The Military Oath Soldiers Take

"I Larry Winters do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God." (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).

I have been thinking about the above military oath I took Oct 3, 1970 when I joined the United States Marines. Right now for the first time in my life I started wondering what oath did the citizenry I was protecting from communist insurgents take. If born in the US the answer is none, if you applied for citizenship here there is an oath you must take.

Then I started wondering if oaths were commitments that people still took seriously? Historically oaths were solemn statements that had to do with the truth, allegiance, promises, honor, ethics and the preservation of life. May oaths invoked a divine witness. As I contemplated this question of oaths I thought that maybe I’d missed the oath I was supposed to have taken as a young US citizen, my education was quite lackluster and maybe I was out the day we studied citizen oaths. Or was it as simple as the US constitution was the oath we all were given to live by. Maybe I never really understood that this was a deep commitment that should guide my personal life and behavior. Doing some research on this topic I found that there is no citizen oath for those born here in the US. I also found that there was a citizen oath in ancient Grease called the Athenian Ephebic Oath. The next installment with start with the Ephebic Oath. Comment Welcome

How to Speak with Vets

I was asked by my friend Ed Tick author of WAR AND THE SOUL to give him some of my thoughts on a chapter he is working on in his new book, the chapter title is “How to Speak with Vets”

“How to Speak with Vets”

No one can speak to vets if they haven't listened to vets. The kind of listening is with more then the ears and mind, it is what you Ed Tick might call soul listening. Many can hear the facts, assess the circumstances and analyze the difficulty and then come up with a game diagram, program or treatment plan. It is the unusual listener who has taken the time needed to hear why soldiers can’t talk about war. If one has listened long enough, opened themselves enough, they may learn to pick up the subtle tones of the oblique tenor of war. It is also important to understand what is being said in the punctuating silences. Souls speak to each other in many ways other than words. Silences’ are often the most articulated statements and if heard as simply empty moments one has missed the message. Taking time, tolerating silences, waiting, witnessing, and staying in the room, are tools a vet therapist needs to know well. It has so much more to do with not speaking then speaking. If the vet feels heard, if a vet feels safe, if a vet feels not judged, if a vet feels honored, he may let you speak to him.

Ed the part that you may not be able to see could be honor. You do honor vets. Honor is a shape sword and cuts through many layers of the “Gordian Knots” of war. It is one of the strands of brotherhood that soldiers have between them. It is a doorway that civilians are allowed through. Honor is part of the fabric of identity. Please let me know how you might feel about how this subject.

Hard Question

I spoke at a Veterans for Peace conference this past Saturday. My talk was about PTSD and how it is as much a society disorder as it is an individual disorder. Most of the folks in the audience were hard core fighters for peace, sprinkled in were a few vets for peace. Many of these folk seemed to have a bit of a hard time finding compassion for vets. a Comment that was made in the question answer session at the end was, "Why should I thank the vets for what they did, when I did not send the to war? I did not vote for the politicians that sent them."
I must admit this was not an easy question to address. What I said was, you are a member of the society that sent these men and women to war. You may not have voted for those who sent them but this does not excuse you from the responsibility for there care and healing when they come home. If history repeats its self returning vets have shown up in high number in the homeless population, in the addicted population, in our homes with incident of domestic violence. You and I as members of this society are paying with our dollars for this social unrest. We may not have voted to have a crack addict rob our home but it happens.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or Post Traumatic Society Diorder

PTSD Workshop

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or Post Traumatic Society Disorder

We have given our veterans behavior a name, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. In 1980 PTSD became a diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM II at that time. This was seen by many health care professionals as making great strides for combat veterans now they were eligible for the treatment they had urgently needed since the ending of the War five years earlier. Finally effects of war trauma on soldiers which had been previously called “Shell Shock,” or “Solders Heart,” became legitimized and the VA was held responsible to treat this disorder.

I believe what was unseen at the time is that by declaring PTSD an illness of the individual and placing it in the mental health manual for the treatment of individual illnesses, we affectively isolated the problem into the category of a personal treatment. This places the onus of healing on the patient and the patient’s treatment team.

I will be presenting the above material on PTSD at the

The 9th annual Kateri Tekakwitha Peace Conference

"Hope and Resistance - Transforming the Course of History" will be held on Friday evening, August 17 and Saturday, August 18, 2007. Please join us in this Interfaith conference, featuring Stephen Eric Bronner and Fr. Louis Vitale OFM at the National Kateri Tekakwitha Shrine in Fonda, NY. All are welcome!

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or Post Trauma Society Disorder?:
A Deeper look at PTSD By Larry Winters
Location: Dinning Hall

PTSD is a diagnostic term that comes out of the DSM-!V, a mental health manual. It stands for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I propose that PTSD should stand for Post Trauma Society Disorder.

This workshop will look at our returning soldiers and the obligation our society holds in healing these men and women. In fact this obligation goes well beyond parades, VA hospitals, and military metals. If we as a society don't reach down into our souls, we will never understand our returning men and women with PTSD nor the continuing disorder in their lives. PTSD is also seen as infectious adversely effecting our families, community, and nation. Until we fully accept our societal responsibility neither our returning military personnel nor our nation will have peace.

Questions we will ask in this workshop:

• What do these men and women soldiers need?
• How can we learn to listen to pain we'd rather turn off?
• What do we do with the pain they will deliver to us?
• What does honor really mean?
• How do we accept the life and death reality of what our soldiers have done and must live with?
• How do we remove politics from our souls and see our soldiers as human beings?
• What does it mean to have a warrior in our house, at our work place, and in our communities?

Larry Winters was born and raised in New Paltz, NY. Larry entered the United States Marine Corps after high school and served in Vietnam 1969-1970. Twenty-five years later, as a licensed mental health counselor at Four Winds Hospital in Katonah, NY, Larry Winters returned to Vietnam with other heath care professionals to study Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the Vietnamese people and to make peace with his past. Larry is a widely published poet, men's group leader and group psychotherapist. He has recently published his book titled "The Making and Un-making of a Marine". If you wish to know more about Larry or his book feel free to email him or check out his blog at:
Email: winters.lawrence@gmail.com
Blog: makingandunmaking.blogspot.com

Post Traumatic Society Disorder

Yesterday I did a radio inter view with Dr. Harris Stratyner renown substance abuse expert on his show called, "Here's to your good health." Harris asked me about PTSD and other vet topics. I began to express to him an idea that I am working on, which is that PTSD which stands for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder may also have a second meaning Post Traumatic Society Disorder. The premise of this idea is that PTSD is a diagnosis which in 1980 was placed in the DSM manual of mental health diagnosis. This was great for vets coming home from war to get treated by the VA. The down side of this is that it put the onus of responsibly for the treatment of PTSD on the individual, and the health care system. What I am learning is that the responsibility for healing PTSD belongs much more on the society that has sent its people to war, than on those who suffer the effects of war. Therefore I think that Post Traumatic Society Disorder may hold more truth and certainly places the responsibility squarely where it belongs.

Comments welcome:

Larry