Grace and I: A Forbidden Tale of War
May 26, 2013
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GRACE AND I:
A FORBIDDEN TALE OF WAR
Guest Spokane Unitarian Church Sermon
by Larry Shook
5/26/13
ONE DARK NIGHT LAST FALL, on a two-lane prairie highway, I hit a deer with my car.
The incident triggered a Vietnam flashback and what I now think of as my soul’s war story. It’s a
story so full of grief and shame and my own evil that it’s almost more than I can bear.
I share a small part of my story with you this morning as a healing prayer—for me, you, other
soldiers, our world.
I was a door gunner and crew chief on a helicopter gunship in 1967 and ’68. I logged 1,200
combat hours in nine months, fought in the Tet Offensive, was shot down three times. I saw and
caused a lot of death.
I served with fine, brave young men who became my forever brothers. Like me, they meant to
offer their lives in the cause of freedom. This is true.
But this also is true: I took part in the murder of an innocent people and the destruction of their
home, a place as beautiful as Eden.
There’s a lot of imagery in 1,200 hours. Imagine sitting in a darkened movie theater around the
clock for eight weeks watching the most violent movie imaginable, where not only is the blood on
the screen real but the madness surrounding it is so absolute that society thinks it’s normal.
I saw Eden carpet-bombed by B-52s; Eden scorched with napalm; Eden seared with white
phosphorous. I saw green so green it hurt your eyes turned into dead red desert by Agent Orange. I
saw three little girls murdered in cold blood and why I didn’t kill their killers God will have to
some day explain to me. So many times I heard men screaming at me in my headset to save their
lives. So many times I saw them turned into bodies plastic wrapped in their own ponchos. I heard
tough guys cry for their mothers in our dark company bunker during the apocalyptic rocket barrage
of Tet. On a brooding, gray day of monsoon rain, beside a muddy river, I saw my burning red
tracers follow men in black pajamas as they ran for their lives into a small open-air pagoda.
I saw… oh, God, I saw so much.
Grace and I: A Forbidden Tale of War
May 26, 2013
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WE FLEW TO OUR MISSIONS each dawn with gauzy ground fog wafting below us in mauve
light, tendrils of cooking fires rising to fill our nostrils with the sweet fragrance of incense. We
returned to base in Mekong Delta sunsets that made it seem as though we’d set the universe on
fire, blood and death behind and before me, exhaustion unlike anything I’d ever known soaking
into my bones.
I’m eating alone in the mess hall late one night, after flying all day, after readying the ship for
tomorrow, when Be Not Too Hard, the Joan Baez hymn that opened this service, is brought to me
by Armed Forces Radio Vietnam. It’s like being taken by an angel’s hand while lost in hell.
I use the present tense, because like all my Vietnam memories, it’s always there. Dr. Edward
Tick, a clinical psychologist who’s one of world’s foremost authorities on what war does to our
soul, calls that “frozen war consciousness.”
I spent only twelve months in Vietnam, but for twenty or thirty years afterward I had
nightmares about being sent back.
SHE WAS A BIG DEER. It was mystical the way she suddenly appeared in my headlights. Her
gentle right eye fixed me calmly out of the night. It was almost as though we had an appointment.
“Here we go,” she seemed to say.
And then she exploded before my eyes, body parts flying to left and right. The impact was like
the detonation of a gong.
My emotions went instantly flat. I flashed back to the night I was shot down near the village of
Phu Hoa Dong, even heard old radio chatter, heard all the rounds hitting my aircraft, as though
someone had thrown gravel at us.
Damage to my car was extensive but I was able to drive it home. I felt such a strange sensation
of peace that I might have been tranquilized. I slept like a baby.
But in the morning I woke to the greatest terror I have ever known. Nothing I experienced “over
there” was remotely comparable. I knew fear in Vietnam, and learned how to manage it. But I
never knew terror. Now my hands trembled. The weeping began.
