Suicide and Christian Witness panel
April 15, 2014 discussion with Stanley Hauerwas at Duke Divinity School led by student veteran group Milites Christi.
Participants:
Alex Arzuaga
Ashley Douglas
Logan Isaac
Rob Densmore
Stanley Hauerwas
Todd Lovell
Alex Arzuaga: All right, folks. We're going to start. Thank you all for taking the time to be part of this conversation. Our group is called Milites Christi. My name is Alex, and I'm one of the members. Our goal in Milites Christi is to develop a pastoral response to the problem of war and violence by providing a space for conversation while simultaneously caring, praying, and reconciling with those who have suffered war-related trauma and all the victims of war. We're going to have Ashley do a prayer for us before we begin.
Ashley Douglas: Hi there. My name’s Ashley Douglas. I'm a third year, and I am from a town in Florida where most of my friends are kids of active duty military people. Most of my friends have been or are in war areas right now, or in South Korea, just got back from Afghanistan. Most of them have dealt personally with what PTSD and suicide looks like in their family, and how it just rips them apart. That's where I'm from, and I'm very interested in these kind of conversations, because as pastors, we will be looking many a veteran or active duty military person in the eye and not know what to say or how to listen to them. These are words by Martin of Tours, who is a saint. After we hear these words, we'll pray, okay?
Lord, if your people still have need of my services, I will not avoid the toll. Your will be done. I have fought the good fight long enough, yet if you bid me continue to hold the battle line in defense of your camp, I will never beg to be excused from failing strength. I will do work you entrust to me while you command. I will fight beneath your banner. Amen. Would you pray with me? Oh, holy God, in these moments, would you speak? Would your spirit be known and felt and Lord, may you show us how to be the leaders and the pastors that can listen to and be with people whose hearts are breaking apart? Lord, we love you and we pray that we can become your people to respond to people who are hurting so deeply. Amen.
Arzuaga: Thank you. I'll begin with a little of my story. In 1995, I enlisted in the Army Reserves, and I served until 2002. The following day, after I got my discharge, I joined the active duty Marine Corps in 2002, and then I was there until December 2005. During this time, I served in Iraq twice. I did two tours, one in 2003, one in 2005. After my military service, I ended up working in law enforcement, where a lot of military people also serve, and this problem of suicide translates into this field as well. One of the reasons I'm here at the Divinity School, there's a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons that comes to my mind when I think of why I'm here is, I had a mentor when I was in law enforcement. He was an Army veteran. He served six years, then after that he went to the Peace Corps. Then after that, he went to work for law enforcement.
He did that for about 10 years, and then on one day, he didn't show up to work. He had committed suicide. He had killed himself. Throughout that year, two other officers from the area also committed suicide. A couple of years after that, a friend of mine called me, he was an Air Force veteran, and talked to me about his friend who committed suicide during lunch break. Went to the parking lot of his work and committed suicide there. Year after that, my wife and I lost a friend to suicide. She was also an officer. She left two beautiful children behind. In all these places, I never saw a response, a proactive response, to that problem. I always saw a reactionary response to it. I just want to leave the floor open with Dr. Hauerwas and Rob to have this conversation. Thank you.
Rob Densmore: My name’s Rob Dinsmore. I'm a first year MDiv. I'm a Navy veteran. I served for six years with a deployment in Afghanistan. I then became a freelance journalist and went back to Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, and then in 2008 to cover frontline news with private security contractors, U.S. Army, British Army, and the Taliban. I returned to the U.S., then moved to the UK to study war and psychiatry at King’s College London with research in combat-related mental disorders and stress reactions. In light of events that have happened last week and tangentially, sadly, yesterday as well, thinking about Fort Hood specifically and the soldier who tragically killed three of his colleagues, wounding 16 before ending his own life, and thinking about the upcoming presence of General Martin Dempsey, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who’s a Duke alum who will be visiting this campus to address graduates at commencement in May.
I wanted to take a window of your time to think about engaging with the issue of suicide in the military, particularly from the viewpoint as Christians preparing for ministry. This is a new angle for me as a journalist, and I'm in this with you as someone who feels called to ministry. I know not all of us may feel called to ministry in the pulpit, but I guarantee you that all of us are called to some element of God’s work in this kingdom. I want to thank Dr. Hauerwas for joining in the discussion, particularly framing this discussion in the way that I just talked about, to look at the challenge and the context of suicide from the perspective of the church. Just a quick note on format. I'll start with a few questions, and then we'll open the floor to questions. I'd invite you to keep your questions short and concise, and preferably on actual questions rather than commentary. Let's get started. Dr. Hauerwas, thank you for being here.
