PTSD |

Spotlight: Albert Gray Eagle

Oklahoma Flutist and Vietnam Veteran, Albert Gray Eagle, Reflects on Art, Family History of Decorated Military Service & Post-Traumatic Stress

by Robin Brooks

There’s something about Albert Gray Eagle when you first meet him that is extraordinarily powerful, yet disarmingly subtle, sensitive, and silent. It is the quiet kind of confidence and strength that undoubtedly comes from years of experience connecting with other human beings on a deep, soulful level. As an obvious artist, one who is spiritually connected, Gray Eagle’s profound talents resonate with everyone he encounters.

“I have to reach way down into the depths of my soul…realize that there is something out there far greater than myself. It’s in every living thing that’s on this earth,” Gray Eagle said. “We have two sets of eyes: one to see with – to see things physically – and then one to see things around you in a different manner…someone who is hurting, someone you can talk to. I’ve been gifted to be able to talk to people one-on-one…about what’s bothering them,” said Gray Eagle. “You can spot a veteran a mile away. You look into his eyes…you know where he’s been.”

Gray Eagle, a globally known teaching artist affiliated with the Oklahoma Arts Council, is a featured musical performer and workshop instructor at the upcoming Military Experience & the Arts National Symposium, scheduled for May 14-17 on the campus of Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma. Gray Eagle will perform music, heavily tinged with patriotic themes and Native American storytelling roots, as well as provide instruction to military veterans and families in the traditional art of flute-making, utilizing authentic materials such as cane, reed, and clay. A Vietnam veteran who served in the U.S. Army, Gray Eagle is acutely aware of how the historical military experience and environment during the 1970s impacted Native American soldiers from a distinctly cultural perspective.

“As an American Indian, it was pretty rough. There were two or three of us in the entire brigade,” said Gray Eagle. “We were called up in front of everyone by a major general and, of course, he went through the spiel: ‘As members of separate nations, the United States Government would like to thank you for your service.’

The first comment I remember was from a staff sergeant in Kentucky who told me that I ‘should feel privileged that I was even allowed to serve after what the Indians had done to this country years ago!’ When they tell you something like that your self-worth goes down a lot, no matter how hard you try to be a better person. You always got this ethnic thing: ‘chief this, chief that.’

“During that time, American Indians were more decorated than any other culture. Yet, they were probably treated the worst,” Gray Eagle said. “It was just stuff people didn’t know…stereotypes…that’s what happens when you get people together. I lived with these guys coming straight off the field. I was a small, five-foot, nine-inch, 135 pound kid, who I guess from behind, looked Vietnamese. I was attacked…choked…they just went crazy, you know? I was seventeen years old,” said Gray Eagle.

As part of the MEA symposium’s focus on diversity and the arts, Gray Eagle will open a lunch-time film screening, courtesy of Oklahoma Educational Television Authority (OETA) and the Oklahoma Humanities Council, titled “Native Oklahoma: Native Vietnam Veterans.” A film panel discussion, including veterans profiled in the documentary, will take place immediately following the screening.

“My family is all veterans. I had a great uncle that got three Bronze Stars during World War II (a Bronze Star with arrowhead cluster), and a Purple Heart. Of course, his PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) was so bad he spent most of his life drunk, and had car accidents that I think were probably attempted suicides, you know? But he survived then, and he never talked about it until right before he died. He was eighty-four or eighty-five years old when he died,” Gray Eagle said. “My grandfather on my mom’s side served. He had a Bronze Star…and my uncles. They were all decorated. There was a lot of service.”

Gray Eagle compares his own difficulties reintegrating into society after coming home from Vietnam with those of his elder family members. “My grandfather…he didn’t know how to communicate with anybody, as I didn’t, when I got out of the military. He got jobs where he would herd sheep up in the mountains by himself. So, all he had was a few dogs and a horse, and he stayed in a…a small camper trailer for months at a time,” Gray Eagle said.

“When I went to work, I was an office manager at this farmer’s cooperative, but I had an office in the back corner where I didn’t have to deal with crowds of people,” he said. “When I was going to get a promotion, to the manager of the whole place, I had to go talk to a board of directors, and I didn’t care for that. So, the only job that I could find where I could be alone was driving a truck. I had my own little space, minimal dealing with people. It was an ideal job for my situation. It was basically the same as my uncle and grandfather,” Gray Eagle said.

