This
conversation was excerpted from John Henry Parker's interview for the
film Beyond Wartime.
Tell us about your son and his service in Afghanistan?
My son is a sergeant in the 10th mountain division, and he’d been in Afghanistan for his second time over. And I hadn’t heard from him very much at all, and one day he called me from the Pakistan border, where he was at, and we were talking and I could kind of sense that there was something really going on for him, and he started explaining to me that he had some real concerns about coming home, and being able to connect with his children and his wife, and it was really concerning. To the point where he just declared to me that he was going to need some really serious counseling when he came home.
It was just really alarming as a parent to hear this from your son, and it was really emotional and very difficult to deal with at the time.
He was a squad leader, and his job was to go into the border towns and into the different mountain areas around the Pakistan border, and seek out and find the enemy. The Taliban, Al Qaeda, whoever else is in the hills there that are resisting.
And he just had been witnessing a lot of really horrific things, and his main concern was, can I come back and just get past all this and be a dad. And be a husband, and just be a family guy. How do you do that?
And what it conjures up for me is memories of my own upbringing, with my dad, who was a combat veteran from Korea.
Who was your dad, and what characterized the upbringing that you had and the problems that you had with your dad?
All I know about my father’s experience is that he was in the Marine Corps, and he was in Korea. He didn’t talk about it and he won’t talk about it. Recently I did talk to him about, what was your experience, you know, and he said that he went to go seek help initially but the therapists seemed like they were more concerned with things that were important to them and they didn’t really relate to him so he immediately went into shutdown and never went back.
And consequently, I was raised around a guy that I knew he loved me, but he was very volatile, very scary. And it was really, almost terrorizing. And he didn’t even realize how he was affecting us as children, as we were growing up. He was always very angry, very volatile.
So when my son was talking to me about his concerns about coming home, we’ve got you know, two beautiful little kids, and he’s worried about transitioning back, and I immediately went into, pretty much, a panic mode. A lot of anxiety about, you know, I’ve gotta do something.
And I thought it would be more simple, I thought it would be more straightforward, that there would be resources more readily available, but having been in the Marine Corps myself, and my transition back into civilian live, I kind of realized that there’s not a lot of care about bringing these guys back into civilian life. So I was optimistic but I was also concerned, so I started doing a lot of research to figure out what does he need when he comes home and how can I find him some resources.
So I spent the next few months in a very frustrated place.
So tell the story of your son from his point of view.
Back in Vietnam, they would send these guys back from Vietnam and they called it “Foxhole to front porch.” Literally in a very short amount of time they were in one place to another.
The circumstances in which my son came home was an emergency leave situation, so literally within 72 hours of leaving Afghanistan he was back in his house, and he called me and he said, “You know, just a few days ago I was in Afghanistan literally being shot at and in firefights, and in a really high-stress environment, and now I’m cooking eggs for my kids,” you know, he was just trying to get his head around that.
In today’s military they’re really trying to take them through a critical incident debriefing and a process of decompression as much as they can, so it’s not typical for it to be that quick.
He was joking about it but it was interesting to hear him say, “I haven’t been touched by another person in 9 months. I have been with my buddies, and we’ve been in really extreme situations, and to come home…” It was funny, he said, “You know my wife’s like a spider monkey. She just wants to be with me and all around me, and I get to the point where I just can’t handle it, and then she misunderstands, and so it’s been a real adjustment trying to figure out how to come back. How to rejoin my family, is what he was telling me.
So what are the challenges that families face, then?
As we talk to more and more families that are going thru this experience, I’m finding that a lot of them are just very excited about having their sons and daughters come home, and what’s been explained to me by my son is that what keeps you alive is hope, and you know, thinking about your parents or your significant other or your girlfriend, and you want to get home, and there’s an interesting process where the person comes home, and they’re used to being around a certain set of people in a very intense environment, and family members, in a very well intending way, can have a bunch of big parties and get-togethers, and that can be the wrong thing to do is having too many people too quickly approaching this person and asking them how was it over there, and what was going on, and just the fact of being around a lot of people is very challenging for guys that come home. We had a get-together at our place and before we had it I had an agreement with my son that if you get uncomfortable, just go out and have a cigarette, go out to the truck, and I’ll take care of it with everybody, and it won’t be any big deal.
For the most part, I would say two-thirds of the time, he was out at the truck, he wasn’t interacting with anybody else.
Describe some negative or unhealthy ways that we at home collectively or individually might react to returning veterans.
Well in my experience, a lot of the military people that I talk to, they really appreciate people saying thank you, and they just really want what they’ve been through over there to really mean something, especially if they lost buddies and other people they care about. I think that’s what’s most important.
What I think is really insensitive, and people don’t even realize, my son Danny told me even walking through the airport, you know, talking to friends, he always feels the wheels turning in their heads, and there are really two questions that people consistently ask that set him off in the wrong direction, and I can see why.
