Soldier boy and soldier girl

I remember reading in an Intro Psych book, many years ago, this fact: Viet Nam War soldiers diagnosed with post-traumatic stress were not “simply” those who had suffered singular or cumulative overwhelm or a near-death experience during combat. Rather, these were individuals whose recent crisis lay upon the porous ground of childhood troubles. I think it will benefit clinicians to take this as both baseline assumption and treatment inspiration for those in the military – women in the higher percentage, according to a recent NPR report – who have attempted or completed suicide.

The most wrongheaded aspect of the numerous therapy approaches to battle trauma is the assumption that these soldiers are the persons they seem to be: adult, competent, strong yet mortally stressed, in a career they’ve chosen with open eyes. Psychology knows that early injury – on a continuum of incest and brutality to neglect and lack of empathy – creates the base of later problems. We know, too, that personalities are formed in the crucible of childhood pain; personalities that see the world through self-sacrifice and need, through immaturity and anger, through errant convictions, through fatalism and revenge. And there is reason, coming from the therapy room, not to be surprised that certain backgrounds lean to certain career choices. Troubled kids’ inner fragility often gravitates to an interest in forensic science and criminal justice, to a desire to join the police or the military.

Why does someone want to become a “killing machine,” a passive actor in a world of hierarchy, discipline, medals, vigilance and the inebriating ether of macho, in a time when his or her country is not under threat? Could there be a problem embedded in that? The teens I see in therapy who wonder about the military are lost selves, though you have to look below their stubborn surface to see that. They are creatures of anger and sadness fused together, acid opinions thrown at wide targets. They were held down in their childhood injustice yet are trying to look outward. At some moment they may have felt like suicide, but would leave the house and go to the woods to hunt or the street to skateboard. Their fathers may never have talked to them, but harshly or distant.

There are countless ways this background might be ignited – not only by the military, but by the adult world itself. Rejection by a girl- or boyfriend. Failure to be interested in the job; having a belittling boss. Scattering of childhood friends to moves, drugs, college, marriage. Next to the mundane world, the military would be a forest of matches to their pool of gasoline. Powerful father and mother figures – and frozen regression to that dynamic. Forcible growing up. Friendships based on similar wounds, macho and aggressive dreams. And in the extremis of trauma and death and killing, the love for their fellow soldier is forged stronger but more desperate than all the life they ever knew, because that is when they were most alive and most dying: the greatest beauty melted to the greatest ugliness.

These are ungrown boys and girls for whom death, the end, became the norm before they became their own life.

If you want to help the wounded soldiers, you must be kind and cruel enough to point them to their child inside. Turn the clock back, let them know their anger came from hurt, their present from their past. You cannot accept they are their warrior self, this character that says “yes, sir!” ten thousand times and marches off to kill strangers. Suicidal souls are not “simply” in pain, but have never gotten their pain out, have never expressed it, given it to a strong heart, a listening person. If in therapy you see only the soldier, as empathic as you may be, with care and camaraderie and the telling and retelling of his story, and eye movement therapy and peer support and Suicide Hotlines, he can only be the soldier, and the deeper, younger person will remain unseen and unheard, and possibly too lonely to keep going on.