MASS MEDIA CONSUMERS in America might be forgiven for forgetting this, but the purpose of Memorial Day is – obviously enough – to remember our troops, past and present, with gratitude for their service. But what are those service-members themselves remembering?
I’ve been asking this question while spending time in company with a good many US military veterans, as they delved searchingly into their own memories.
My focus was a workshop conducted for and by wounded warriors who suffer from invisible as well as visible wounds. Media access to such highly personal and confidential events is rare – for understandable reasons.
But I was invited in for the purpose of covering the “Healing Of Memories” process – as it is known to the participants – in a forthcoming edition of the PBS television program Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, to which I often contribute.
The episode will not air for some time (probably not until June or July), but as Memorial Day fast approaches, it feels right to share with THE MEDIA BEAT’s readers some of what I’ve learned about the (often deeply hurting) memories of American service-members I’ve talked with.
The originator of the workshop series in question – this one held in the beautiful and calming surroundings of the Franciscan Renewal Center in Scottsdale, AZ – is someone I’ve known for some years, and whose experience of war derives from a theater of combat somewhat removed from US military operations.
He’s Father Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest originally from New Zealand who served as chaplain to Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress liberation movement – and for his pains he had both his hands blown off by a package-bomb.
It was delivered to him, it seems clear, by the secret intelligence agency of South Africa’s white supremacist regime in its last throes.Indeed it happened in 1990, after Mandela had been released from his 27-year prison ordeal. (As I’ve reflected in The Media Beat several times recently, the physically brutal reality of that country’s liberation struggle – even during its eventual transition to a negotiated victory for the ANC – has too often gone under-reported, especially in American media.)
After a long, slow and painful recovery from his injuries, Lapsley now travels the world conducting “Healing of Memories” workshops for similarly traumatized people as himself, usually military veterans. Their countries range from Mozambique to Germany, to Sri Lanka, to the US and more. In the US, the workshops take place in Arizona, Minnesota and Hawaii, with plans to extend into several more States.
THE AMERICAN VETERANS I sat down among in Scottsdale all felt that Lapsley’s literally battle-scarred experience was hugely helpful to them as they met to confront the often buried mental and emotional damage exacted along with physical injuries. An Army engineer with severe arm and leg damage who served in Iraq said:
“Talking with this guy whose hands were blown away seemed to show me a way to voice my own truth about how I’ve felt getting injured at war – because he’s the real deal. My anger and loneliness became something I could finally spit out.”
Many told a familiar tale … that no matter how many civilians tell them “Thank you for your service”, they feel there is no way they can communicate in a truthful way about that service. “I sense that I just can’t talk to those who haven’t shared my kind of experience,” said a Vietnam era Marine, “and neither, frankly, to I even really want to.”
They don’t have to, either. But many do quite evidently have that need to talk about their memories, if only among themselves. It’s a need that is often repressed, a repression often self-determined but maybe unconsciously so, sometimes brought upon the vets, even unknowingly, by well-meaning but uncomprehending families and communities.
The workshops take a straightforward form. Individuals with traumatic histories are encouraged to purely tell their tale – and others to purely listen. Everyone in the end tells their tale … for everyone, of course, has their own story. There are many silences. There’s no “therapeutic discussion” as one former Navy officer somewhat disparagingly called it.
“Our approach is simple, perhaps deceptively so,” says Lapsley gesturing with his far-from-cosmetic prosthetics. “We offer people the chance to tell their story, perhaps even just vomiting it out, when they have perhaps never been able to before – and they do so without being judged or advised or offered a ‘cure’ or anything like that.”
It gave me pause and turned out to be very quieting to appreciate this week, more deeply than ever before, just how my own daily stock-in-trade – that of sheer story-telling – can be so fundamental in its power. Fundamental, indeed, to aiding those men and women who go to war, in their recovery from what war has done to them.