It’s, How was it over there, and how many of those fill-in-the-blank did you kill, you know, how many of those people did you kill? And it forces him to constantly have to tell a little story to just to shut them up and get rid of them, and move on to some other topic, and he’s amazed but literally 80-90 percent of the people just want to know the answers to those two questions.
I think that if people really understood that just by asking the question you’re really taking them back into an area that’s – you’re asking them to re-experience something that could be extremely stressful for them, so I would say that knowing how to be appropriate and knowing that that’s probably not really a good place to delve into with a veteran, is a good idea.
What’s the single most important piece of the healing process for someone like your son, from PTSD?
The single most important thing about his healing process, I think it’s really talking about his experiences, and getting it out, and not holding it in, and not compartmentalizing it. The statistics from the military’s own research says that upwards of 17 percent of our guys coming back from Iraq are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD.
The LA Times a couple weeks ago quoted a statistic of 23 percent. But what’s interesting is, we’ve got these statistics, but upwards of 60 percent of the people who need help the most, won’t seek help, for a myriad reasons. That’s really the biggest challenge, is this high risk group of people, that we really need to focus on as a community.
You know we, in the military have lived a code, of Army of One, the few the proud the Marines, adapt overcome improvise, there’s nothing in there that says seek help, and so our whole society is really needing to focus on our at risk population. Because clearly 75 percent of the guys coming back are going to adjust, and get back into civilian life and become very productive, and some of the great leaders of business historically have been former military. So it’s really evident that the majority of people coming back are going to be very productive in civilian life. It’s the at-risk population that we really need to focus on. It’s never been done before.
What was the slogan that you’re using with Veterans and Families?
When I talk with people about Veterans and Families, our organization, and what we’re trying to do to build a support network of family members, employers, community leaders, the overwhelming response I get, which is really refreshing, is people generally say something along the lines of “Let’s get it right this time.” Let’s learn from the past.
Literally every person I talk to, whether they’re a teenager, or a young adult or a baby boomer in their 40s or 50s or 60s, all had an experience of being raised in a home with a Vietnam veteran father or grandfather or parent, mother or father, or they’ve had some experience of what happened. The young people know that something terrible happened with this homecoming, and the people who experienced it never want to see it happen to their kids, so the message of “let’s get homecoming right this time” is really the message that we’re trying to put out to the community about building the support network.
All right, so I want you to imagine that I’m your son Danny, sitting here, and I’ve just told you the story of some of what happened in Afghanistan. You and I talked about what Jonathan Shay said about how the healing requires two people, really, as a returning veteran, I tell my story, as the community or family member you hear my story, with, you’re a compassionate listener. So I want you to address yourself to me as your son and tell me what your response is to my story.
I guess I would say, Danny, this is a long term process, and it’s going to take time, And you’ve got incredible family support around you. And everyone believes in you, and we’re here for you, and we’re going to make a difference for all of your buddies coming back who maybe aren’t seeking help, as you are. And we’re going to make a difference in the community, and you’re a part of that.
And your message and your ability to talk to other people and allow me to talk about your experiences is going to touch a lot of people and it’s going to make a big difference in their lives, for both the veterans and the people who are trying to understand what is going on for this person coming home, as well as how can they be appropriate in managing their emotions and their patience and their understanding about how to let this person to readjust, maybe little by little, but, allow them to open up.
Talk about the connection between healing and our ability to move beyond wartime.
I can say that in healing, in my experience, and by looking at the research that’s available to us, and talking to countless veterans and family members, the 60 percent of the people that are suffering from PTSD, that need the help the most and won’t seek help, aren’t gonna seek counseling.
They’re gonna feel like somehow, they’re failing, or they’re going to be stigmatized, so we as a society need to understand that this is what’s happening, and so creating opportunities for personal development, creating opportunities for programs that are more private, and individualized, and self-paced for veterans.
My experience is that veterans across the board are very interested in succeeding, being effective, but it’s not always counseling that’s going to help them, it’s about reading a book, it’s going to a seminar, go to a self-paced learning program. And what that does is open in it’s own way a possibility of thinking about who you’re becoming as a person, once again, not focused on where you’ve been, thru your combat experience,
I remember when I got out of the Marine Corps, the best advice I got, from a military officer, he said to me, you’re going to get out of the military and it’s going to be a lot different than you remember. My advice is to go a bookstore, go to the self-help section, and find a book that jumps off the shelf at you, and start reading on it, and focus on who you’re becoming.
And I think that would be my advice to any service person, is, don’t close down, find something, find a hobby, find a book, go to a seminar, find a program, and start individually expressing to yourself who you want to be and who you see yourself as and develop a new identity. And that military experience and that armor and that responsiveness will always be there, and you’ll be able to recapture it in a second, but you may not need to go there ever again in your life. So I would say that, focus on a learning path, is the biggest healing process, of expression.
Could you talk about the bracelet you’re wearing?
This is a memorial bracelet, and these are the three guys that they lost in his unit when they were in Afghanistan. And so I wear it every day as a reminder of why I’m doing what I’m doing as a parent, and why I’m building this community support network, so it means a lot.
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