“When I got out, I just wanted to go home. I wasn’t going to admit to anything that would keep me there. It was a shameful thing to have PTSD or anything wrong with you mentally because you were going to be labeled,” Gray Eagle said. “Nowadays, you know, they sign a document: ‘sound and ready to go home.’ Of course they are going to sign the paper! They’re not going to say, ‘I have a problem.’ It all depends on the severity of what you happen to see or feel, but the biggest thing is the label of ‘they’re crazy, they’re nuts, they’re whatever.’ Everybody’s got problems. Some people just handle it better than others,” said Gray Eagle.

Gray Eagle is sentimental and respectful of his family heritage, ancestors, and the older generations. Although he didn’t understand the concept fully as a younger man, where his knee-jerk reaction was to run away from his problems rather than ask for help, he is conscious today of the positive role and major impact older veterans who’ve served in prior wars and conflicts can have on the younger generation of veterans. Gray Eagle believes they understand like no one else can. He agrees the support is mutual; it can work both ways.

“There is a trust between veterans…and older generations. I think it is important when a veteran who has been there can talk to a younger veteran, because there is going to be an automatic piece of trust as compared to talking to a young psychiatrist that just got out of school who has a certain guideline to follow in a twelve-week program. There is no trust in somebody they think has read a book or learned from a book and has no idea what they’ve been through. They can’t ever let the veteran go outside of the guidelines,” Gray Eagle said.

“The first thing you need is a support system. If you don’t have any family left because you end up driving your family, your spouse, your kids even…you drive them away…there’s another veteran there to help you, to listen to you. You are not alone in this world,” said Gray Eagle. “I think the greatest tool out there to help a veteran is another veteran.” Gray Eagle is also lucky enough to credit his niece, who works and travels with him everywhere, as well as his wife, who he gives “props to for hanging in there,” as sources of comfort and support.

“My great uncle was like my dad. He never boasted about ribbons he had. As a matter of fact, I didn’t know that he had all these acknowledgements until right before he died. He spent most of his time alone, drunk or trying to kill himself,” Gray Eagle said. “He never reached out to [the] Veteran’s Administration or [a] hospital…He didn’t know how to. It was a big taboo to label yourself…that you’ve got a problem mentally or that your heart is broken, or your soul is hurting so bad that you find it hard to get up every morning to carry on.”

“And having so many awards at a time where Indians or any minority would not have gotten any type of recognition, it just amazes me what he actually went through, what he had to live with his whole life. I know why he was alone, why he wouldn’t talk, and why the only time he showed any affection was when he was drunk. It’s so sad. He was an amazing man that I looked up to.”

“My grandfather, my uncles…coming back from Vietnam…they were messed up. I totally understand, as a veteran myself, who they were and why they were the way they were. I’ve seen so many die young because they never asked for help. That’s why we are averaging twenty-two suicides a day of veterans. That’s a lot. That’s twenty-two too many,” said Gray Eagle.

Gray Eagle received a very special gift as a child that has served him well as an adult survivor of military trauma; which included severe beatings, racial hostility, and witnessing the catastrophic circumstances surrounding the death and disabling wounding of two friends from Texas who just so happened to be brothers.“I wasn’t qualified to be there,” he said.

“I was so far down…and it was a gift given to me when I was five years old, a flute that I learned to play, that saved me. During my darkest times as a kid, I always had a place where I’d go and play it and I’d release all of this negativity…get it out. The flute has saved my life, all the way through! My art is my best survival tool. I have that and, sometimes, the company of another veteran,” said Gray Eagle. “Veterans that get into the arts at the VA, in music or pottery, they seem to do far better than anybody else. So, that’s my healing. I pretty much had to manage my own way out of ego, pride, whatever, to find my own ways of healing to survive,” said Gray Eagle. “I do have something to offer to the world, and it’s a peaceful art, a solution to all these bad feelings that I’ve held deep inside…the hurt and the heartbreak.”

Gray Eagle’s music and healing catharsis has incredibly far-reaching effects, as he is constantly sharing what he has learned with others in every part of the world. He tells a wonderful story about making a special, lower-C-register flute for a World War II veteran from Topeka, Kansas. Although the elderly veteran is confined to a wheelchair, Gray Eagle is fascinated with how he continues to use this form of musical art to stay overjoyed and alive.

