1 Boring Old Man

^{In October 1962, I was 21 years old and a junior in college. One afternoon, I was working ‘the desk’ of the Student Center and vaguely listening to the TV News in the nearby lounge. When I heard President Kennedy, I walked to the lounge and heard him announce the presence of Russian Missiles in Cuba. We were going to war soon, I thought. When I got off from work, I walked towards my girlfriend’s house rather than my apartment. I was going to join up the next day, I think, and I was off to tell her. Walking across the parking lot of the football stadium, I had something as close to a vision as I’ll ever have. I saw myself in fatigues, being shot in the head in a battle, and felt terror. It was just a flash, but I changed my path and went to my apartment, or the fraternity house. I didn’t join up the next day [and we didn’t go to war].}

^{I don’t think I ever mentioned meeting the Buddha on the road that evening to anyone. But I never had another romantic thought about the glory of war after that. I opposed the Viet Nam War that soon followed and was saved from the conflict  of my vision when I served my time in the military during the Viet Nam era. I was a physician assigned to an Air Force Base in England. I carry the ‘survivor’s guilt’ of much of my generation. I feel bad that I didn’t serve in Viet Nam and I would have felt bad had I served in Viet Nam. I remain mildly obsessed about a not very close friend who died in Viet Nam before it had escalated. I first heard of Viet Nam and of his death there in the same conversation, about a year after my vision.}

^{I gravitate to stories of experiences like my vision – the paradigm being Stephen Crane’s 1894 The Red Badge of Courage. The protagonist, Henry, is a young guy marching off to his first Battle as a Union soldier in the Civil War. He becomes obsessed that he will "run" in face of combat. He tries to talk to his comrades about it, but they laugh him off. He doesn’t run in the first skirmish, but in a subsequent enemy counterattack, he finds himself fleeing as fast as he can run. The rest of the book chronicles his redemption when a non-combat injury is mistaken for a combat wound, and he returns to the fight with his red badge of courage.}

^{I’ve talked to a lot of soldiers and civilians with PTSD in my career, and I’ve concluded that there is no such thing as courage. What looks like courage is training, or experience, or rage, or denial, or group solidarity – some way of dissociating from terror – and it’s something that has collateral expense [the terror comes later]. But that’s not my point. I want to talk about two things – the demonstrations in Iran and the underwear bomber.}

^{This is just one of the videos from the demonstrations in Iran that shows the crowd refusing to be intimidated by being fired on and charging the soldiers. Bravery? Courage? I would say that the solidarity of the group and their strong belief in what they’re doing pulled them together as a group – and the group cohesion allowed them to overcome their individual fears, much like units in the Army. Notice, in the video that it takes a little time for the group cohesion to coalesce after being shot at before their collective charge.}

We send our young, well trained, volunteer soldiers into battle in groups. We hope they don’t get killed and do a lot to protect them. We speak of them as courageous, and honor the fallen – as we should. The other guys do the same thing with some notable exceptions. They often go into battle alone – the young suicide bombers. And they go with the knowledge of a sure death. No experienced soldier would do such a thing, so they rely on naive non-veterans. I expect they do everything they can to make sure that their suicide bomber-in-training doesn’t have a moment of truth like I did back in 1962 in that parking lot.

On 9/11, they sent groups onto the planes. That worked. They had surprise on their side, and the solidarity of the terrorist group working for them. Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab was all alone. He bungled assembling his bomb and seemed in a fog as he was restrained – showing nothing even though he was sustaining severe burns. I’m proposing that though he may have been a terrorist, he was also terrorized himself. There was no group support, no experience in the fog of war. I think his denial mechanisms must’ve broken down and he was paralyzed, dazed – he may have even had a vision of the reality of what he was doing.