A HISTORY OF WAR TRAUMA (PTSD)

The history of the government's treatment of returning combat veterans has been long absent from the public's awareness. Lately, a plethora of documentaries presenting the wounded veterans' plights are currently making their way into the American public's consciousness. After their initial treatments, the wounded service members from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan face an ongoing battle to receive appropriate care and financial assistance. The Department of Veteran Affairs has historically been drastically under funded, under staffed, and overworked. The costs and consequences of war are unpredictable. America is unprepared.

Powerfully relevant to the current situation of our government's treatment of the homecoming warrior is Soldier's Heart by Lee Burkins.  This book  is possibly the most honest inquiry of war and its consequent trauma ever written by a combat soldier. Burkins, a former Green Beret, writes with the emotional firepower of  an automatic weapon. Novelistic in nature, Soldier's Heart, weaves and braids the grime, blood, and guts of the experience of war with the world's past historical treatment of the warrior returned home. He humorously reveals the uncompromising assault he and a handful of pugnacious veterans made upon the bureaucracy's neglect of the combatants. Sit in a Veterans rap group, walk the jungles with the tribal warriors Burkins led in combat and follow the inner world of a warrior's mind and soul as he struggles to comprehend the reasons behind humanity's penchant for war and the government's reluctance to acknowledge the trauma now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

A story from Soldier's Heart was previously presented as a documentary on the HISTORY CHANNEL 

Soldier's Heart: An Inquiry of War

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Rob Schultheis, war correspondent for Time Magazine and CBS since 1984
 Author of Night Letters: Inside Wartime Afghanistan, The Hidden West, Fools Gold, Bone Games and Waging Peace

Soldier's Heart is a rare book, one that dares tell the truth about what war really does to people. Anyone interested in the Vietnam War, the experience of combat, and the problems facing ex-soldiers should keep a copy in their library. It should be required reading at West Point, the War College at Fort Bragg, and in every high school and college course dealing with the Vietnam era.

As a young Special Forces Sergeant in Vietnam, Lee Burkins led small units of Montagnard tribesmen on recon missions deep behind enemy lines. Many of his fellow soldiers, American and 'Yards' died before his eyes. He came home to America angry, alienated, deeply scarred by what he had experienced on the battlefield, and found himself fighting another war, on behalf of himself and his fellow Vietnam vets, against a nation that shunned its own heroes and a Veterans Administration that refused to recognize the very real psychological traumas that plagued Burkins and hundreds of thousands of his fellow vets. In the end, Burkins won out against his own PTSD, and helped fellow GI's get the help they needed and deserved, to heal themselves.

I rate Soldier's Heart as one of the half dozen truly great books on the Vietnam War, up there with We Were Soldiers Once and Young, Dispatches and Charles Anderson's The Grunt

Thomas Alan Jarrett, LCSW, DCSW "Warrior Resilience Training"

While deployed to Iraq as a Mental Health Officer, I fortuitously discovered Lee Burkins' Soldier's Heart, while searching for inspiring books to enhance my work with combat soldiers. I was so intrigued by what I read, I reached out to the author, who allowed me to interview him from Iraq , regarding his journey beginning 37 years before in Vietnam . What I wanted, and what is in short supply today are warriors who have been transformed by their experiences, versus being labeled by themselves or others as broken or permanently damaged. From his authentic PTSD "earned" as a SOG operator and healer himself  through Post Traumatic and Stress-Induced Growth, Burkins thrives psychically where many did not, largely because of his transformative journey and personally resilient personality, combined with a relentless pursuit of justice for other veterans, by what the Buddhist's term ,"For the sake of all living beings".

The book is controversial, direct and written in a narrative format which easily slips between deep penetration missions, authentic psychotherapy sessions and historical VA struggles, culminating in a warrior attaining no less than a Phoenix-like transformation. As Erik Erikson might call it, the author attains integrity versus despair which gripped so many of his generation and is affecting my brothers and sisters in arms today.

Applicable for today? Absolutely, as the author has sat with his journey long enough to convey it with wisdom and compassion and relevancy during our time. Easily could be catalogued under Special Operations, psychotherapy, martial arts or wisdom literature. Especially recommended for those who will not volunteer themselves as a passport into the soul of a warrior who transmutes his suffering and experiences and brings back the teachings for us all with ears and hearts to listen.

The author's accounts of his war experiences are powerfully and engagingly written. He well captures the horror of war (both its outward and inward battles), its long-term effects on those who live through it, and the nightmare of seeking to integrate those experiences with the normalcy of everyday living upon a soldier's return to civilian life. The most impressive thing about this book is the author's ability through his writing to "show" the reader the emotional and psychological turmoil soldiers experience both in their adjustment to war and their readjustment upon return. This author writes very well.

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Lee Burkins has produced a remarkable work that will assure a vital education to those genuinely concerned with the true prices of warfare. Those intelligent enough to purchase his teachings/reflections will acquire a visceral knowledge of a journey that few survive let alone possess the courage and clarity to document. Soldier's Heart is a masterpiece and parties claiming to be military historians without turning its pages are simply fooling themselves. Please  read other reviews about this book at Amazon.Com. You'll get the idea.

