“Our hearts and our hopes are turned to peace as we assemble here in the East Room this morning”, said President Johnson on the morning of November 19, 1968. “All our efforts are being bent in its pursuit. But in this company we hear again, in our minds, the sound of distant battles”. President Johnson was addressing these words to those gathered for the Medal of Honor ceremony in honor of five heroes of the undeclared war in Vietnam. One of those heroes was a young African-American man from Detroit, Sgt. Dwight Johnson. Dwight, or “Skip” to his family and friends, had always been a good kid, an Explorer Scout and an altar boy, who could only recall losing control of his temper once in his life, when his little brother was being beaten by older boys.
But in Vietnam, when the men whose lives he had shared for eleven months were burned to death before his eyes, he suddenly became a savage soldier, killing five to twenty enemy soldiers in the space of half an hour. At one point, he came face to face with a Vietnamese soldier who squeezed the trigger on his weapon aimed point blank at Skip. The gun misfired and Skip killed him. According to the psychiatrist who saw him several years later, it was this soldier's face that continued to haunt him.
After receiving the Medal of Honor, Skip, who had been unable to even get a job as a simple veteran, became a nationally celebrated hero. But his body and mind started to give way. In September of 1970 he was sent to Valley Forge Army Hospital where the psychiatrist there diagnosed him with depression caused by post-Vietnam adjustment problems. “Since coming home from Vietnam the subject has had bad dreams”, read the psychiatric report, “He didn’t confide in his mother or wife, but entertained a lot of moral judgement as to what had happened at Dakto. Why had he been ordered to switch tanks the night before? Why was he spared and not the others? He experienced guilt about his survival. He wondered if he was sane” (Nordheimer, 1971).
On April 30, 1971, Dwight Johnson, now married and the father of a little boy, was shot and killed while attempting an armed robbery of a Detroit grocery store. The store owner told the police: “I first hit him with two bullets but he just stood there, with the gun in his hand, and said, ‘I’m going to kill you . . .’ I kept pulling the trigger until my gun was empty”. In the exchange, Dwight Johnson, an experienced combat soldier, never fired a shot. His mother’s words echo down to us, twenty-seven years later, “Sometimes I wonder if Skip tired of this life and needed someone else to pull the trigger” (Nordheimer, 1971).
It is with this dramatic behavioral re-enactment of one young, despairing African-American soldier that the curtain opens on the first act of the story of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. The ISTSS is one organizational part of a late twentieth century social movement aimed at raising consciousness about the roots of violence by enacting and reacting to that violence everywhere. The ISTSS was born out of the clashing ideologies that became so well articulated in the 1960’s and 1970’s. War crimes, war protests and war babies; child abuse, incest and women’s liberation; burning monks, burning draft cards and burning crosses; murdered college kids and show trials of accused radicals; kidnappings, terrorism and bombings; a citizenry betrayed by its government and mass protests in front of the Capitol in Washington – all play a role in the backgrounds of the people who founded the organization and in the evolution of the organization itself.
If I have learned anything from my contact with victims of violence, I have learned that it is vitally important to remember – and honor – the lessons of the past. We have to know where we came from if we are to know who we are now. But it is extremely difficult to write history as history is being made. Since this chapter can only serve as a marker along the way, I have chosen to concentrate my attention on the origins of the Society, before those roots become even more lost in the darkness that envelopes those who move offstage.
There are two fundamental aspects of the growth of this group. First, there are the individuals who provided the action – both the victims and their advocates. One remarkable aspect of the ISTSS history is the extent to which the founding mothers and fathers have had personal experience with trauma (van der Kolk, Weisaeth and van der Hart, 1996). It may be that it was this close brush with the Angel of Death that has given the growing field such a continuing sense of passion, devotion and commitment. Whatever the case, there are a multitude of stories begging to be told, severely limited here by time and space. The second aspect of organizational growth is the group-as-a-whole growth that I hope will emerge in the structure of the chapter. The origins can not be placed at the foot of one powerful individual and did not derive from a clearly thought-out, hierarchical, managerial demand. Instead, it has grown organically, from the grassroots, and has remained multidisciplinary, multinational and multi-opinioned.
Excerpt from Bloom, S. L. (2000). Our Hearts and Our Hopes are Turned To Peace: Origins Of The International Society For Traumatic Stress Studies.
Bloom (2004) Building a Future Worth Surviving: Reflections and System Changes for Trauma. Past Experiences, Present Realities, Future Goals.