Stanley Hauerwas: Good to be here.
Densmore: Why does military suicide matter to the Christian community? Why should it matter, maybe it shouldn't, to divinity students?
Hauerwas: Suicide matters to Christians. It's very interesting to ask yourself, why do you have the language of suicide? The very fact that you have it, it does no good to say to someone, you committed suicide. That's a terrible thing. They're dead. They can't do anything. The language of suicide is a reminder to the community of the kind of people we ought to be, so that suicide never happens. The very language of suicide is a call for us to be present to one another when there's very little you can do other than be present to one another. But that presence is a way of saying, we're not going to abandon one another. Tolstoy says in Anna Karenina at the beginning, every happy family is the same. Every unhappy marriage is different. I think that's an inadequate account of happiness, but it's certainly true that unhappiness creates difference, and that means every person that commits suicide is different.
I think, in this society, there are two, and this is Émile Durkheim’s famous book on suicide. There are predominantly two kinds of suicide. One is the suicide of what I call the metaphysical I gotcha. We all play I gotcha games. I wash the dishes for you tonight. Surely, we can finally have sex. Our lives are filled with these trade-offs. There is the trade-off, try this on. You've never liked me. I'm dead. I gotcha. What do you do with that? One of the things that suicide does is affect the memory of how we relate to the one that's committed suicide. Did we know them? If they played the metaphysical I gotcha game, there's nothing you can do. There's nothing you can do. That's what it was meant, that there's nothing you can do other than to forget them. That's a deep problem of forgetfulness.
The other kind of suicide that I think is very prevalent in this society is the suicide of absolute loneliness, and that there is absolutely that no one cares enough about your life. You might as well be dead. There is different forms of that, but I've wondered, I've thought about the difference between people in the military that commit suicide, or the phrases being used, military suicide. Is military suicide a particular qualifier of what kinds of suicide that might be occurring? It's interesting that so many military people go into law enforcement. One of the characteristics of being around people in law enforcement is, they usually prefer to be around other people in law enforcement. Why is that? Because it's like—why do doctors on the whole prefer to be around other physicians? Because they see parts of life that most of us don’t want to know about.
Most of us don’t want to know about what it means to go into a domestic dispute, where you get the shit beat out of you because they turn on you. What I think happens, violence and killing creates a loneliness that's very hard to have shared, except with other people in the military and in law enforcement. What it means to live a life that isn't sharable is deeply agonizing, because I think that people don’t comprehend what we ask of people to envision killing another human being. Then we ask people that we've asked to do that to come home and don’t tell us what that does, other than, let us celebrate you for being a hero, and you know you're a frightened person, and that how that lack of sharable lives possibly leads to, I might as well be dead.
That overwhelming of that loneliness, I take to be one of the great challenges before Christians to one, to say, we have a language for this. It's called confession and repentance and reconciliation. We have a language for this, but that language allows us to be truthful with one another in a way that the celebration of, you're a hero, doesn't quite get it, it seems to me. It's very interesting. One of the things that I learned when I was at the Air Force Academy, and I've subsequently seen in some books, is how important it is for people in the service to receive medals. That may sound very trivial, but medals say, you're okay. Medals say, you're okay. But you can't live forever on a medal. It's very significant when a veteran says, I'm going to turn my medal in. Very significant.
Densmore: I want to visit a point that you were making about—if I can reframe that in a sense of envisioning and seeing the otherness in military or in veterans, particularly among some of us who may not have agreed with the context of war in Iraq or Afghanistan. That otherness is very tangible. How do we go about envisioning a way to reach out without feeling like we're condoning the ethos behind the military?
Hauerwas: First of all, as someone committed to Christian non-violence, one of the problems with declaring yourself as such is, it makes it sound like that anyone in the military is doing something wrong. I think that if you think to say that you're committed to Christian non-violence and therefore, you're not part of the problem, you're just kidding yourself. It's not like there's bad guys and good guys here. We're all implicated in ways of life that mean that some are asked to become part of the military and envision extremities in forms of life that most of us don’t experience. Just look at the uniform and all the weaponry, and you think, that's real, but I don’t experience it, but y'all guys in the military do. Guys, I understand to be a feminine description, also.
