Saturday, November 05, 2011

That is the feeling, in a fashion


The military tries to explain it to families on pre-deployment meetings. Senior spouses try to explain it to new spouses, with various degrees of success, what is coming back. No one can really do a good job.

Lucky for me, Mrs. Salamander has always been the very sensible type, a much better person than me in so many ways. As with all good partners in life, she knew more often than not when to give me space, when to draw closer; when to speak, when just to be.

Lucky for her I guess, according to her I am/was and hopefully will be fairly low maintenance. Flinty now and then, but on average easy to read - at least for her.

There is something though about coming back from deployment. In peace or at war - peaceful or not - that can change a person. If not for good, then for a transition period.

Some wonder why, after months together, some only feel better socializing with their Shipmates. Even if they weren't on your deployment - just other people who have deployed. There are reasons at larger gatherings, military or ex-military will group together. Hard to explain why - but there is a quick bond between those who serve and for many - a parting from those who have not.

I have never seen it written about well. Much of it is caged in psychobabble or snuggy-huggy in ways that make it but fried air - of no use to those who deployed or those who welcome them back.

I found something that gets close to capturing one aspect - one angle - of a complicated mental state. I found it in a classic - one that I am listening to in my travels; Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Here it is for you to ponder next time you wonder what is behind the silence and distance;
I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.
Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend.
I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance.
I daresay I was not very well at that time. I tottered about the streets -- there were various affairs to settle -- grinning bitterly at perfectly respectable persons. I admit my behaviour was inexcusable, but then my temperature was seldom normal in these days.
My dear aunt's endeavours to 'nurse up my strength' seemed altogether beside the mark. It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.
In the first few months after you leave active duty - the feelings are not unlike returning from deployment. Different, but especially if you wade as I have up to your ears in a civilian undertaking; similar.

There; Sal's moody moment of the month.

40 comments:

FCC(SW) said...

The Horror, The Horror.

NavyGatorRet said...

Couldn't agree more.  Have been retired five years now (does time ever fly!) and still miss Navy life.  On this side of the fence I haven't been able to even remotely establish those bonds which seemed so easy to do on USS LAST SHIP. 

butch said...

To thems that was there, you don't need to say anything.

Them's that wasn't, they'll never understand.

i occasionally feel a twinge of apartness from my civilian cow-orkers.

sid said...

A'int that why so many of us gravitate to this inviting porch?

MR Ts Haircut said...

Coffee Cup hoisted high to this entry.  I agree with all your sentiments this cool crisp autumn morning.   I had some pretty heavy rolls during the last year since I retired from the Navy also.   Lucky for me, I stayed at my station and manned my watch.

All things will pass...

Byron said...

This career civilian will attest that in a small way, I understand. You retire and suddenly you are no longer a part of something much larger than yourself. No longer do you know that what you do today will affect sailors in the now and the future. No longer will you smile at the jokes, sweat together to work through a problem, feel fear and elation at the same time.

If I have one large regret in my life, it's that I did not join the Navy when I was a young man. Instead, I chose another vocation that in time would come to serve the Navy in my own very small way. Now at the end of my work life I see my ships start to go away to be made into scrap to sell to other nations to produce cars and refrigerators and computers and...crap. That is the part of my life that I truly despise.

MR T's Haircut said...

Byron, I think it is safe to say that Phib was speaking of the Non associated civie variety and not the service connected, supporting sand crabs like you and a few others who know what we know... ;)

Campbell said...

I'll let the rest comment about the gulf between "then,there" and "here, now"....

From me, CDR, just this:   You be sure to SHOW that good lady what nice things you write of her. 
 Don't be coy about it, nor patronizing....just simply let her see that you PUBLICLY acknowledge her great worth to you.  
 (trust me, you'll be glad you did!)  
She'll glow inside. 
 It's one thing to know your partner thinks highly of you; it's marvelous to know that they extol your worth to others........

Andy said...

The flip side to Shakespeare's "Band of Brothers" speech in "Henry V". It comes not from the knowledge that "they" don't get it; it comes from knowing they never will. There are times I have more animated and knowing conversations with Son #1's best college friend, a former USMC CPL, veteran of two pumps to Iraq, then I do with Son #1. It is what it is, Sal, and find peace in the fact that you had that experience. Even if you are a 'shoe. ;)

UltimaRatioRegis said...

The old saying going back to Friedrich der Grosse. 

"Those who require an explanation can never understand.  Those who understand require no explanation."

Which is why combat veterans often prefer the company of other combat vets.  Not because we all want to talk about it, but in many ways because we don't.

DeltaBravo said...