Where was this terror coming from?
I HAVE A CONDITION that has been common to soldiers for as long as there’s been war. These
days they call it post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. In times past it’s been called soldier’s
heart, shell shock, battle fatigue, but it’s all the same thing. Odysseus had it.
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May 26, 2013
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PTSD is the reason it’s always taken soldiers a long time to come home from war, if they ever
make it home at all.
PTSD can make you edgy, sleepless, a loner, unemployed, homeless, a drug addict or alcoholic.
It can make you all kinds of things, including divorced, including dead from committing suicide.
We’re losing more American service people to suicide than enemy fire these days. Twenty-two
veterans now commit suicide daily, according to the Veterans Administration. Some fifty-eight
thousand Americans were killed in the Vietnam War, but one estimate is that three times that many
Vietnam vets have committed suicide.
Those we call enemy have suicide bombers; we have suicide soldiers; 349 of our soldiers killed
themselves last year, while the enemy managed to claim only 295 of our troops’ lives.
FOR HELP WITH MY OWN PTSD, I contacted my best Army buddy, Hugh Scanlen. Hugh and I
roomed together in our gunship platoon and have been as close as brothers ever since. Wounded
twice the year he flew with me, he returned for a second 12-month tour in Vietnam and has never
been able to remember the last nine months of it.
Hugh’s own PTSD hit him 20 years after returning from Vietnam when he had a car accident. It
ended his successful broadcast journalism career. He became suicidal, pulled himself together with
intense therapy, and since then has devoted his life to helping other vets with PTSD.
A few years after returning from Vietnam I dropped out and wrote a bunch of fiction about my
experience. That seemed to have drained enough of the poison to let me lead a good life. I have
three beautiful, healthy, happy, successful grown children and two beautiful grandchildren. I’m the
most blessed man I know.
But a few years ago I attended a reunion of my old gun platoon, and that brought up some bad
war memories. So I did some fairly intensive Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing
therapy—EMDR, they call it—and that seemed to handle my PTSD.
Then I hit the deer, and I had to seek a new peace with my past.
Hugh sent me a copy of Dr. Tick’s book, War And The Soul, and urged me to study it as a way
to finally find my way back home.
Tick’s book tells the forbidden story of war, which is soul devastation. There’s not a warring
government on earth, certainly not mine, that wants this truth out. I really have to wonder what
would happened if the citizens of every nation that sends its young to war read this book. Here’s
why.
War causes what Dr. Tick calls “psycho-spiritual” death at a rate of one hundred percent among
combat veterans like me.
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May 26, 2013
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Psycho-spiritual death is every bit as bad as it sounds. Worse: it’s contagious. We walking
wounded spread it. Our loved ones, friends, co-workers, society as a whole suffer from it, too. And
those of you hearing my words can’t escape it. It’s a virus present in every molecule of air you
breathe.
Writes Dr. Tick:
• PTSD is a soul disorder, not a psychological disorder.
• PTSD distorts every function of the soul in every personality type.
• “The soul is the part of us that loves and seeks intimacy.”
• The soul is the seat of the imagination, our meaning maker.
• War corrupts the imagination and enlists it in the service of death, not life.
• Thanks to our skill at making weapons, “We have reached a point where almost everyone
exposed to combat will, within a comparatively short period of time, be killed, wounded, or driven
mad.”
• “Studies of World War II soldiers revealed that about 2 percent [did] not collapse. But these men
were already mad, for most of them were aggressive psychopathic personalities before they entered
battle. It is only the sane who break down.”
War drives us crazy, in other words, and if it doesn’t it’s only because we were crazy already.
Clinicians say there are actually three kinds of trauma in PTSD—the trauma of war’s violence,
the trauma of seeing people die—especially friends—and moral injury.
Moral injuries, explains former Army psychiatrist Elspeth Ritchie, are caused by a tortured
conscience. “You may not have done anything wrong by the law of war,” she says, “but by your
own humanity you feel that it’s wrong.”