Guys in the military do, and how the context can be created for your ability to share that and how odd it was with those that haven't experienced it, I think is one of the great challenges. It's interesting. I think part of the difficulty is the airplane. In World War II, it took two to three weeks for you to get the military home on a ship. People got to decompose the experience they'd undergone by being on ships. You're in battle one day, and the next day, you're in New York City, and you haven't had a chance to say to one another, boy, I'm so glad to be alive, but I don’t feel good about Bob who isn't, and I don’t know how to process it. That seems to me to be part of the process that Christians should care about. I assume, I understand that the military is doing increasing studies and practices to provide a transition. Is that right?
Densmore: That is right, I think, especially in this country on the medical side. There's certainly programs for transition and there's a close monitoring when you then switch over to VA healthcare, then they resume the post-operational...
Hauerwas: I think the other thing that's involved with the transition, too, is there is an intimacy created by battle that is not reproduced in any other aspect of our lives, at least as I read what people say about that. It creates a bond that is more intense than sex. When you come back, you miss it. At Fort Bragg, in the first Iraq war when soldiers returned, I remember in one month, there were five murders of spouses. There's bound to be plenty of different reasons for each of those, but I wondered how much returning veterans expected their families to supply the intimacy that they had experienced in war, and that simply couldn't be done. You've got to pay up in different ways.
Densmore: I suppose part of the challenge then of reading into this is, as a Christian community, how can we think about reading ourselves and reading the witness and story of Christ and his teachings into that level of intimacy? I'd like to take a moment, if we can, to transition to questions from the audience. I know you'll have some. Who wants to start off?
Audience Member: Earlier, you mentioned how when soldiers returned—first of all, they're asked to go kill a human being and then society subliminally asks them to not speak about it and not share about it. Can you recommend ways that the church can have a different sort of atmosphere that asks them to discuss what kind of strategies we can use to minimize the gap between their experience and here?
Hauerwas: The National Guard has been so used in Iraq and Afghanistan. You take an 18-year-old kid who joined the Minnesota National Guard in order to make enough money to go to college, and they find themselves on the street in Kabul, and they see an eight-year-old kid walking down the street, and they think they may have to kill him because that may be someone that's going to try to kill them. Ask yourself what that does to your imagination. I'm going to kill an eight-year-old kid? How do you process that? In the Middle Ages, when soldiers were even thought to fight in just wars, before they were received back into the Eucharist, they were under three years of penance and penitential right, through which they were returned to a life that meant that they did not have blood on their hands.
The reason why clergy could not fight in the Middle Ages was because, as those that handled the body and blood of Christ, they did not want people that did that to have blood on their hands for other human beings. What I think would be useful is there to be modes of confession and repentance, but in Protestantism, since we don’t have any modes of confession other than a generalized, I'm a sinner but I don’t have the slightest idea what that means other than I have some bad thoughts here and there. I think that it's a general challenge to us to know how to even confess sin, particularly in a world where what we've done is not seen as in any way problematic.
Densmore: As a traditional, does the Methodist church have a venue for formal confession?
Audience Member: Not as in the Catholic [inaudible 00:27:07].
Audience Member: The Orthodox church does have a form of confession, and they have a sense of spiritual father that will deal with these types of issues. The trick, though, in being a good spiritual father is to maintain the relationship through the work you process. What that allows for is the presence of Christ accompanying that individual through the process, and with God, all things are possible.
Hauerwas: I'm sure as the time began, many of you have experienced people having taken their lives as part of the military. I suspect many of you first experienced suicide in high school, where young people seemed to have nothing to live for. It always creates a dangerous situation, because you have imitation. I'd be interested in the kinds of remarks I've made, whether they fit at all your experience. One other aspect that I haven't is, I think, what does the military have at its center? Death. Death. Most of us keep death at bay. We don’t know, and we don’t want to know what death is like. People in the military have seen it. People in law enforcement have seen it. In some ways, it can be seen as a relief. I think that that's part of the other kind of context that makes suicide thinkable for people in the military.