In one of the most meaningful and emotional experiences of Gray Eagle’s life, he describes how he once met two individuals at a National Veterans Creative Arts festival in Wisconsin, both on a USO tour, who helped him fulfill a life-long dream.

“I told them: ‘I would like to send some flutes to Iraq…Afghanistan…to the soldiers over there.’ Well, being on the USO tour, they told me they could make that happen. I had made two-thousand flutes. I do Sundance and ceremonies like that, and I had one of those Sundance priests smoke them off, bless them, whatever you want to say. So, they went to Afghanistan and they found these soldiers! They took the time to give these individual flutes to these soldiers…and some of the emails I got back were just awesome! It was a blessing…to be able to pass something on that was given to me and send them overseas to a combat zone, where maybe some of these guys could find some peace, too, in the middle of all the chaos.”

It was great, he says, “for two people to come into my life like that and allow me to fulfill something I had always wanted to do for someone else, and to do it and take the time to find the American Indian soldiers that were stationed there. I told them I didn’t care who got one because, culturally, they belong to everybody in the world. Everybody in history played a flute for some reason or other, so I just wanted it to be a gift… if they found someone to give them to,” Gray Eagle said.

Gray Eagle credits amazing, miraculous moments like these; working with children at camps and schools; teaching suicide prevention classes; being present for his daughter, who also suffers from military-related trauma; and being accessible to those veterans in need at the VA and beyond, with helping him wake-up every morning and continue the long and winding journey towards health and healing.

“When I get a piece of wood…and feel the life that used to be in that piece of wood…it’s like giving life to create sound. It’s like our second heart. We have a heart that pumps our blood, but then we have the heart that our soul rests in, that you can reach for deep inside…and feel like you’ve done something,” Gray Eagle said.

“We all have many resources, but we have to find the one that finds us. Because once you get into that dark place or that hole, it’s so hard to dig out. Art is about the fastest way I know of to get out. If I can be a part of that…volunteering or visiting another veteran…and share a piece of my art…that’s awesome. I’m glad that I was invited to the MEA symposium to be able to give a little piece of hope. Maybe someone will pick up what I do, pick up the flute. I love to play music. I love to do it. It’s the one thing that has saved my life over and over again, but it’s not just the art itself. It’s what happens when you’re doing the art that’s the medicine. When I put my soul into my art, it puts me in a place that’s peaceful.”

“To allow something positive to happen, people can’t do it alone. No matter how strong you think you are, you know, we were put on this earth to be there for each other…to help one another. It doesn’t happen with one person. We have to respect everything and everyone around us. If you can help somebody, by all means, it’s your duty as a human being,” Gray Eagle said.

Additional background information on Albert Gray Eagle can be found at http://www.imaginativz.com. Registration and general information about Military Experience & the Arts’ National Symposium can be found on its homepage. Registration costs $20. Active duty service members and spouses with military I.D. cards can register free-of-charge.

The Kill Switch

Somehow it’s a dirty little secret that the entire purpose of war is to kill human beings. That vastly important fact is becoming more well-known thanks to the work of authors and journalists like Phil Zabriskie, a former foreign correspondent for Time who has also written for National Geographic, The Washington Post Magazine, and other notable outlets. He’s more than a war correspondent, though. He’s made a study of the subject of combat. He fine tuned that study with an in-depth exploration on killing in war in his latest book, a Kindle Single called The Kill Switch.

Zabriskie delves into the phenomenon of killing with considerable skill. He expands our understanding of the concept into the societal and institutional context and contracts it into the personal. It’s perhaps the latter that gives the book its stark, chilling nature. The author chronicles the lives of several participants of the Iraq and Afghan Wars to illustrate the powerful psychological forces at work in the act of killing and the impact of the moral injury that killing causes. His coverage of these men over roughly a decade paints a clear picture of the entire process of learning to kill, applying those lessons, and attempting to find peace with that act. For instance, we learn about a Marine, Ben Nelson, who struggles with the times he killed and the times he didn’t. We learn of a Marine officer who bears the emotional burden of ordering men to kill as well as taking lives himself, and how the strict enforcement of the rules of engagement protected civilian lives as well as the combatants’ humanity. We see them in war. Then we see them in their living rooms. We see their pain with a clarity that speaks highly of Zabriskie’s expertise in recording the grim truth of war.

