A Crucial Defense
With war comes death, and with death comes the need to grieve. However, during wartime, grieving is a luxury not available to those in action. Therefore, to shortcut the grieving process a soldier may find defense mechanisms, a way to forget the troubles around them and continue on being a “good soldier”. These men seek solitude from all that is around them through religion, inward thinking of other places outside the madness, and a general neglect in acknowledging their surroundings and circumstances. They shield themselves from the horrors of war and the insurmountable death that entails.
Stuart D. Lee’s play “The Ghosts May Laugh” shows in great detail many of these defense mechanisms that the soldiers of World War I employed. Each of the characters had their own way of shielding themselves from the war, and those who lacked this ability were met with death in No Mans Land or at the hands of a firing squad. For instance, Jenkins sought solitude through stories that would take him out of the war and into his own imagination while Lewis turned to alcoholism to disconnect him from the world. Saunders, however, because of his newness to the war has yet to create a defense mechanism for himself. Jones, on the other hand, seemingly lets it all build up inside himself and lets it out in little bursts through his comments and dealings with other soldiers. In fact, I believe the only thing keeping Jones from suicide is his rationalization that there is no afterlife thus he must endure and go on living as long as he can.
The Iraq war is much different from World War I in many respects. However, the need for soldiers to disconnect and shield themselves from wars horrors is not a thing of the past. Every day soldiers are returning home seemingly unscathed, but beneath the exterior, irreparable scars remain. These men have seen horrors that some of us couldn’t imagine and care not to. In the blog Soldiers Telling the Truth About Iraq – What You Won’t Want to Hear there is an article of Spc. Douglas Barber returning home from the Iraq War and subsequently taking his own life due to the memories he had to endured. In the interviews conducted prior to taking his own life, you can see the affect that war had on him. All he seems to talk about is death and stress.
“It was really bad – death was all around you, all the time. You couldn’t escape it,” he said in an interview after he returned to Alabama with the campaign group Coalition for Free Thought in Media. “Everybody in Iraq was going through suicide counseling because the stress was so high. It was at such a magnitude, such a high level, that it was unthinkable for anyone to imagine. You cannot even imagine it.”
Sadly enough, Spc Douglas Barber was unable to suppress the memories of the past and filter out the bad, unable to disconnect himself and find solitude elsewhere in his thoughts. These defense mechanisms are not merely for peace of mind but are crucial to a soldier’s survival in and after a time of war.