If it will help the isolation... you may be selling some of your civvy friends and relatives short.  What Conrad writes of can be expanded to cover anyone who has seen the flimsy veneer of "civilization" or "life as it pretends to be" stripped away and had to hang on to their own core with both hands or lose everything forever.  There are those who "know" who have never been on a battlefield, per se.  But they've been police, priests, EMTs, doctors, nurses... anyone who has seen the worst that man can do to another man and had to clean up the mess afterward.  There also are victims who have, though untrained to take it or defend themselves as a soldier might be prepared, endured personally the worst others had to offer.  They are survivors of illness, death's door, cancer... people who have had their grip on life itself almost taken from their own grasp.   They're parents who have had to sit by helplessly and watch a child die, or almost die.  They are the people who woke up one day and life as they ever thought they knew it ended suddenly and harshly.  They're all these people who "know" and must walk around in the sunshine and "grin bitterly" at the world. 

There are many "wars" out there and "endings of camaraderie" that people face.  The end of jobs, the end of marriages, the end of families as children grow up and move on and one's most important role in life is changed forever. 

I have to say to limit oneself to a special coterie of military and those who have seen the battlefield and to isolate yourselves is to do yourselves a disservice and those around you.  Because it cuts you off from the lessons others learned in the commonality of it all...the heartbreaking or bitter transitioning.  And it cuts others off from the wisdom you have learned that you may not be aware applies to many many others in their own particular circumstances.

Okay... off my soapbox now.  I love you guys.  What you have all done is special.  What you have learned is priceless.  Know that it is shareable with those walking wounded around you. 

Grandpa Bluewater said...

Yea, verily, and AMEN.

bullnav said...

On Combat by Dave Grossman goes a long way towards explaining the psychology of "the return." 

UltimaRatioRegis said...

I am sorry, DB, but I don't believe you are correct.  There is much that separates the experiences of people who have withstood even extreme misfortune and those who have seen the furnace and savagery of combat. 

The brotherhood forged in those times and places are unlike any other.  When I first got back from overseas, the VA was advising combat vets who were having problems adjusting to participate in PTSD groups with people who were rape victims, had been in fires, car accidents, suffered the violent death of a loved one.  Combat veterans had nothing whatever in common with those people, and attendance quickly fell to zero.

I have lectured to the VA Scholars program on the subject, and the lack of understanding of even those in the VA system is remarkable.  Treating combat vets as unfortunate victims instead of proud warriors creates an instant barrier that, in many cases, is permanent.  They take a great deal of pride in their service, and believe rightly that those who call them victims denigrate their experiences and indeed their values. 

Many of the questions after my lecture centered around combat vets not telling loved ones of their experiences.  My answer was that the things that they saw or had to do are not aspects of this world they want to share with wives or children.  In fact, the veteran looks at all times to protect them from this very thing.  My own Dad, veteran of the South Pacific, never talked to any of us, his wife of 49 years included, about his experiences.  Until I came back from Iraq, and he knew I could understand, and then, when we were alone, talked quite often of his time in the war against Japan.  The things he saw, the things he had to do, they were not for the ears of wives or children.  And not something any nurse, priest, EMT, or cop would understand in the slightest. 

I adore you, DB, but you are wrong in your assertion.

ewok40k said...

I think prolonged combat exposure is something altogether different from disaster area or crime scene, though basing on the same psychological factors. Cops and emergency ward doctors after all are back at home with their kids at the end of the day, or maybe a week. Combat tours are incomparably longer, and usually more risky, and in many wars they involve witnessing, if not taking part in, things that make our domestic serial killers naughty children in the class room. I am mere civilian, but I instinctively feel the size of things are different.

DeltaBravo said...

Both of you, I see your point (though, URR, I know some chaplains who would relate too well with what you're saying)...  I'm just saying those who come back to "the world" need to understand that there are lots of people who have reached their limits in their own unprepared and untrained capacity....  and that isolating yourselves off is a barrier to being able to offer the fruits of your wisdom and experience to others in dealing with "the horror."  Your role as warrior is still germane to civilian life, in an altered capacity.  Your bucket of horror may be indescribable... but to the guy whose capacity is a thimble, he's lost and overwhelmed with his thimbleful.  I'm just saying you still have much to offer back here. 

UltimaRatioRegis said...

Chaplain, maybe.  Priest, doubtful.

AOD said...

They will never understand until the draft is brought back.  the fact that not only "they don't, but they can't" is the problem.  The further we stray from the citizen soldier model into the professional soldier model that was never the intention of our founders, the broader the disconnect and the deeper the fissure will get.

Beyond just getting everyone to put skin in the game, there is something major to be gained by having universal service requirement.  Everyone will understand.

ewok40k said...