Result: moral pain. “… moral pain, with its incumbent harm to the soul, is the root cause of
PTSD,” says Dr. Tick.
“To protect the soul, war cannot be waged for selfish ends,” warns Dr. Tick. “We cannot make
death and destruction the weapons we wield for political or economic gain.”
As I work to heal my own PTSD, and as I reflect on the suicide epidemic among our soldiers,
that last conclusion troubles me deeply. As I’ll explain in a moment, given the current reality of
American government, it strikes me as naïve to think that our wars could be fought for good
reasons. This is profoundly important, I think, to the condition of our national soul.
Remember President Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex: “The total
influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every
office of the federal government,” he said 52 years ago.
It’s taken Dr. Tick’s War and the Soul to lay out the clinical evidence that the soul wound
America is inflicting on itself with its immoral wars is far more damaging than any terrorist ever
could be.
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May 26, 2013
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By law, health warnings have to be put on cigarette and medicine ads, but the military doesn’t
have to put the warning of certain psycho-spiritual death on its inspirational ads and commercials.
And it doesn’t have to warn society about the pandemic it spreads every time we send a soldier to
war.
What would happen should there be a global outbreak of war literacy? Dr. Tick speculates in his
introduction: “… in the words of the old gospel song, we ain’t gonna study war no more.”
AFTER READING WAR AND THE SOUL I understood where my terror came from. It was a
combination of shame and fear of being found out.
I put on a mask after returning from Vietnam. I pretended I didn’t hurt, pretended I was whole,
pretended I was like everyone else. I hid, because I thought no one would want me in their life, not
even my own family, if they knew who I had been in Vietnam. I thought had no place else to go.
I’ve always been afraid to admit this. Until now, I haven’t really known where I belong. Deep
down, ever since Vietnam, I’ve been so lonely I could die. Hitting the deer changed all that. Now I
know where I belong—talking openly about what fighting in one of this nation’s wars did to me—
and what it does to our young people; how they go off to serve us, experience the “moral injury” of
what we ask of them, and then kill themselves to end their misery.
FOR MY OWN HEALING of PTSD I have taken up meditation, I’m seeing a psychotherapist twice
a week, and I have had hundreds of conversations with Hugh Scanlen, whose moral support has
been priceless. Hugh has travelled from Texas to be with us today, and I’d like to introduce him to
you, because I want you to see what a real American hero looks like. Hugh, would you please
stand?
In order to heal not just myself but to support the healing of my brother and sister soldiers, I felt
a need to understand the evil I was part of in Vietnam. So I gave myself a crash course in Recent
American Wars 101. I’d like to share a few of my findings.
Thanks to the heroism of Daniel Ellsberg, we now know that the American Vietnam War was a
crime from the beginning. And we also know that, in an historic betrayal of its own citizens,
America used its own law to force its young people to commit crime in Vietnam. In other words,
America asserted the divine right of the sovereign to condemn the souls of its citizens.
If you’re open to considering the evidence of this, for a quick review I commend the
documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America. It’s the story of how Ellsberg released the topsecret government documents known as the Pentagon Papers. In that film you’ll hear President
Nixon, leader of the “free world,” a Quaker, say that he doesn’t give a blankety-blank about
Vietnamese civilians, that he wants to use nuclear weapons against them and their little blanketyblank country.
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I warn you, if you love this nation—if you love the world—that film will break your heart. But
it will also inspire you, because it’s the most beautiful love story and portrait of moral courage
you’ll ever see. Read Ellsberg’s book, Secrets, and your eyes will open further.
While I’m recommending reading to you, read Jim Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable.
Douglass documents how the CIA turned America into a “Frankenstein monster;” that President
Kennedy meant to “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds;” that “six
weeks before he was assassinated, President Kennedy issued his secret order for a U.S. withdrawal
from Vietnam.”