To his credit, Zabriskie lets the subject and those who lived it speak for themselves. But he’s packaged those voices in a concise and fast-flowing narrative, one that is buttressed by interviews with psychologists and research into relevant scholarship. It’s an engaging, educating read.

Although the book is short, it is long on authenticity and insight. Zabriskie has created a work that offers real-world examples of some of the ideas first explored by Dave Grossman. He has made a clear argument for the fact that killing is one of the most traumatic experiences of combat, and it is the very essence of war. How we treat that haunting truth – that we collectively flip a kill switch when we go to war – is up to us as a society, but Phil Zabriskie has done a remarkable job of defining it for his readers.

(Review contributed by David P. Ervin)

Finding Triumph in Tragedy

by David Chrisinger

“Weep, darling. Weep…and then, tomorrow, we shall make something strong of this sorrow.”–Lorraine Hansberry, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window”

When he was discharged from the Marine Corps in 2006, Mike Liguori knew he had changed. “My reactions to the violence of Iraq coupled with multiple near death experiences caused an immense amount of pain in my life,” he wrote. “In 2007, I was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress (PTS). I remember when the doctors told me of their findings; it felt like a death sentence.”

Liguori was told that post-traumatic stress was incurable and that the only way he could manage the symptoms was through the use of antidepressants and talk therapy.

“I didn’t like the way the pills made me feel,” Liguori continues, “and couldn’t get past my therapist never experiencing combat. Everything she said to me about my experiences went in one ear and out the other.”

After he stopped going to counseling and stopped taking his medications, Liguori says that his post-traumatic stress made his daily life almost unbearable. He even considered taking his own life.

Then, when he was at his lowest, Liguori started writing about his experiences.

“The moment I typed those first words on the keyboard, uncensored thoughts and memories from Iraq poured out. My first entry turned into 10 pages of flashbacks and memories that were subconsciously hidden in the depths of my mind.”

“I felt unbelievable,” Liguori continues, “to have the weight of PTS that had held me down since I left the military finally start to feel lighter…. When I decided to share my experience with others, I found my friends and families’ reactions to be insightful and powerful. It was the first time I felt connected to other people by sharing my stories.”

As human beings, we have always related to one another by telling and listening to stories about ourselves and others. We have, in turn, always understood who and what we are — as well as what we might become — from the stories we tell each other.

Those who buy in to the theory of Narrative Identity argue that identity is not a single, fixed core self that we can “reveal if we peel away the layers.” Instead, each and every one of us constructs our own identities — conceptions of who we believe ourselves to be — primarily through the integration of life experiences into an internalized, evolving, and communicable story.

According to Donald Polkinghorne, “We are in the middle of our stories and cannot be sure how they will end; we are constantly having to revise the plot as new events are added to our lives. Self, then, is not a static thing or a substance, but a configuring of personal events into a historical unity which includes not only what one has been but also anticipations of what one will be.”

These stories — life stories, if you will — provide us with both a sense of unity and purpose if we tell them the right way.

Indeed, those who are able, the theorists continue, to incorporate negative or traumatic life events into their life stories as instances of redemption tend to be happier than those who do not. In a redemptive story, the narrator transitions from a generally bad or negative state to a generally good or positive state. Such a transition is characterized as:

sacrifice (enduring the bad to get to the good),
recovery (attaining a positive state after losing it temporarily)
growth (bad experiences actually bettering the self), or
learning (gaining or mastering skills, knowledge, and/or wisdom in the face of the bad).

Incorporating your experiences into a redemptive life story allows you to organize memories and more abstract knowledge into a coherent biographical narrative. In other words, turning your disparate experiences into a coherent story helps you to construct, organize, and attribute meaning to your experiences, as well as to form, inform, and re-form your sources of knowledge and your view of reality.

Travis Switalski, an Army infantry veteran with multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, turned to writing as a way to cope, and found it to have a transformative effect on his memories.

“Writing about my experiences in the military,” he writes, “has given me more in the way of recovery than medication or therapy ever had. Putting down on paper what happened to me and those around me has helped me to understand the trauma that we were subjected to, and to help let go of some of the guilt that I was holding on to personally.”

“There is something liberating,” he continues, “about getting all of that mental mess out of my head and heart and putting it into an organized, understandable thought that others can read and comprehend. Translating it for them has helped me understand it better myself.”

In this sense, crafting a life story that makes sense of our lack of coherence with both ourselves and the chaos of life is a tremendous source of growth and transformation.

