Silence
By Mary Beth McBride
As the war worsens, tensions rise in the Middle East and men and women are being redeployed into Iraq and Afganistan for the third, fourth and fifth time, I reflect on my past year as a physicians' assistant at Tallahassee's Veterans Administration clinic. I feel compelled to write about the almost unspeakable: the silence surrounding wars.
Here are the numbers: More than 3,000 Americans dead; more than 22,000 Americans injured; more than 4,800 veterans in our North Florida/South Georgia area; more than 2,400 veterans have enrolled for services in our area; more than 400 have been seen at the Tallahassee outpatient clinic. We can't even get an accurate number of the Iraqi and Afghan people who have been killed: the Pentagon says that it does not keep records of civilian casualties. Still, in January, the United Nations reported that last year in Iraq, 34,452 civilians were "violently killed" and 36,685 were wounded. Last October, The Washington Post reported that a team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimated that since coalition forces arrived in Iraq last March, 655,000 more people have died than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.
It has gotten very personal. My 19-year-old nephew deployed to Iraq in October 2006. The reality of it all stuns me almost into wordlessness.
We rarely talk about the cost that each person pays and that we will pay for generations after this war ends. It does not matter whether you are an American, or an Iraqi citizen, or an Iranian citizen or a person from Palestine or Israel. The details of our lives may be different but the common ground is our humanness. We share a longing for family and belonging, for shelter and food, for health and basic safety. We are all paying a tremendous price for not recognizing our similarities and respecting our differences.
There is a cost to pay when you are trained to shoot people and then are expected to assimilate back into civilian life; a cost in being the hunted or being the one who is hunting the "other." There is a cost in losing friends and family either to bullets or to the consequences of post traumatic stress disorder and long deployments; a cost in losing home or country and with it your sense of safety and sanity. These costs rarely are discussed openly. They are certainly not calculated into the national war budget.
How do we start this conversation? We don't know how to ask; we don't know how to listen; and we don't know how to respond. There is a silence in my family: If we don't talk about it, we can pretend it's not really that bad. If we don't talk about it, the fear goes underground. It freezes instead of sitting unbearably close to our warm and tenderly beating live hearts where it can be transformed into honesty and action.
When a traumatic event happens, fear arises. Fear freezes parts of brain, and the two sides of the brain can no longer communicate. The brain literally shuts down. But, we need both sides of our brain to communicate with each other to integrate our experiences into a coherent story. We think that by ignoring and not talking about traumatic events that the fear and bad memories will go away. Just the opposite seems to be true. The brain repeatedly brings up the memories, trying to make sense of and to integrate the traumatic experiences. If we can speak of these memories in the presence of safety and compassion, the fear can be integrated and released. This needs to happen repeatedly, and eventually, the traumatic experience becomes part of the fabric of your life and not the ruler of your life. If this is not able to happen, the trauma remains unresolved.
What prevents my listening well? Viewpoints such as having an agenda, an aversion, a judgment or a polarized position keep me from listening with an open heart. If I feel impatient, incompetent or if I feel like it's my job to "fix it," I cannot listen well. I am too busy coming up with answers, strategies and defenses.
Often when I leave the VA's urgent care clinic, I feel like I have been sitting in a deep pool of unspoken grief. If I do not allow my own grief to move through me, I will resist being in that space with others.
So, it is important that we learn to ask from our common humanness and curiosity. We must practice our ability to stay with people in their different and difficult places. It is so easy to look away and not see. We learn to listen with open hearts. This requires practice too. We have to stay with ourselves and others even when our own hearts close. And finally, we learn to respond by sharing our stories with each other. In this, we can weave kindness and healing back and forth between us. There is no pill in the world that can do this for us. It is our job to do it for each other.
May this weaving bring about a shift in consciousness, a transformation towards working through difficulties without killing each other. Like a stone thrown in a pond, may there be millions of acts of inquiry, listening and responses rippling across the waters of our world. May a huge wave of compassionate action take form.
Mary Beth McBride has written two other articles on this war: 2/2006: Honoring the Warrior: A Peace Path of Action and 4/2006: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: The Long Road to Recovery. They can be found in the Tortoise online archives. She can be reached at mcbridemb@hotmail.com.
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