Densmore: Can I ask if there is anyone here who has personal experience with someone they know who’s in the military or was in the military who may have dealt with traumatic episodes or issues of self-harming or depression or anxiety?
Hauerwas: Is the kind of stuff I'm saying, Logan, make sense?
Logan Isaac: Yeah, I think so. I think that it becomes imaginable. I think Dr. Smith in some class had mentioned that with his wife, he never mentions the D-word. He doesn't mean death. He means divorce. It enters your mind, and you begin being able to comprehend it and it becomes morally or experientially approachable.
Douglas: For my friend who came back from Afghanistan, this was last year, he was stationed in Missouri, I think, which was a long way from where we're from in Florida, a long way from his family, his relatives. Totally secluded, away from the guys he'd been in battle with. He had no one to talk to, nothing really to live for. That's what it ultimately came down to. Completely alone and cut off, and there was a week there where I really thought if I didn't check on him or call him a couple times a day, I thought, he's going to be gone. Thankfully, he came back from that spell, and he still deals with it every now and then, but [background noise] about a year.
Audience Member: I'm thinking of two friends who I've had who served in Vietnam, which takes us back a number of years, of course. They both came back. They had similar experiences where they actually had to kill women and children who were armed, who would have killed them first. One went back into corporate administrative work in the office, and just seemed for all the world to be fine. The other one was an emotional wreck. Total wreck, nightmares, screaming in the middle of the night. We'd be out in the other room playing cards, and he'd come tearing out in a panic. I guess the thing that keeps rolling through my mind is, is it too late to save those who served in Vietnam? Because I don’t want to speak too generally, but a lot of those folks today are those who will wind up as homeless or emotionally distraught, not being able to care for themselves.
Hauerwas: Yeah. Self-destructive behavior that's almost equivalent to suicide. One of the points I was going to make, and I forgot it was, I think the problem of Vietnam is also the problem of Iraq and Afghanistan, namely non-heroic wars. If you're not part of the Greatest Generation—all that language, the Greatest Generation, the problem with that is, the people that have actually been in battle, that's not the way they describe themselves. The Greatest Generation and the great rah-rah’ers are usually people that were in supply. They never got—people forget modern armies are basically bureaucracies. Your ability to overwhelm the enemy has everything to do with your ability to move materiel.
It doesn't mean that they're not a people that have to finally fire weapons and that kind of thing, but the rah-rah are oftentimes people who never saw “the enemy”. Vietnam provided a peculiar challenge. Of course, it was an extraordinarily brutal war exactly because there could be no celebration of what you had done. There's not much celebrate—of what has happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. I think about things like, you can board the airplane if you're wearing your uniform first. I feel quite sure that oftentimes, people in the military feel quite awkward about that kind of thing, but it's the gesture that seems to say, ah, yes, we so appreciate your sacrifice. You're thinking, I don’t know. I don't know.
Densmore: Do you have other questions? Logan?
Isaac: You mentioned the question of Vietnam. There's a guy that wrote in 1985, Bill Mahedy. He said the question of Vietnam was, where was God? A friend of mine who was not military had committed suicide, and I went through my head like where my God had been. Do I get upset at her? Is she going to hell? Where is God? Not just in these wars, because I think that's—Bill Mahedy was a Catholic chaplain, so he's writing very self-critically about the chaplaincy and about religions, in particular their failure to account that question. It also relates to suicide. If it's this loneliness, what is the church’s theological response? What does that have to do with this? Where is God? My friend jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. If God wasn't whispering in her ear, if God wasn't falling with her, where is God in this equation?
Hauerwas: God is in the prayers you say for her soul. Through your prayers, God is made present to her in death. God was not absent when she jumped, but she did not know that presence. If you don’t believe in intercessory prayer, it is indeed a very lonely world. I think that's why we continue to remember the dead.
Densmore: Are there other questions?
Audience Member: I'm curious, with this commencement weekend, how that becomes something that is transformational and is truly a witness that isn't just us patting ourselves on the back?
