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 33 may 31, 1997 This double standard could all too readily be accommodated by the slippery imprecisions of psychiatric jargon. B eforetheVietnamWarpromptedmanytohavegravereservations about military service, most young physicians had to give two years to the army, navy, or air force under the provisions of what used to be called the “Doctors’ Draft.” (Now our armed forces train their own doctors or make arrangements to pay the tuition of certain medical students in exchange for their later obligation to serve.) Because I’d had some psychiatric and psychoanalytic training, I was put in charge of an air force psychiatric service in Biloxi, Mississippi—yet another military doctor counting each day of his two-year stint and regarding it as an unwelcome interlude, at best. In retrospect, however, I’ve come to realize how very much I owe to that time spent at Keesler Air Force Base. For one thing, I’d never before been in the South, and it was as a resident of Mississippi in 1960 that I came to witness the struggles of black children (in nearby New Orleans, which I often visited) to integrate hitherto all-white schools. My whole life thereupon changed. I never did rush back to New England at the end of my military assignment. Indeed, even during it I 34  had begun to make the kind of inquiries that would characterize all my later work—interviews (in homes and in schools) with children and their families who were caught in one or another social or political or moral struggle.Inasense,then,anairforceassignmentwhichIinitiallyregretted (how much better to serve in a European military hospital, or one on the West Coast or Asia!) turned out to be a shaping influence upon my occupational life—the kind of irony the novelist George Eliot urged us to appreciate: fate and chance and circumstance as powerful aspects of our destiny, determinants all too commonly overlooked these days in favor of those tossed our way by various social scientists, who so often are on the lookout for psychological or sociological theories that explain anything or everything all too unequivocally. But apart from an accidental encouragement to one doctor’s future research, that air force hospital kept giving many of us physicians plenty of pause—to the point that we frequently talked of the “education” we werereceivingaswestruggledtoreconcileourprofessional(really,moral) values with the various policies sent our way through the military chain of command. We noticed, for instance, that when we regarded enlisted men and women who drank a lot or who were struggling with various sexual problems (struggling hard, many of them, to figure out who they were, so to speak—the matter of “orientation” or “preference,” as it is put in psychiatric lingo), we were mindful of the desires of our superiors to “board them out administratively”—i.e., to discharge such men and women as having “character disorders” and hence as not fit for service, and hence with no future rights as veterans, not to mention with a mark of suspicion in the eyes of future employers. With officers it was quite another matter. We were asked to be more than considerate and kind; we were asked to mobilize a psychiatric vocabulary for the purpose of  35 strengthening (rather than undermining) the reputation of these individuals —so that they could be kept in the service, if possible, or if not, honorably discharged with full benefits. This informal but distinct double standard could all too readily be accommodated by the slippery imprecisions of psychiatric jargon, by a profession’s inevitable subjectivity. In Tillie Olsen’s hauntingly powerful story “Hey Sailor, What Ship?” a mother tells the following to her daughter (who has been denouncing a longtime family friend, a lowly, hard-drinking seaman): “I care you should understand. You think Mr. Norris is a tragedy. You feel sorry for him because he talks intelligent and lives in a nice house and has quiet drunks.” The daughter had been contemptuously throwing around the word “wino” in just the way we were urged to use the language of psychopathology with pejorative intent when we made our decisions about the privates and corporals entrusted to us. For our Mr. Norrises (and there were no small number of them) another tone altogether was wanted, a medical slant that favored the kind of “understanding” Olsen’s mother wants for a sailor. Put differently, and with all too brutal terseness, we were learning as young doctors in the military that class most significantly...

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