This May, at the 2^nd national Military Experience & the Arts Symposium, it will be your turn to say what you need to say, to turn your trauma into triumph. Joseph Stanfill and I will be leading a workshop in which we will help you tell your stories of redemption and post-traumatic growth. If you have a story to tell, please consider joining us in Lawton, Oklahoma.

Down the Rabbit Hole

by David P. Ervin

I asked a buddy how he was doing the other day. I keep in touch pretty regularly with “Doc,” a combat medic who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. We live in the same town, but I hadn’t heard from in a while. He replied with a phrase that’s emerged in the lexicon of American combat veterans of the War on Terror; two words that act as a euphemism for a chilling component of life after war.

“Rabbit hole.”

Of course, we’re not talking about having tea with the Mad Hatter here. We’re talking about a flashback.

I knew what he was experiencing. Your palms sweat. Breaths come deeply and rhythmically as your body maximizes oxygen intake. Your heart thumps within a tightened chest as it pushes blood to every limb. Eyes dart and hair stands up. It’s not a hallucination in which you believe that you’re in another place and another time. Rather, you feel like it. Something (sometimes nothing) has elicited a very physical and emotional memory, a frighteningly intense mental space that we first discovered in combat. As Brian Mockenhaupt aptly wrote, they are the “darkened areas that for many remain unexplored. And once these darkened spaces are lit, they become a part of us.” Often, our time back in those places passes quickly. Sometimes, it does not. And, other times, we give in to the immense gravity those memories exert and venture further down the rabbit hole.

So I wasn’t surprised when Doc began sending me links to videos from the wars. On occasion some of us indulge ourselves in the imagery and sounds of combat. We scratch that itch in a way that’s masochistic, nostalgic, and indicative of the bizarre allure of adrenaline. Modern technology has created an internet that is awash with footage of combat. We can take our pick between an Apache strike, a machine gun’s hammering rattle, or a stream of tracers racing across those all-too-familiar cityscapes. Anyone can. Many do. We wouldn’t be the first generation to revisit these things. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussel told us about World War One veterans of Great Britain purchasing phonograph records of the sounds of artillery bombardments on the Western Front.

And, of course, as veterans we’re not really so unique in this regard, either.

There is a reason these images are at our fingertips. If America is honest with itself, we are all fascinated with war and violence on some level. It permeates our culture whether we served in war or not. Those who haven’t experienced it can be drawn to it by curiosity, and the less those who truly understand talk about it – the more it’s a dirty little secret – the greater the pull of this curiosity. David Grossman has taken it a step further in pointing out that the prevalence of fictionalized violence in video games, television, and film is widespread, so much so that it has warped our society’s fundamental understanding and beliefs about violence. Indeed, he went as far to say that the more dishonest we are about the true nature of violence, the more we associate it with positive feelings and thus perpetuate it. For most, those spectacles are just that – exciting images and sounds.

Of course, combat veterans know better. We know what a grotesque reality it is to kill and be killed. It’s the harshest reality we’ve had to face. So why would those of us ‘in the know’ seek to face this reality again by seeking out this imagery? Are we subjecting ourselves to some kind of punishment? Not really.

Down there in the rabbit hole, we fumble around in the dark for reasons why we’re there. We look in every corner of our current reality to make sense of the emotions. But for the myriad of possibilities, there is one single reason why they really occur – it’s a memory. Immersing ourselves in the images and sounds of war allow us to establish a concrete, logical connection between the way we feel now and the way we felt then. It’s a reminder that we are not insane. Our bodies and minds just hold distinct, vivid memories, and those memories have powerful emotional content. We can make sense of it, and that understanding is somewhat of a comfort even if the mechanisms we use to comprehend it make us feel strange.

Were Americans frank about their fascination with war and thorough in its desire to understand, we wouldn’t feel so uncomfortable about remembering. But we live in a conflicted society, one that alternates between peacemongering during war and warmongering in peace. Perhaps if the imagery of war and violence were packed with the horrible punch that we feel that fascination would dissipate. At the least, it would be understood for what it is.

So we write and attempt to tell stories to explain, to give a gateway into the emotional context that surrounds the phenomenon of war. We do so in the hopes that everyone can understand that it’s not really something we miss as much as it is something we can’t forget.

And we try to let others know that when they go chasing rabbits down those holes, they’re not alone.