Soldier, Fighting is So Manly…

Humphries M (2010). War’s Long Shadow: Masculinity, Medicine, and the Gendered Politics of Trauma, 1914-1939. The Canadian historical review, 91 (3), 503-31 PMID: 20857589

‘…L. has an admirable service record, was decorated, and was promoted more than once. He served at the Somme until he was blown up by a shell and rendered unconscious, after which he ‘cried for a long time,’ but then returned to duty voluntarily. In November he was blown up a second time and developed what his doctors called ‘panic.’ He was evacuated to England with shell shock. In hospital he was ‘on bad terms’ with the other patients because he was emotional and ‘always making a scene.’ Eventually his symptoms subsided, but his days of soldiering were over and he was sent home’ (2010, p.504).

The tragic contradiction of the soldier is that he must constantly face death, with all the crushing fear that brings and yet, he must contain that inestimable fear deep within his soul. Not a word can he scream, not a tear can he shed, no quivering lip or trembling voice, since duty commands the strictest adherence to masculine ideals. Real men, soldiers, warriors, must continue to eagerly sign up and prepare themselves for battle, without question or hesitation (2010, p.507). Breaking free from that dreadful script is akin to treason and therefore is punished accordingly.

Prior to the Vietnam War, we were all led to believe that war was a big lads’ adventure, replete with marching bands, heroic tales, and glorious homecomings. That hardy myth got shot down in flames the moment those horrific images started beaming into our homes every night, of burning flesh and bombed-out villages and the ghostly look of young soldiers terrorised by their plight. Suddenly war was no longer pride and glory but rather, it was hell on earth. Increasingly, and with rousing condemnation, people began to ask ‘why?’

Why do we willingly engage in such madness…?

Now, some 40 years since, it is almost as if the Vietnam War never occurred. It has been so astutely marginalised from other theatres of war and its veterans cast as atypically wrecked by ‘Agent Orange’ and post-traumatic stress disorder and not like da at all. That dirty war, the forgotten war, the war that we never won, had painfully and yet briefly reminded us that killing and maiming are self-evident anathemas to the human condition. Such heretical thinking was bound to feel the glaring heat of the rapacious war machine…

A war without willing and able cannon fodder, after all, is awfully hard to sustain…

Humphries (2010, p.503) poignantly describes here how tens of thousands of Canadian soldiers returned home from World War I, deeply if not irreparably psychologically scarred by their combat experiences. Instead of being offered the care and support that they so desperately needed, many of these men were conversely treated like pariahs (2010, pp.504-506). The authorities usually dismissed such shell-shocked veterans as deviant, feminine or homosexual (2010, pp.504-505). Thus, a ruthless binary was reinforced between ‘real men’ (2010, p.503) and men who were presumed to be, inherently weak.

That said, the pained attempt to camouflage the truth could not forestall the inevitable ‘conflict between idealized masculinity and the emotional reality of war trauma’ (2010, p.508). Although Canadian authorities tried to dismiss shell-shock as being indicative of a pre-existing, depraved and defective subject, the sheer volume of highly traumatised veterans who flooded their hospitals during and for decades after the Great War, told an altogether different story (2010, pp.512-513, 518). It just did not make sense that so many men could be such snivelling cowards (2010, pp.529-530)…

‘The problem became acute in the Canadian army in the spring and summer of 1916 when shell-shock cases accounted for an average of 21 per cent of all non-fatal casualties in the Canadian army. The crisis came at the Battle of Mount Sorrel when between 24 May and 13 June alone, the 1^st Canadian Division reported 532 cases of shell shock – 44.6 per cent of total casualties’ (2010, p.514).

Humphries (2010) is especially critical of the role played by doctors, with respect to the manner in which they assessed and treated traumatised veterans (pp.518-519). He recalls how these doctors would routinely force shell-shocked soldiers out of their hospital beds and back to the front, both to punish them for their moral failings but also, with the hope that further combat duty ‘would [finally] make men out of them’ (2010, p.519). It is almost too abhorrent for me to comprehend, how doctors could so effortlessly abandon their professional ethics and become, as it were, oppressive agents of the State (2010, p.508).

A systemic, human rights abuse regime of immense scope and longevity…

When I read this article (2010), I paused to reflect on how badly my da had been treated by Veterans’ Affairs, when he returned home from active service after World War II. Traumatised and terrified as he most profoundly was, the authorities chose to ignore his immense suffering and thence, compelled him to live a life of excruciating agony. Like so many veterans before him and since, my da had broken the cardinal rule not of being traumatised as such, but of letting his traumatic experiences get to him, and break him down (2010, pp.508 & 530)…

STRONG SILENT TYPES-STUFF ABOUT MEN