A Soldier’s Experience of Mortality

Recently I went to an appointment with my oncologist in a high rise building filled with doctors and other medical professionals. Knowing that I would spend some time in the waiting room, I brought along a book I was reading at the time called The Good Death, by Marilyn Webb. After demonstrating that most American doctors view death as a defeat Ms. Webb argues that “Rather than view death as the failure to find a cure, the medical community must learn to view as an alternative kind of success the goal of ensuring a good death.”

As I boarded the elevator to reach my oncologist’s office I was joined by a friendly man of about my age wearing a doctor’s white coat. He saw that I was carrying a book and asked about it: I held it up so he could read the title, “The Good Death”. He replied, only half kidding, “You’ve got a lot of nerve to bring a book like that into this building full of doctors.” Clearly, in his mind—because death is the doctor’s enemy—bringing a book about death into a medical facility was like wearing a Washington Redskins shirt to a Dallas Cowboys tailgate party.

Of course, it’s not just doctors who avoid the issue of death, it’s an all-American habit. As the brilliant novelist and highly decorated Vietnam veteran Karl Morlantes recently wrote, America is the only nation in history that seems to think that death is an option.

I believe our squeamish attitude toward discussions of death makes it much more difficult for us to have the conversations we need to have with our veterans returning home from our two wars. I was a soldier in Vietnam. All of us who have fought and risked dying and have killed and slogged through death-saturated environments, day after day, corpse after corpse, arrive back home with the psychological smell of mortality. And scalded by concerns about the meaning of what we have seen. And what we have done.

In war, questions about the meaning of death cast a dark shadow because they can too easily shade off into death of meaning. A soldier is denied the option of denying our mortality; it’s with her every step of the way from boot camp to discharge and throughout the rest of life.

In my experience the most gut wrenching issue for the returning veteran is the question of meaning. What’s the meaning of the suffering I endured, the suffering I saw, the suffering I caused?

Engaging with returning veterans is not a matter of demonstrating that we know the answers but demonstrating that we’re asking the same questions they are. It’s not the solution to what’s asked—it’s the solidarity in the asking—that’s at the heart of our obligations to returning veterans. To sit with them in the penumbra of our shared sense of mortality. After all, It won’t kill us to talk about death.