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Two weeks ago, Nat Futterman received some news. The French government is bestowing upon him its highest honor: its Legion of Honor award. Nat served with the 10th Infantry Regiment, 5th Infantry Division which fought through France and Belgium. At the Battle of the Bulge, he suffered severe burns which still cause him discomfort today.

The French government honors one hundred veterans every year.

Nat’s reaction: amazement, tremendous surprise, and profound satisfaction . “When I got the letter from the Washington embassy, I was completely floored. I can hardly believe I deserve France’s highest military honor for the minuscule part I played in the liberation of France but was completely thrilled that I had been selected out of the many vets who had applied. I will be proud to wear it for whatever time I have left.”

Nat first experienced the enduring gratitude of European countries to members of the Allied Forces six years ago when he and his wife Harriet traveled to Belgium at the invitation of the Belgian government. There they and other WWII veterans who fought on European soil were wined, dined, and celebrated by both representatives of the government and ordinary citizens, many of whom were not even yet alive in 1944.

“Our trip to Belgium and Luxembourg for the 60th anniversary of the Bulge was one of the most emotional experiences of my life. The attitude and warmth of the people of those countries towards us was nothing short of extraordinary. Adults and children lined the streets to welcome us and show enormous gratitude, something that does not happen here in the U.S. We members of the VFW try to organize and march for Memorial Day and Veterans Day and find that only a pitiful few people come out to observe. This is very frustrating and trying. We did our duty, but it seems that does not matter very much now.”

As we celebrate the independence of the United States from England two hundred and thirty-five years ago, let us all remember our veterans who helped others regain their independence. Let us commit ourselves to showing them through words and behavior that it does very much matter, that we remember and will always be grateful.

This website has introduced me to many wonderful people who have shared their journeys of healing from either their own trauma from combat or from their parent’s trauma. One such person is Richard Lawrence, a United States Marine Corps combat veteran of the Vietnam War from 1967-1970 . While suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder during the 1980′s, he began drawing and painting expressive observations of the war. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Vietnam Veterans’s Art Museum in Chicago, Illinois.

The painting below is “We Still Remember.”

You can see his work on his website: www.richardglawrence.net 

Here is what Richard emailed me:

“I now have my Vietnam pieces in boxes in my basement and only get them out if students want to see them and have me talk about my experiences in Nam. I’ve spoken several times and took some of my work to area colleges around Lancaster. My eye balls usually sweat when I talk about my memories.

“My Father, who is still living, was a combat Marine and wounded three times. My brother was also a Marine but not in combat. My son enlisted in the Air-force and I thank God for that.

“All my three children suffer with some form of PTSD. They were all little when I was in the VA hospital for many years but they remember how I was  then. It still hurts when they talk about the things I did.  We have grown closer because I now try to tell them everything about the WAR.

“After my divorce many years ago, I remarried.  My wife is older and understands more, and we treasure each moment.”
 
Richard’s work is inspiring. He presents us all with the possibility of finding relief and even healing through art.

Post traumatic stress disorder has become a household term, especially in the context of combat. Every day some media outlet in the country talks about the PTSD of our veterans and troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, the number now estimated to be 95% rather than the 20% previously reported. But what we aren’t talking about as a country is the long term consequences of that trauma. Michelle Obama and Jill Biden have created “Joining Forces” to help the families of our service men and women, the program’s concerns being “employment, education, wellness and public awareness.” Ms. Obama gave as an example of the outcomes she’d like to see “better career opportunities for veterans and their spouses.” Though a good job is essential, the prerequisite to one is a veteran’s physical and mental wellness. That wellness is also essential for a family’s most critical concern: their children’s prosperity.

Our children’s prosperity demands that we talk about their vulnerability to their parents’ invisible wounds. In a terrible and cruel irony, when a member of the service returns home from combat, what they most want to achieve– safety and sustenance for their children– becomes elusive. The trauma of combat not only persists in tormenting the veteran, but the ghosts it creates haunt the entire household, infecting the children with the veteran’s melancholy, the depression, the anger and unresolved grief.

Can we be taking care of our veterans if we don’t acknowledge this vulnerability of children to their parents’ trauma and extend care to them as well?

My generation of babyboomers provide a concrete example of how this dynamic between veteran parent and child plays itself out over the child’s lifetime. Over four million of the Americans who enlisted or were drafted to fight in WWII saw combat. And we, their children, grew up in homes haunted by the ghosts of that war. My posts for Huffington Post and the talks I have given in the past four months about the multigenerational consequences of war have received passionate responses. The topic resonates deeply with children of veterans of WWII, the Korean War, and the Viet Nam war. Time and again I hear back from many of these people about how my words caused them to see their families in an entirely new light and to realize that what they had suffered from– their fathers’ silence, distance, and anger– had been manifestations of unhealed trauma.

Last week a Huffington Post blogger reposted a recent piece of mine that quickly began a multi-day long conversation among many people. Some of the comments are significant indicators of the fall out of war for the children of veterans.

