backwards into the bath creating this great splash, and it hit me like a thunder bolt. I got it!!

That was one of the funniest moments in my little life up till then. But being a boy the thing that stayed with me was each time I went to the loo after that, I would turn as I reached for the square of torn newspaper, look down in the throne and in a mock American voice declare launched, “the Battleship Missouri”!

To this day that is how I remember Archimedes.

Jerry Yellin, a fellow member of the Military Writers Society, came home from the Pacific in World War II with anguish and trauma.  He finally found relief when he discovered transcendental meditation (TM), and in the last few years he has been dedicating himself to making TM available to today’s troops fighting in and returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.  ”We are facing an epidemic of PTSD- with its consequences of suicide and broken families.”  But transcendental meditation can help us avert this crisis.

Yellin has joined forces with David Lynch whose foundation promotes making TM available to the troops and veterans.  They held a big fundraiser in New York yesterday.  Here is a link to a presentation they held earlier in the day.  It contains some powerful words about war’s wounds and the difference TM can make.

www.livestream.com/DavidLynch

www.livestream.com/DavidLynch

The Multigenerational Ripple of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Last week the New York Times published a front page article, “Families Bear Brunt of Deployment Strains” that portrayed the profound consequences for families, especially their young children, of a parent being deployed. Half of the troops deployed have children. No one will be surprised to hear that wives of deployed soldiers struggle with depression, anxiety, and sleep disorder and that the children have high levels of anxiety and difficulties at school and at home.

The article focuses on a family—the Eisches: a single dad, Brian and his two sons- Joey, age 8 and Isaac, age 12. When Brain was deployed to Afghanistan last January, he turned to his brother to take his sons for a year. Their pain was much higher than their dad and uncle anticipated, the adjustments much more stressful for both families. Then Brian was shot in his legs, which created intense pressures for the brothers’ families. Isaac said he is more attached to his dad now, and everyone feels grateful that Brian returned home in one piece. They are all too aware that many other children will not get their father or mother back.

It is important that the media report on the sacrifices of military families, so that the rest of us can have some idea of what those sacrifices are. But as I read this article I went from appreciation to amazement and shock when I read the four pages of comments that followed the online version of the article. Many readers argued that the story provides the best argument against war; as the older son Isaac says, “Why can’t we just, like, end the war?” But there were responses that surprised me such as:

“Unless I’m missing something, all these people willingly signed up.” correct?”

and

“All Troops signed up without pressure or mandate. They did it themselves so don’t blame US presidents or the general public for their family problems. The US Military is like a religion and indeed these poor kids are forced to live with it. What else is new!”

and

“Sorry, I don’t buy the attempted pathos of this story, which really belongs in the New York Post.
These people made their decision to become soldiers with their eyes wide open.
Regardless of whether they did so for the reliable paychecks and a lifetime of military benefits, the camaraderie, or whether they’ve chosen to buy into the brain-dead mythology that their “service” is protecting American freedoms, these people made a conscious decision to sign on the dotted line.

It’s far too late in the game to try to heap pity on their situation, or to even suggest they were naively duped to become soldiers. Surely the Times, in this story, isn’t suggesting they were too stupid to realize that joining the military could be disruptive to their families.

This is just one of the consequences of their own free will. One, I should add, that is far less horrific than several others that could be mentioned.”

There were many more comments that expressed support for our service members and showed understanding of how a veteran’s family is vulnerable to war’s invisible wounds. But the huge gulf between those comments and the ones I quote above chills me and heightens my concerns about the consequences for a society that relies on an all voluntary military. It is all too easy to disconnect ourselves from war when we see ourselves immune from the sacrifices it extracts. All too easy to judge those who do choose to serve and to absolve one’s self of responsibility to them. These comments express the division I see between our military and our civilian worlds that I wrote about on November 30th– a division in which civilians have no idea what motivates those who enlist, who see the only motivation possible as financial or hormonal. A division in which an opinion of the war extends to those who are fighting it, just as happened during the Vietnam era. But at least then, people acted on their convictions and protested the war.

I believe it moral cowardice to dismiss the burdens and wounds of military families without first and foremost opposing the war or insisting on compulsory service. And whether or not we believe a person is responsible for the consequences to them of choosing to enlist, it is cold-hearted arrogance and meanness to be indifferent to the effects on the children of their parents’ choice to defend their country.

The Multigenerational Ripple of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)