Excerpts from Soldier's Heart

The illnesses of war. These afflictions were salved with recognition of the soldiers’ service. Early Babylonian soldiers were rewarded with spoils and tribute from conquered lands. The Greeks saw war as a necessary evil to support democracy. Land grants and stature in citizenship were received as entitlements. Care was provided for the disabled and the deceased’s family. The returning combatants who were ‘afflicted’ were given small plots of land to farm outside the city. The government understood the need to distance these men from society’s antagonisms. Besides they could serve as a hardened defense should an enemy come to the city’s gate.

The Legionnaires of these ancient times demanded no less. In a letter from a commanding Centurion to the rulers of the Empire of Rome it was written, “Make haste to reassure me, I beg you, and tell me that our fellow citizens understand us, support us and protect us as we ourselves are protecting the glory of the Empire. If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached bones on these desert sands in vain, then beware of the anger of the legions!”  

The stress and traumas of war are unpredictable in their assault upon the human body, mind, and spirit. No one, other than the combatants who directly experience the insane obscenities of warfare can comprehend the nature of the wounds. Every war fought still reverberates in the body, mind and soul of the soldiers who faced death and killed and battled to keep themselves and friends alive.

The Vietnam War was the mother of the modern terminology Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Although psychological science has assigned to this acronym the observation of the effects of severe combat trauma on the human psyche, the malady this modern scientific definition represents has an ancient history and has lived by many names throughout time: 'neurasthenia', 'shell shock', 'war neurosis', 'combat fatigue', 'soldier's heart'. Some of the earliest record of war trauma was written during the first century A.D. by the Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch. He kept detailed accounts of many prominent people and their lives. In the book, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, he wrote about a soldier and nobleman from the army of Alexander the Great, who suffered flashbacks. In understanding the human psyche, what better a laboratory of rats and men, than a war. After a country's wars, what becomes of those who bear the burden of war trauma?

During the Civil War in the United States, nearly six percent of the Union Army was discharged for 'nervous disease': palpitations of the heart, quick fatigue, shortness of breath, headache, dizziness, diarrhea, chest pains and disturbed sleep. Most often the diagnosis was insanity. So great was the public outcry that Military Hospitals for the Insane were established in 1863. But at the war's end the government closed the hospitals and no effort was made to treat soldiers afflicted with the stresses of combat.

Attention to World War I veterans' problems reached a threshold in 1932 when an estimated 15,000 veterans marched into Washington, D.C. to petition for previously promised benefits. This first ever mass demonstration in our nation's capitol was violently dispelled after President Hoover ordered federal troops, commanded by MacArthur, Patton, and Eisenhower to force the veterans out of Washington. A few veterans were killed and hundreds were injured. Congress immediately passed legislation meeting veterans' demands for benefit assistance.

Some two million men served in combat in World War I. 'Shell shock' a state of depression, thought to be caused by brain concussion (a prevalent injury in the Iraq War), disrupts a human's physiology. Because of shell shock, over 69,000 U.S. soldiers were permanently evacuated from the fighting. Nearly 36,000 men were  hospitalized for lengthy periods of time because of this disorder. Eventually almost 160,000 soldiers were deemed psychiatrically unfit. 'Shell Shock Centers' were created to treat psychiatric casualties. World War I shell shock cases accounted for over fifty percent of Veterans Administration patients by 1942.

The stress on the heart, mind and soul of the soldiers of World War II was profound. Psychiatric casualties increased by 300 percent from WWI to WWII and accounted for 23 percent of all evacuees. The traumatic after effects of combat were widely rejected as the cause of these psychiatric casualties. In the early years of 1943, more soldiers were being medically discharged for psychiatric and neurological reasons than were being inducted.  Battle fatigue, sometimes called combat neurosis, troubled over one million men. According to Richard Gabriel in No More Heroes: Madness & Psychiatry in War, more than thirty-seven percent of all World War II Army combat troops were discharged for psychiatric reasons.

Combat trauma statistics for the Korean War (1950 - 1953) are vague due to the underreporting of psychological casualties by the military. A report from the Surgeon General's Office in 1967 on Combat Psychiatry estimated five percent of all evacuations in Korea were for psychiatric or neurological reasons. Korean veterans were probably the most ignored group of service members by our government.

After the end of the Vietnam War (1973), soldiers who sought help for combat stress related disorders were told by the government that such claims had no merit. It wasn't until the early 1980's that the government began recognizing and treating Vietnam veterans for combat trauma.

Currently, their are 292,260 veterans receiving compensation for PTSD from the Department of Veteran Affairs. With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq these numbers are increasing every month.

If war is a business it will not end soon. The expense of war knows no confines and extends beyond currency. The costs must be made prohibitive.

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New Book Coming!

Author Lee Burkins will soon finish writing 'Your Secret Body' an instructional book on the esoteric workings of the body's physical and energetic configurations and connections!

If you move, ambulate, run...are an athlete of any sport or discipline this book will have you completely rethinking about how the human body moves! If you think you know how to walk or stand this book will give you a new paradigm to operate from. Practice the amazing exercises presented in this book and you will find and feel more space inside yourself. Your body will become taller! Experience the pulsing of your joints, the flow of the fluids inside you, the lengthening and elasticity of your connective tissue. Learn how to quiet the mind and nervous system and release stress from the corporeal, mental and emotional energies of the human form! Move like wind. Move like fire. Move like water. Discover 'Your Secret Body'.