“My dad only told us about his time under Gen. Patton after he came out of a coma, the result of his fifth heart attack,” one woman wrote. “He had previously only told us a couple of stories like how they were given their uniforms, guns, boots and walked across Europe, stole food to survive – many Germans were very kind to them and gave them food. That was the only time my father ever talked to us our whole lives! My father drank for many, many years. Then at one point he just stopped. I blamed him for so much until I finally understood. Now I want to retrace his steps during the war. He was in the Battle of the Bulge, took me to see the movie when I was a kid. That was so strange: both my father taking me to a movie and the fact it was a war movie.”

Another person told us: “I only learned my father liberated Dachau a few years before he drank himself to death. It was during a trauma at the end of his life. He was a sensitive man who taught the romantic poets at Dartmouth. A therapist told me that as a child tried really hard to carry my father’s pain for him! Her insight overwhelmed me. I always just thought I was the observer.”

“My Dad didn’t drink,” someone else said, “but he was the loneliest soul. He worked hard and hid within himself. My family members hated him for not being the great American family man. I was the only one who connected with him on a soul level in the last six months of his life. And they distrusted me for it– for being Dad’s girl.”

One woman shared how her grandfather was a veteran of WWI and suffered survivor’s guilt. “And my poor father, who served in WWII, had learned to mimic a father who suffered from PTSD.”

The words of one participant expressed for all of us the fundamental dynamic of our families, seemingly different on their face, but underneath suffering the same pain. “The not talking about it held us pretty much in emotional hostage…all of us frozen in silence, not feeling, not supposed to feel it, until not feeling and not talking and just doing became normalized. Frozen from our humanity, not aware of our needs or even our right to need connection, respect, and safety to be who we are.”

As a group we agreed how critical it is to have this conversation, to realize that our families were not some bizarre anomaly but a piece of a huge pattern of passive aggression and disfigured emotions. If we are committed to healing our veterans, we must first be honest about the fall out from war within our own families. Then we will recognize how much is at stake in helping our veterans. Otherwise, our blindness will allow the wake of trauma to swallow another generation.

The Multigenerational Ripple of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD

This is the letter Dr. Ed Tick sent today:

Dear Friends of Soldier’s Heart,

I write to you on this Memorial Day weekend from Greece, where Kate and I are leading a healing pilgrimage for warriors and therapists.
We have taken our group to many of the most sacred and influential warrior sites. We have visited Marathon, Thermopylae and Sparta, among others. Our veterans declare that they know the spirits of the men who fought there. They say they wish they had been like those warriors — people who were utterly sure of the righteousness and necessity of their cause and sacrifice, people for whom there truly was no other choice but to defend, people who were fully united with those they defended and who were fully supported and honored in their sacrifices. There is a warriors’ code and our veterans sought to fulfill it against the leaders and conditions that betrayed the code and them. That is one key source of traumatic wounding. Here, at these old battles, there were no doubts or moral questions. They did what they had to do, they suffered what they must suffer, they were honored.
Please imagine what we have seen and done. See our own American combat veterans standing before the grave of the 300 Spartans that still guards the steep and narrow mountain pass at Thermopylae. Here us reciting the epitaph on the grave written by the poet Simonides, “Go tell my people, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.” Obedience to their laws did not mean following orders and rules and legal precepts. It meant serving and surrendering to the ultimate necessity of the warrior code to give all, unto life itself, when the lives and freedom of their own people were truly and immediately threatened and all else had failed.
Feel our veterans’ anguish in their wish to have been as sure in their service to the US as the Spartans were in their service to Greece. See our veterans standing at attention as they did here, as so many will all over the US on this holiday. See our American veterans saluting the fallen of 2,500 years ago as their true brothers. Feel the love that never dies and the wish that our sacrifices ring true to the heart and soul, so true that though we “pass through the valley of the shadow” we are not poisoned by the poisons there.
On this Memorial Day we salute and grieve the fallen of our and all wars. We contemplate true spiritual warriorhood. We try to bring it back to our own and all wounded warriors. We seek clarity of vision and purpose and swear that only out of ultimate and unquestioning necessity will we ever resort to force. And even if we must, we do so with honor, respect and reverence and forswear violence against the soul of another.
No death, no killing should ever be celebrated. We grieve all fallen. As Chaplain Lt. Chris Antal does as he sends our troops off to Afghanistan, we warn our troops to feel remorse to protect their own souls. We support our veterans in their grief this day and always. We salute the fallen, not as a patriotic act, but as a spiritual and moral act that can elevate our souls and teach us what true warriors know, that the greatest wisdom is gained only through suffering and that those who have suffered so much in our names must be honored, not with parades and slogans, but by walking with them through the darkness so that their wisdom finally becomes ours.
Prayers, blessings, tears and thanksgiving to all of you and to all our troops, veterans and fallen on this Memorial Day and always,
Ed

Sue Diaz is the author of the excellent Minefields of the Heart that details how her son Roman’s enlisting in the Infantry and going off to Iraq altered their lives. She turns to the words of poet William Stafford: “I have woven a parachute of everything broken. My scars are my shield.”

Now she has created two videos that capture the spirit of her book.

War changes the lives of everyone it touches.

A Soldier’s Call

Words for a Soldier Home from War

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