The most troubling part of all this is that I actually liked being in Afghanistan. I didn’t want to leave. For the first year or so after we got back, I spoke openly and bluntly about the experience. Eventually, however, I started to notice a pattern: Whenever I talked about it, I’d leave the conversation feeling ashamed and become increasingly anxious over the rest of the day. So, I decided to stop bringing it up.
These words appeared in a New York Times report written by Sgt Adam Linehan, a former US Army combat medic who served in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011. His admission that he missed being in a war zone is common among veterans. Former US Army Major and chaplain Carlos C. Huerta has expressed similar feelings.
At the time, Linehan was experiencing sleepless nights, seeking solace in alcohol and drugs, and suffering panic attacks. One night, his wife, Sara, found him ‘... doubled over at the foot of the bed’ following a panic attack. He told her, ‘Joining the Army was a mistake’.
Linehan described his longing for Afghanistan as ‘troubling’. However, his desire to return to the war zone suggests he missed something about life there and struggled to adjust to civilian life after returning to the US. His experience reflects a familiar feeling among some veterans: ‘They came home but could not find the home they left behind…’.
The guilt of being a ‘lucky bastard’
For some who survive war, being alive can bring a painful burden known as survivor guilt.
According to a recent study, content survivor guilt occurs when someone feels responsible for another person’s death because of something they did or failed to do. Existential survivor guilt arises when someone feels guilty simply for being alive when others have died, even though they know they were not responsible for those deaths.
Sgt Linehan’s grandfather, Michael Linehan Jr., a former US B-24 pilot, survived World War II and joined the Lucky Bastard Club, a club for a group of airmen who survived the war. However, surviving war did not necessarily mean escaping guilt. Sgt Linehan never wanted to join that club, but he, too, came to experience the burden of survivor guilt.
For some veterans, guilt and shame can follow them for much of their lives, made worse by a painful sense of unfairness about who survives and who does not.
You can be a clerk typist and get hit by a rocket while at a Vietnamese massage parlour in Saigon. You can be an infantryman and not get a scratch in 12 months.
To survive, then, is to be a lucky bastard.
The guilt that follows them home
Sgt Linehan struggled with the guilt of surviving war. For Staff Sergeant Robert Miltenberger, however, it was something he said during a firefight in Iraq that continued to haunt him. He had lied to a wounded soldier, Tomas Young, in an attempt to reassure him. The lie still haunts him, and Miltenberger recounted the story with a quaking voice:
I had one soldier, he kept saying, ‘I’m paralysed, I’m paralysed’. I said, ‘No you’re not, everybody’s just laying on you’. There was nobody laying on him.
Young was just 24 and had been in Iraq for less than two weeks when a sniper’s bullet damaged his spinal cord, leaving him paralysed from the chest down. Miltenberger carried the guilt for years and had not seen Young since. Nearly 10 years later, with the help of ABC News, Miltenberger travelled with his wife from Cameron, Louisiana, to Portland, Oregon, to reunite with Young and ‘try and find some peace for that survivor's guilt all these years later’.
When they met, Young, whose speech was slurred, spoke first:
‘I bared no grudge against you’, Young tells Miltenberger.
‘Well, I lied to you’, Miltenberger answers.
‘You were just trying to help me’, Young says.
‘I was feeling guilty because I didn’t get shot’, Miltenberger says.
The consequences of war weighed heavily on them and they struggled to the point of contemplating taking their own lives. Guilt and painful memories followed them long after the fighting ended.
Guilt Essential Reads
Final thoughts
Survivor guilt can be common among veterans, but Sgt Linehan suggested that something else may lie beneath it. He told PBS NewsHour:
So, if you would ask me if I felt guilty for anything I did in Afghanistan around the time that I started to kind of have this breakdown, I would have said no. The guilt is masking something else, because when I was over there, and I saw these things, I felt afraid, and – but I didn't feel sad. And so, I thought, I don't have a right to say I have PTSD, because, when I saw it happen, I didn't feel anything.
Linehan’s account raises a broader question about the psychological struggles veterans face that may not fit neatly into diagnoses such as PTSD. This concern is shared by Dr Hannah Murray of the University of Oxford, who has said:
I believe some people have emotional consequences from trauma that aren’t PTSD, and because of the way the health care systems work here and in America, they won’t get taken care of’ … So, I think there are a lot of people coming home from war who don’t get treatment and end up making bad decisions.
These accounts highlight the need to better understand veterans’ psychological struggles to provide appropriate support. When Linehan said, 'I actually liked being in Afghanistan’, his words may have reflected more than a cry for help. His experience may relate to ‘mental immobilisation to the past’, a psychological attachment to earlier experiences that may contribute to ‘a disrupted sense of identity and home’, two key features of cognitive immobility.
His remarks alone cannot establish that he experienced cognitive immobility, but they raise questions about why some veterans may long for life in a war zone long after they have returned and why so many struggle to adjust to civilian life after their military service has ended.
For veterans and those supporting them, recognising that leaving a war zone does not always mean leaving it behind psychologically may help explain the difficulties they have adjusting to civilian life and finding a sense of belonging at home.