“We Combat Veterans Have a Responsibility to Ourselves and Our Families”: Domesticity and the Politics of PTSD in Memoirs of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

On Veterans Day 2009, the PBS newsmagazine Newshour with Jim Lehrer devoted its program to returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans’ struggles and particularly to what by that point was a widely accepted epidemic of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and suicide. The program featured a profile of Jeremiah Workman, a marine veteran who had won the Navy Cross for his 2005 heroics in Fallujah and had subsequently authored a memoir of his struggles with PTSD and suicidal tendencies, Shadow of the Sword: A Marine’s Journey of War, Heroism, and Redemption (2009). Workman’s chief message was that veterans needed to recognize that it was acceptable to seek treatment. “Nobody wants to raise their hand,” he told reporter Betty Ann Bowser, “Nobody—there’s such a stigma out there involving PTSD, that nobody wants to be associated with it.”¹

In the segment that followed, former navy psychologist Heidi Squier Kraft, herself the author of the memoir Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital (2007), agreed. Asked how to improve the situation, she replied that “it continues to be the stigma … the line needs to continue to buy into this and have every level of the chain of command buy into it, that these injuries are just that, injuries, and not disorders.”² Yet her copanelist, former air force psychiatrist and Iraq War opponent Jeffrey Johns, disagreed. “While the President talks that we will take care of our own,” he told the Newshour’s Judy Woodruff, “we’re really shortchanging our troops and not providing them the care that they need. So, this problem is pervasive. It is extensive. And we need to be doing a lot better job to take care of these troops.”³

Without much commentary, these two segments exposed two prominent positions within a critical debate regarding veterans’ mental health care during the second half of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. While there was nearly universal agreement that returning soldiers’ mental health struggles constituted a legitimate crisis, there was considerable disagreement regarding what had caused earlier failures and what would constitute adequate improvements. Military and Department of Veterans Affairs officials emphasized a culture that stigmatizes mental illness and that has made veterans reluctant to seek care and sought to validate personality disorder, a diagnosis that attributes postwar mental health struggles to prewar mental maladies. Veterans and their advocates, however, have frequently agreed with Johns’s claim, blaming an underresourced, unresponsive, and perhaps malicious system; beginning in 2005, they appealed for more responsive treatment in a series of congressional hearings.⁴ In relating their stories of postwar struggles and requesting assistance, these veterans have often compared their situation to that faced by Vietnam veterans. Continuing a discourse long central to Vietnam veterans’ activism and to popular culture about the war, contemporary veterans have particularly pointed to their failures as partners and parents as evidence of the wars’ psychological impact.

These issues not only have arisen in congressional hearings and media but also have been significant within representations of veterans’ experiences that have emerged in the wars’ later years. This essay examines three memoirs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that particularly explore veterans’ psychological struggles: Kraft’s Rule Number Two and Workman’s The Shadow of the Sword, as well as Craig Mullaney’s The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education (2009). These memoirs, more than other well-received memoirs about the wars, pay significant and explicit attention to veterans’ postwar psychological struggles, their causes, and their resolution.⁵ Moreover, as Workman’s and Kraft’s Newshour interviews, public appearances, and well-received memoirs make clear, these authors have achieved some cultural capital in the wars’ aftermath.⁶ Roll Call referred to Workman as “an extraordinary veteran of this country’s most recent war,” and the Washington Times termed him “an expert on the disorder.”⁷ Kraft has been a frequent speaker on military mental health issues and, like Workman, has gone on to a postmilitary career in veterans’ mental health.⁸ Similarly, Mullaney...