The fundamental problem I see with that is - more even than battle-proven from the Falklands to the Gulf advantages of professional military over conscripted servicemen - and more than political obstacles - the very technological side of modern US forces is pretty much forcing the professional military model. Can you learn to be a really good M-1 tank crew, Aegis operator or similar within year or 2 of service? And then there are special forces, the realm of ultimate professionals where years after years of training produce finest soldiers imaginable - and those are the most needed in the realm of the Long War.
Conscription and mass industrialized combat has brought a period of citizen-soldiers, but if we look back, for the most part of the history standard was a professional soldier, be it legionnary, knight, samurai, landsknecht or muskeeter.

Mary Alpha said...

Thank you for this Phib. I'm no longer amazed at the great rift from the military most experience who are not connected in some way to it. No longer amazed but continually saddened. God bless each of you who have and who are now serving. You are our best.

Kristen said...

Military life can put a lot of extra strain on a marriage.  It's wonderful that you found such a good spouse, CDR.  You always write about her so lovingly.

Kristen said...

I love DB too, but I agree with URR on this.  I don't think that anything else in the world is comparable to going into combat. 

Kristen said...

Andy, that first sentence of yours is a great observation.

DeltaBravo said...

Let me try it another way... 

A couple years ago in San Antonio a woman decapitated and dismembered her 3.5 week old infant because the voices in her head told her to.  I would bet money the LE who handled that situation had more in common with you and your father and what they had to process than you have with some REMF who was deployed but saw nothing but the ice cream bar. 

Phib writes about going from one world to another... a world where everything was X10 and you used parts of your personality and talents that aren't so needed in everyday America.  To leave that and the people you worked with and to put those parts of yourself on a shelf is a loss.  You will always miss that part of your life. 

But the person you became while living that life and the resources you developed are still very much needed here in the US of A more than ever.   When you are somewhere dealing with life and death and the eternal verities, you come back here and the old life never fits again.  But there's lots of people living that here...  the rape victim and the gunshot victim can't make sense of their situation because there was no purpose to it.  You all are not victims because what you did and endured had a meaning and a purpose.  In that respect, you won't ever understand what the PTSD civilian is suffering, but that doesn't mean you can't be an example to them of how to move on and function despite it. 

I'm probably saying it all wrong.  Just know you have more in common with the civilians who are trying to live in their own "new normals" than they have with other civilians who haven't yet stared into the horror.  And you have a continuing role to serve and protect and lead in that respect.  So don't isolate yourselves in your own company... you're still needed back in this world.  It's just not going to be as obvious to you where your services are necessary.  The distress signals and maydays will be more subtle, but urgent nevertheless.

Anonymous said...

No, there isn't, Kristen.  I don't need to go into combat to know that.  But... men will never know what it's like to be pregnant or go into the delivery room and not know the outcome.... we all have "untouchable" experiences that other sectors of society will never understand.

What I'm trying to say is how combat vets view their own experience and those who didn't undergo it can affect their usefulness to others.

Say you're some civvy in the office and you are enduring something dreadful.  You've got a combat vet working with you.  There is is a difference between these two:

"Gee.. I could use advice... but this guy has been through combat and he is so far above me he isn't even on my planet.   My problem is trifling to him."

Versus:

"Gosh... he managed to get past all the stuff that happened to him and he's doing well.  I can learn from him."

How others view him has a lot to do with how the vet views himself and his place among those who didn't share his experience when all is said and done.  Which one do they want to be for their friends and neighbors and families?  Emphasizing the separateness and mental isolation will serve no one in the long run. 

Anonymous said...

WILL everyone, AOD?  There is a case to be made that the draft made the military MORE hated in some sectors.  Those who didn't want to be a part of it opposed it much more vociferously.  Google pictures of the fools occupying Wall Street and ask yourself if the military would be better off if they were having to train some of those folks.

Are some people even trainable?  Or would they create new problems?  You can be forced into an experience and never really share it.  I'm not thinking the draft would cure what ails some people.

DeltaBravo said...

oops that was me.  JS-kit and all that...   :-E

AOD said...

Everyone hated the draft in Vietnam because the "everyone" was BABY BOOMERS.  In World War II, it worked out just fine thank you very much.  Same for WWI.  And Korea.  And the Civil War.  And many other actions.

And you know what?  The men that I know who were drafted in Vietnam don't hate the service.  They hated how they were treated when they came home.  The hate the asshats who burned their draft cards, hid out in college, and found ways to blow out their knees so that they couldn't serve, which goes back to what Salamander was talking about in the first place.

AOD said...

The legionnaire, knight, samurai, landsknecht and musketeer were the officers and NCOs of their respective armed forces.  They were NOT the foot soldiers.  They all, ALL, led conscripts into battle.  What made them so formidable, beyond their professional craft, was their leadership in turning conscripts into soldiers.

