Q&A: Director Ric Burns on disabled veterans: ‘They’ve been somewhere the rest of us haven’t’

In anticipation of his latest project, documentary filmmaker Ric Burns has been touring the country, screening “Debt of Honor: A History of Disabled Veterans in America.”

The film, which aired on PBS on Tuesday, is a wide-ranging examination of the rise of disabled veterans in the country. Improved battlefield medicine means fewer wartime fatalities.

But technology wasn’t the only thing that changed with time. Each war and resulting crop of veterans came home to a different cultural climate, which had long-reaching effects on their recovery.

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Burns, younger brother of filmmaker Ken Burns, uses a deft hand to examine America’s relationship with its disabled veterans and creates an insightful film for Veterans Day eve viewing.

We spoke to Burns via phone while he was in Tampa screening “Debt of Honor” and discussed the divide between civilians and military families, the danger of silencing individuals, and why we owe it to our disabled veterans to do more.

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How did this project come to be?

It was suggested to us by a philanthropist from south Florida, Lois Pope, who’s been a huge supporter for the cause of disabled veterans for decades. She was a prime mover for a memorial that opened a year ago near the mall in Washington, D.C., the only monument of its kind to American veterans disabled for life.

She wondered if it would be a topic of interest to us and a huge light went on for me. It’s a subject that’s hiding in plain sight.

Particularly for kids who grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., in the ‘60s and ‘70s, that was this weird time where we just thought it was natural to hate the military as opposed to the policy. We thought that was normal.

It turns out it was really aberrant. It’s totally possible to hate the policy and love the men and women who serve the country.

I was 18 in 1973, the last year of the draft, no chance I was going to get drafted. Now we haven’t had a draft since then and we’re never going to have one.

As James Wright mentions in our film, president emeritus of Dartmouth College, 1% of the American people are involved in the armed forces. Ninety-nine percent have nothing to do with it. That’s a stunning statistic.

There’s a tiny section of the population who almost seem like a different ethnic group. They live in their own way, they live in their own places, and the rest of us have the sketchiest knowledge of them.

The purpose of the film is to try to work at tearing down that divide and building some kind of bridge. So that no matter who you are and what your political beliefs about any particular war or policy, you take a series of giant steps towards these men and women who are sacrificing so much.

The film makes use of a lot of phrases that have been adopted into modern society as casual expressions: “shell-shocked,” “take no prisoners.” To see these phrases coupled again with their origins was very striking. Was that an intentional choice you made to recapture the gravity of words we use so casually?

It’s so funny, the whole film is, in a sense, courtesy of this extraordinary cadre of men and women, and not just the veterans. The historians and the neurologist, Dr. Charles Marmar or James Wright, Beth Linker or David Gerber, they’ve taken these giant steps toward these men and women and made their stories and their circumstances their own in some way, intellectually.

We took Max Cleland’s admonition at the end of the film seriously, “Just listen.” We want to listen to those people. Each of these people are talking from the inside of such a deep, humane wisdom.

I hadn’t registered what you’d noticed right away, but you’re right. They’re taking something which is woven into the everyday fabric of life and shining a really powerful light on it, saying, “Wait, this is what that is. This is where that comes from.”

When Thomas Lynch, the undertaker and poet, says, “My father was in a war where they took no prisoners,” and you’re looking at those men, I just felt like we have a huge moral obligation as Americans.

It’s dangerous to live in a society where the civilian and military population are so far apart. It’s kind of immoral. There’s a moral anomie associated with it, because we don’t have any sense of service. Someone else is doing that. What about the idea that there’s something larger that you owe some service to?

I think to do the film from a historical perspective, so that there’s an X-axis, which is the disabled veterans now, and the Y-axis is, “How did this evolve over history?”

I found that part of it so crucial, partly because it shows that we haven’t always felt the same way. We haven’t always had disabled veterans. It used to be, if you got wounded, you died. One out of two wounded men in the American Revolution, dead, so you don’t have a big population of wounded veterans because medicine hasn’t caught up.

Once medicine gets to a certain point, then you can start producing disabled veterans during warfare, in ever-growing numbers. The better the medicine, the more disabled veterans.

We end the war in Vietnam and we decide we had to fight wars differently, in the political and cultural sense. Embedded journalists, no conscription, no pictures of the boxes coming off the planes at Dover Air Force base. Keep it away. We’ve revisited, in the last 30 years, the worst aspects of the Progressive movement.