Writes Douglass: “We have no evidence as to who in the military-industrial complex may have
given the order to assassinate President Kennedy. That the order was carried out by the Central
Intelligence Agency is obvious. The CIA’s fingerprints are all over the crime and events leading up
to it.”
In other words, it was the Frankenstein that American government has become that sent my
generation into the moral meat grinder of Vietnam, sacrificing our souls for reasons having nothing
to do with the virtues we pledge allegiance to.
Douglass also shows how the legalized crime known as the National Security Act of 1947
essentially turns America into a rogue state, an anti-life front for corporate plunder. Practically
speaking, I think this makes you and me citizens of a nation that must rank high among the most
dangerous and systemically evil in all of history.
What else can you say about a morally crippled nation in possession of weapons capable of
destroying the planet?
The criminality that I experienced in Vietnam has metastasized into the interminable wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, causing military suicide rates to soar. When MSNBC talk show host Phil
Donahue had critics of the Iraq War on his show, he was fired. His network owner: defense
contractor General Electric.
Eric Sorenson, who was the president of MSNBC, told The New York Times: “Any misstep and
you can get into trouble with these guys and have the patriotism police hunt you down.”
Today, the Frankenstein machine, guided by the CIA, is using drones to kill Americans and
others around the world, including hundreds of innocent civilians, a chilling violation of the 5th
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
How can Frankenstein get away with this? “The CIA gets what it wants,” President Obama was
quoted in the May 6, 2013 issue of The New Yorker
Because of their morally injurious work, drone pilots suffer as much PTSD as combat soldiers,
reports The New York Times.
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If the bumper sticker, “Support Our Troops, Support America,” is the definition of patriotism,
then the two most unpatriotic bodies in the nation today are the U.S. military and the U.S.
government. You don’t support our troops by sentencing them to certain psycho-spiritual death and
consigning them to suicide. And you don’t support America by violating her constitution.
Evidence like this helps me understand the pattern of evil that is causing us to sacrifice our
young people to a monstrous machine that is creating so much suffering in the world.
But how could I have gotten caught up in it?
When I was twelve years old, my grandfather offered me a penny apiece to shoot the sparrows
eating his strawberries. I killed one bird, almost threw up, told Granddad I couldn’t do it. Eight
years later, I was killing human beings in a criminal war.
How did that happen?
The answer, I think, is that I was culturally and hereditarily programmed to become a killer. I
was brainwashed, in other words, catechized in the violent American madrasa of empire.
In his book The Powers That Be, the late theologian Walter Wink lays the blame on what he
calls the Domination System and its “myth of redemptive violence.” It’s a mental disorder that
emerged as part of human ecology, he wrote, infecting civilization about five thousand years ago,
colonizing our consciousness, making pathological liars and psychopathic killers of us, growing
ever more virulent, ever more dangerous, from one generation to the next. It has us hypnotized,
causing us to destroy the earth, perpetrate incomprehensible violence against women, sacrifice our
young, butcher civilians, reduce cities to rubble, and pervert our religions and economic systems. It
has so socialized us into lostness, argued Wink, that it’s even turned Christianity against the gospel
of Jesus.
That lostness, by the way, is what I felt all those years ago in the lonely mess hall when the
angel Joan Baez came to me. Thanks to the PTSD crisis brought to me by hitting the deer, I no
longer feel lost. I know what I am to do, which is to ring one of the bells that still can ring by
speaking out.
I’ve developed such an intimate relationship with the spirit of that deer that I’ve given her a
name: Grace.
Softly and tenderly Grace speaks to me.
You tell your truth now, Honey, I hear her say. That’s how the light gets in. That’s how the light
gets in.
THANK YOU for keeping me company today. Thank you for sharing your beautiful sanctuary. I
no longer feel so alone.
Grace be with you.
Grace and I: A Forbidden Tale of War
May 26, 2013
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