Bully Nation
Yale Magrass and Charles Derber

In recent years, there has been heavy emphasis on providing psychotherapy for soldiers and veterans.  Although this has been endorsed by the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense, it is somewhat problematic because traditionally psychology and the military come from two very different cultures.

As we have argued, the psychological paradigm is inadequate for addressing bullying, both among adults and children, because it looks at individual failings and does not consider larger institutional and social forces that have a stake in promoting bullying.  This is even more true in the military than in other institutions, such as schools where so much of the discussion about bullying has taken place.

No other institution has a stronger stake in promoting bullying than the military. Psychotherapists, who work within the military would violate their professional ethics and risk their job, if they suggested the real pathology, the real source of bullying and violence, rests with the institution itself. If the psychotherapist himself wears a uniform, as many do, he could face court martial for insubordination, if he offered that diagnosis or even allowed himself to really think it. 

As we have seen, the goal of military training is to make you violent, but not too violent, to be a “good guy with a gun” who only uses it against “bad guys with guns” or people who do not acknowledge that you are the good guy and THEY are the bad guy. A soldier has the paradoxical identity of a “good bully,” adept at bullying methods for allegedly lofty ends. The public has been inundated with messages from the media that expresses shock over crime and violence on military bases and among veterans. We are supposed be bewildered that people trained to be violent become violent.

The army was disappointed at a psychological study that it commissioned in the hope that it would better help them to predict who might turn violent against their fellow soldiers at military bases. The report emphasized reluctance of soldiers to report personal problems and insufficient sharing of information among army agencies.  The fact that their whole purpose is to train people to be violent did not seem to even cross the mind of the investigators or the army officers.

The psychological paradigm has labeled failure to adapt the military-especially after exposure to combat, after seeing gore, destruction and death all around you, after being in dread of being a victim yourself or being bullied into become a perpetrator- as a disease. In World War I, it was called “shell shock;” in World War II, it was called “battle fatigue,” and since Vietnam, it has been called “traumatic stress disorder” or among veterans, “post traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD).  

As we have seen in other chapters, the psychological paradigm takes society as a given, something beyond challenge, to which the individual must adjust. There can be nothing wrong with the institution.  Increasingly, the military has been pressured to rely upon the psychological paradigm because the bullying built into classical training often backfires and recruitment has become more difficult because of the fear that veterans may be left without support.  

The armed forces do this reluctantly because psychology has tended to be a “liberal” profession on the opposite side of the culture wars.  Meditation was a psychological exercise popular in the 1960/70s counter-culture and anti-war movement, but around 2010, the Marines have started adapting it as a technique to make their troops even tougher and more “mindful.”  According to Maj. Gen. Melvin Spies:

While teaching troops to shoot makes them a better warfighter, teaching mindfulness makes them a better person by helping them to decompress, which could have lasting effects.

Oommm!!! Bomb! Bomb! Oommm!!! Boom! Boom! Oommm!!! Kill! Kill! Oommm!!!

Historically, career officers often have been hostile to psychological explanations for failure to blend into military culture, seeing it as a justification for “namby pamby wimpy cowardliness.”  During World War II, Four Star General George Patton slapped soldiers diagnosed with “battle fatigue.”  Upon seeing soldiers in army hospitals with psychological illnesses, he issued this directive: 

• It has come to my attention that a very small number of soldiers are going to the hospital on the pretext thatthey are nervously incapable of combat. Such men are cowards, and bring discredit on the Army and disgrace to their comrades who they heartlessly leave to endure the danger of a battle which they themselves use the hospital as a means of escaping. You will take measures to see that such cases are not sent to the hospital, but are dealt with in their units. Those who are not willing to fight will be tried by Court-Martial for cowardice in the face of the enemy.

He ordered one soldier diagnosed with “battle fatique:”

You’re going back to the front line and you may get shot and killed, but you’re going to fight. If you don’t, I’ll stand you up against a wall and have a firing squad kill you on purpose.

Patton provoked a serious controversy within the army, when he did this.  Other generals, like Eisenhower, wanted to recognize the legitimacy of alleged mental illnesses like “battle fatigue.”

Despite this historic debate, military psychotherapists usually try to blend in and dedicate themselves to the service,largely because the professional ethics of psychology say critiquing institutions is outside of their domain. If they are working with active duty soldiers, their goal is to get them back on the front line; if they are treating veterans, their goal is to get them to overcome any remorse over whom they shot or anything else they experienced.  

Again, the problem rests with the individual, not the institution. If you are in the military, psychotherapists are there to help you adjust to what might be the more pathological institution of all, one for which the most sane response may be insanity.  The institution itself may be so insane that there is no sane way to function within it. 

This was made clear- or at least as clear as something this muddled and contradictory can be made - in the World War II novel and movie Catch 22.  A psychiatrist thinks flying in combat missions is crazy and he should prevent anyone from doing it.  However, his professional commitment is to the military and recognizing the insanity is a sign of sanity. Therefore he must force anyone who asks to be grounded to fly.

Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka (Air Corp Psychiatrist): Sure. Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat isn't really crazy, so I can't ground him. 

Captain Yossarian (Fighter Pilot, main character):  Ok, let me see if I've got this straight. In order to be grounded, I've got to be crazy. And I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I'm not crazy anymore, and I have to keep flying.

Sociologist Jerry Lemcke sees a tendency to “psychologize the political,” to deny the sociological imagination, to prevent recognition that the problem may rest with the institution- not the individual. Psychological labels can be ways of transforming rational responses to inherently irrational situations into diseases. We can infer that the way to cure the real diseases is transform the entire society and possibly abolish certain institutions.   

As a case of psychologizing the political, the construction of PTSD is a textbook case of how “badness” can be reframed as “sickness…” In no sense did [the] neo-Freudian perspective on shell shock imply that the illness of veterans needing to be understood was not “real.” Rather, it shifted the diagnostic gaze from causes external to the victim, like exploding shells, to causes that were internal to the mind and emotions of the veteran.

What the patient was really afraid of was his own shortcomings…New stories about wartime atrocities that are couched as the failure of individual soldiers to meet the national standards, or reported as forms of personal “breakdown” are a kind of spin put on violations of human decency so as to shift the blame away from public policy and social norms

Soldiers and veterans certainly do act in ways that can be considered pathological. However, the response has been mostly either to treat them as criminals who must be arrested, jailed, maybe even executed, or to label them mentally ill and advocate for better mental health services which will help them to rehabilitate and better adjust to society.

The question is this a society to which you should adjust is seldom asked. What are we to make of a country that spends more on armaments than the next seventeen countries with the largest militaries combined? Where the CEO of the largest corporations typically earns over three hundred-fifty times his average employee?  Unless we address the pathology within the society itself and consider the possibility that certain institutions are inherently pathological, we can hardly expect to contain individual bullying and violence.