We live in a democracy. We’ve got to know the consequences of war, so that in our democracy and the people who represent us in our democracy, understand exactly when we should really be doing it.

That disconnect creates a glibness, it’s just so easy. We have to know what the consequences are, which means we have to know these men and women who are paying the consequences.

There’s 2.6 million soldiers in the Iraq/Afghanistan war. That’s Vietnam size. We don’t have the sense we’re fighting a Vietnam. Vietnam was on the front page. It was fought in our living rooms. We marched in the streets. It was a consuming, national trauma, that we all had a stake in, no matter what we felt. That’s gone. How can that be?

But nobody is not responsible. Everybody is responsible. Because it’s our country. You can be a radical leftist, which I kind of think of myself as being, if you want to believe that there’s not going to be war, well, dream on. There’s going to be war and that means there are going to be people who are choosing to serve their country in this fashion. We are obliged to serve them in turn.

One of the things that will stay with me is the “soldier’s heart” from the aftermath of the Civil War. Again, we’ve adopted PTSD into our vernacular without really thinking about the fact that this is something that has surely always existed.

Homer. There’s PTSD in Homer. We’re wired to fight and we’re also wired to be traumatized by slaughter. We keep the reality of death and horror at a distance, because it’s impossible to live if you don’t. But if you have that distance radically foreshortened, if you have the veil torn aside, it inflicts damage on your nervous system. That damage does not go away easily and, in some cases, doesn’t go away at all.

Freud saw it when the men came back from WWI, the compulsion to repeat, so he’s now trying to theorize, “What the hell is going on with these people who can’t let go of these devastating memories and images and anxieties?” But 200 years ago, we didn’t have that vocabulary. It just didn’t exist. We didn’t think in psychological terms, but it didn’t mean we didn’t have psyches.

It didn’t mean that we weren’t exactly the same animals, wired for aggression, but also wired for the denial of slaughter. And very likely, under some circumstances, to buckle.

We now know so much more and there’s still so much more to know. In the meantime, we need to get much better at understanding it and making it clear that it’s a physical wound, not a diffuse spiritual disorder.

The figure, one suicide per hour, in the military and veteran community? How can that be? We cannot let our military men and women suffer like that. It just can’t happen.

During the era of silence after the first World War, the way we treated veterans eventually became reflected in our culture. My great-grandparents came from an era where men were quiet and unemotional, which became the ideal in American masculinity.

Was that phenomenon something you came across with each war you examined?

I actually think in the Civil War, there seems to be evidence that there was more sharing of the experience after, that the wounds were carried more openly, the inner and the outer wounds.

Perhaps that was because during the Civil War, bloodbath that it was, you had 750,000 dead in a population of 31 million. Comparable statistic today in our nation would be 7 million dead. So you have a huge number of dead, huge number of wounded, everybody’s involved. The homefront, the warfront, the South is overrun, it’s everywhere in everybody’s life.

That means that the hell of the experience, one of the things it does is create tremendous alienation and de-realization for the men and women who go through it. They need to externalize it. They need to say it. They need to bring it back and then be validated.

To some degree, only the men and women who’ve been there can really validate it, and that’s why they know that disabled veterans being together is a crucial part of healing.

But they often need to have it validated by being spoken out loud to people, so that culture of silence of our grandparents’ generation, there’s a noble, stoic heroism associated with it, but it was also enforced from the outside, augmented by all sorts of cultural trends and, in fact, what we now know is exactly the wrong thing.

It needs to be spoken out loud. It needs to be understood. That listening is a profound thing, it’s not just the airwaves moving. You are helping somebody reassemble the liberty of their own interior life by taking it in and hearing it and nodding your head and maybe reaching out your arm.

They’re saying, “I was torn to pieces, literally and metaphorically, but I am not the pieces I was torn to. I’m here talking.” You help them reassemble who they are by being there for them.

When J.R. Martinez speaks of needing to teach people how to treat him, it becomes evident that through listening to disabled veterans they will show us how to help them more effectively.

We’re opening ourselves as they opened their selves. We’re parking our pre-conceptions. We’re taking a deep breath. And then we’re letting somebody build themselves in words and thoughts and feelings for us.

Disabled veterans know what it is to make a choice. They know what it is to have been forced to pay the consequences for their choice. They know what it is to struggle with something super hard, that most of us, until we approach disease and death, will not be dealing with ourselves. Hence, their wisdom. They’ve been somewhere the rest of us haven’t.

Follow me on Twitter at @midwestspitfire.

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