Hauerwas: General Dempsey’s PhD is in English literature. He's a very intelligent guy. Indeed, I find as someone committed to non-violence that my best conversation partners are people in the military, because they have no use for the bullshit. They don’t want to be murderers. They don’t want to kill, but they know the reality. What becomes very important is how you try to establish a communication with General Dempsey in a way that in no way demeans his position, because he represents not just himself but countless people that serve. I think it's fine to simply try to be present in a way that suggests we need to engage one another. I don't know how best to do that in this context. Self-righteousness is a constant temptation. During Vietnam, what killed the protest against Vietnam was the lottery draft. It was really interesting.
Before you had the lottery draft, the American middle-class was subject to the draft, and the sons and daughters of the middle-class counted politically. I never will forget, I was teaching at Notre Dame, and the night that they started drawing the numbers to establish your birthday and where that put you in the draft, when the number would be pulled, 286, you could see a kid suddenly realize that they were not going to be drafted because of the number that they pulled, and they lost their moral standing to protest the war. How do you have a protest that doesn't in a way exempt you of liability? You forget. That time was so intense. I still carry my draft cards. When I was first registered, I was going to college, so I got a 2S. Then I let the Dallas draft board know that I was going to divinity school, and it took them a year, and they finally reclassified me 4D.
That's my card. 1962. I wrote them and said, I decided that ministerial classification was establishment of religion, and I didn't agree with it, and they needed to reclassify me. On February the 17th, 1970, I was reclassified 1A. I was viable for the draft. I didn't want to be, I can assure you. That was the intensity of those times, that how to avoid Vietnam was high on all of our agendas. I was recently asked probably the most important thing that can happen for peace today. I said, the reinstitution of the draft. The all-volunteer army has meant that race and class has determined so much of the army in a way that I think is unjust for how the liability of the whole population should be held accountable. If you had a draft, the people that send their sons and daughters to Duke would have something more to say.
Densmore: Dr. Hauerwas, I want to thank you for your time today. It's been a short but pretty deep discussion. Please do stay with us. Todd’s going to have some closing remarks.
Todd Lovell: Dr. Hauerwas, thank you for your insights, and we're thankful for your presence and your participation here with us as well. In speaking more to the opportunity for witness that we are currently in dialogue about, you all received or should have received a sheet of paper. We have some more if you didn't. We're still shaping what this witness looks like. The question that was raised about it is actually very valid and pertinent to where we are in the sermon of that. General Dempsey will be here commencement weekend. Commencement is on the 11th. We're not exactly sure what time during that weekend we might provide our witness, but the witness is going to be an opportunity not to propose any sort of patriotism or pacifism. We're not trying to protest either of those directions, but exactly what Dr. Hauerwas was alluding to. To encourage a conversation to happen.
We we'll like as future pastors, future clergy, future people that will be involved in different areas of life, and just Christians fundamentally, basically as Christians, we feel like that we need to be a part of this conversation. It's something that I think the church has delegated to places like the VA and other places, to the realms of psychology, but we do feel like we have something pastoral and theological to say at what's going on, as Dr. Hauerwas scraped the surface of for us today in the brief time that we had. We want your input on that. We want you to help us decide what a prayerful and powerful witness might be that reflects this community. This is not something that we want just the people in Milites Christi to get together and decide, this is what it's going to be.
We want you to be a part of that, because we want it to be a reflection of what our actual convictions are as a community, and to encourage General Dempsey and all those that he represents to acknowledge the Christian community as a viable participant in this conversation. If you will just fill out what you can on this white sheet that you have. Anything you're interested in. If you're interested in participating, if you want to help in planning, that would be great. Let us know that. Let us know how people you'd work to bring to that event. If you'd like to be informed of future Milites Christi activities, we can put you on an email list for that. If you just have any direct questions that you would like to ask anybody in Milites Christi leadership about this topic or any other topic that might need to be raised for the divinity school community, we invite you to do that as well. Do we have anything else?
Hauerwas: It’ll be a very interesting sign if whether General Dempsey wears his uniform to receive the honorary degree, or whether he wears a suit. It's a very interesting gesture. He should just wear a suit, because the military—you're an academic when you come to get the degree. You're not a soldier. The people who are the AFROTC, NROTC, and so on, whether they wear uniforms or not in academic... to these events. You might try initiating conversation with them, because they might have—I'm sure they will be very good and decent people. It just might be good to see how that would work.
Lovell: Definitely. Thank you for that note. All right. Thank you, everybody, for being here. Please keep the conversation going and begin to reflect critically and theologically about these issues. Thank you.
