Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging(22)
The civil war in nearby Ivory Coast unfolded in much the same way, although relief organizations had less access to combatants afterward. “In tribal cultures, combat can be part of the maturation process,” I was told by Sharon Abramowitz, who was in Ivory Coast with the Peace Corps in 2002. “When youth return from combat, their return is seen as integral to their own society—they don’t feel like outsiders. In the United States we valorize our vets with words and posters and signs, but we don’t give them what’s really important to Americans, what really sets you apart as someone who is valuable to society—we don’t give them jobs. All the praise in the world doesn’t mean anything if you’re not recognized by society as someone who can contribute valuable labor.”
Anthropologists like Kohrt, Hoffman, and Abramowitz have identified three factors that seem to crucially affect a combatant’s transition back into civilian life. The United States seems to rank low on all three. First, cohesive and egalitarian tribal societies do a very good job at mitigating the effects of trauma, but by their very nature, many modern societies are exactly the opposite: hierarchical and alienating. America’s great wealth, although a blessing in many ways, has allowed for the growth of an individualistic society that suffers high rates of depression and anxiety. Both are correlated with chronic PTSD.
Secondly, ex-combatants shouldn’t be seen—or be encouraged to see themselves—as victims. One can be deeply traumatized, as firemen are by the deaths of both colleagues and civilians, without being viewed through the lens of victimhood. Lifelong disability payments for a disorder like PTSD, which is both treatable and usually not chronic, risks turning veterans into a victim class that is entirely dependent on the government for their livelihood. The United States is a wealthy country that may be able to afford this, but in human terms, the veterans can’t. The one way that soldiers are never allowed to see themselves during deployment is as victims, because the passivity of victimhood can get them killed. It’s yelled, beaten, and drilled out of them long before they get close to the battlefield. But when they come home they find themselves being viewed so sympathetically that they’re often excused from having to fully function in society. Some of them truly can’t function, and those people should be taken care of immediately; but imagine how confusing it must be to the rest of them.
Perhaps most important, veterans need to feel that they’re just as necessary and productive back in society as they were on the battlefield. Iroquois warriors who dominated just about every tribe within 500 miles of their home territory would return to a community that still needed them to hunt and fish and participate in the fabric of everyday life. There was no transition when they came home because—much like in Israel—the battlefield was an extension of society, and vice versa. Recent studies of something called “social resilience” have identified resource sharing and egalitarian wealth distribution as major components of a society’s ability to recover from hardship. And societies that rank high on social resilience—such as kibbutz settlements in Israel—provide soldiers with a significantly stronger buffer against PTSD than low-resilience societies. In fact, social resilience is an even better predictor of trauma recovery than the level of resilience of the person himself.
Unfortunately, for the past decade American soldiers have returned to a country that displays many indicators of low social resilience. Resources are not shared equally, a quarter of children live in poverty, jobs are hard to get, and minimum wage is almost impossible to live on. Instead of being able to work and contribute to society—a highly therapeutic thing to do—a large percentage of veterans are just offered lifelong disability payments. And they accept, of course—why shouldn’t they? A society that doesn’t distinguish between degrees of trauma can’t expect its warriors to, either.
CALLING HOME FROM MARS
BECAUSE MY FATHER GREW UP IN EUROPE, I WENT there a lot when I was young, first with my family and then on my own. In my early twenties I wound up in Pamplona, Spain, for the festival of San Fermin, the infamous running of the bulls. One night I found myself in a small bar with sawdust on the floor talking to two young Spaniards who were so drunk they could barely stand up. One wore a white T-shirt and was drinking red wine out of a leather bota. Every time he squirted wine into his mouth, most of it went all over his shirt. He was also wearing a plastic Viking helmet with fake gemstones around the rim that he seemed to have completely forgotten about, though it was impossible to ignore if you were talking to him. He was drinking and grinning like a fool and had his arm around his buddy, and everything was going fine until three Moroccan guys walked into the bar. They were as drunk and happy as everyone else until the biggest one spotted the Viking helmet on my friend’s head. He strode right up and grabbed it. “That helmet’s mine!” he shouted in French. “You stole it!”
I translated because I was the only person who spoke both French and Spanish. My friend managed to get his hands on the helmet and shouted, “That’s not true, the helmet’s mine!” And so it began. Suddenly all five men had their hands on the helmet; they weren’t throwing punches because no one wanted to let go, but it was clearly headed that way. The men lurched around the room grunting in two languages and gradually deforming the helmet until my friend yelled, “Para! Para! Para!” and everyone stopped. “It’s starting to rip!” my friend said, pointing to the helmet.