As for the falklands, the fact that they were conscripts did not cause the war to be won or lost.  The fact that the Argentines underestimated the British resolve to win back their islands through use of force and therefore only sending recent inductees with less than 3 months worth of training caused them to lose the war.  Just had a fantastic Naval War College lecture on it as part of our Operational Art section.

ewok40k said...

did they? since Marius reforms legionnaires were the professional footsoldiers, signed for long term - 16 years was standard - contract and the NCO/JO rank were centurions... knights and samurai led lesser retainers, but those were again usually more volunteers than conscripts - and landsknecht were not only professionals, but usually mercenaries. The same goes for the 30 years war era muskeeters/pikemen. It was only when combined mass of printing press, increasing literacy, revolutionary propaganda and fervor, improved muskets (brown bess) created the ground for the citizen militia of american and french revolutions that warfare become a nationwide phenomenon. Of course, levy-en-masse did happen earlier, but it was usually confined to situation of enemy invasion to homeland, and not very much effective in battle. It was eventually the increasing firepower of rifled, then repeating , then machine guns that forced the model of mass conscript armies as in 1861 and 1914 initial volunteer armies were chewed by modern firepower faster than you can read my post. In fact in 1914 only UK had still volunteer army, all other powers had mobilizwed conscription armies. The trend was reversed when in 1960s and 1970s technology began what culminated in the Desert Storm - age of professional military driven by technology. Combination of superior tech with superior training of professional armed forces allowed for an era of unparalelled US superiority. I can see only one thing that can reverse the trend, namely emerging of a rival with tech parity or even superiority. Chinese still don't qualify, though are prime candidate.

xbradtc said...

CDR, Procceedings had an article about 25 years or so ago, The Emotional Cycle of Deployment. It should be reprinted annually and required reading for all deploying servicembers and their spouses. 

Maybe Mary at USNIBlog can help you find it?

Kristen said...

I understand, DB.  And we all have our own little identity groups.  I have a comfort level with other mothers of young children, and other military wives.  I feel an affinity with you when I read your comments because you are a Catholic and conservative woman and we have a lot in common. 

I think the CDR is writing about a complicated and hard-to-describe emotion that veterans and active-duty share.  Deployments are hard and reintegrating is hard, and the experience is unique to such a small number of society these days.  Bonds are forged because of it, and the bonds forged among men who go into combat together are like nothing else I've ever seen.  It dwarfs the fellowship that I have with the women I know.  I don't think the CDR is suggesting that vets hold themselves aloof on purpose, but that they share an experience that no one else can really understand.

UltimaRatioRegis said...

"<span>I would bet money the LE who handled that situation had more in common with you and your father and what they had to process than you have with some REMF who was deployed but saw nothing but the ice cream bar. "</span>

Perhaps, but that is saying little.  If the police officer had to go into that house, and risked being blown apart, or see his partner officer shot through a lung, with a healthy dose each of fear, anger, hatred, and animal survival at stake, maybe he might.  Even more so if he had to kill the perp.

UltimaRatioRegis said...

And I might add that he has to repeat the process half a dozen times on a bad day, every couple of days, for weeks.

CoRev said...

Thanks, Sal!

Charity said...

Great post Sal.  I couldn't agree with your below statement more (loved the Heart of Darkness excerpt too):

"I have never seen it written about well.  Much of it is caged in psychobabble or snuggy-huggy in ways that make it but fried air - of no use to those who deployed or those who welcome them back."

Boat School Grad said...

<span>

<span>Spot on post Sal.</span>
<span> </span>
<span>Two personal anecdotes.</span>
<span> </span>
<span>My sister and her husband just so happened to live not far from us in Va Beach.  My brother-in-law commented once shortly after I returned from a deployment and was going out to shoot pool with some buds from the wardroom..."Didn’t you just spend 7 months with those guys? I don’t want to see anyone I work with until I go back to work the next day". </span>
<span> </span>
<span>My current boss has commented several times that he can’t understand why I would have sacrificed a lucrative career and choose instead to make a career on active duty.  He'll never get it.  HIS boss though was a one tour USMC scooter driver and no one in the office understands why he and I are so tight.</span>
</span>

DM05 said...

Great stuff. There's a reason my financial planner is a former Shipmate. Bonds, trust, and shared experiences, together with his acquired acumen for something as intimate as my money. And yes, the transition to CIVLANT was never as easy as changing jobs.

Grumpy Old Ham said...

Indeed. 

...and +1 Internets for the reference...

pk said...

when i recieved my draft notice (by registered mail) i was stationed aboard the USS Bryce Canyon AD36 which at the time was moored to a bouy in Kaiosuing China. (this was in 1966). i showed it to the warrent personellman on the ship and he, with great glee, generated a formal MESSAGE to my draft board which was routed through the recruiting office in Missoula Montana where a first class ?? drove to my home county 110 (miles round trip) where it was delivered and a reciept for said message demanded and signed.

as i understand every one who put his hand to that message did so with a smile on his face.

C