“I think it’s unconscionable to train soldiers to kill and then offer them only two years of treatment after they return to recover from the experience of killing.” So wrote Terese Svoboda after I contacted her on finishing reading Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, her exploration of the distant events behind the suicide of her uncle Don. Motivated in part by the suggestion of an emotional connection between the events at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Don Svoboda's service guarding imprisoned US soldiers soon after WWII, there's an outrage and a sadness in this book turning it from the story of a “Superman” uncle into something of a polemic. At the end of the book, she positively pounds the table:

 We need to wake up and face the nightmare, the dangling body, because we pay for the terror and torture with the minds of our soldiers. It's a symptom of the degeneration of a society when such behavior is hidden. The society begins to stink, no matter what.

What Svoboda discovered is that abuse of prisoners by the US military may have begun long before the Iraq war—and its impact on the soldiers forced to be involved (to say nothing of the impact on the prisoners) has been a factor in the veering of America from the path most of us imagined for the nation. Often, ours is an “open” society only when convenient; we hide the scars of our action beneath layers of make-up, hiding from ourselves the fact that those scars remain infected and dangerous.

Don Svoboda, just too young to see service in the war, spent his stint in Japan as a Military Police guard at a prison housing American prisoners who had been convicted of a variety of crimes. Many of the prisoners (just as in American prisons today) were black. His niece's book, sparked by hints her uncle made as he fell into depression late in life, is the result of tapes he made for her, often oblique, circling around his experience rather than addressing it directly, and her own research, including a trip to Japan. She found hints of prisoner abuse and of execution by hanging, but was never able to verify much, though she was getting tantalizingly close when her uncle killed himself. Instead of finding answers, Svoboda found little but doubt and suspicion. Something had gone on, but she wasn't able to determine much about it, beyond the fact that it haunted her uncle for the rest of his life. The lack of openness, the sweeping of sins under the rug, may make for a momentary sanitary appearance but, as this book shows, the impact of the hiding may prove as deadly as the initial crimes.

When I contacted Svoboda, I asked her five questions:

Barlow: "The need to know": In this book, you are both a victim of this need (and of its other side, the need to hide) and something of its analyst. As a writer, you've certainly been schooled in the belief that covers imply completion, that the curiosity of the reader needs satisfying. Yet life is not like that, and the expectation of answer is artificial, at best. Throughout the book, you show you recognize this, expressing hesitation. Did you continue to feel that as you wrapped up the project--or had you come to terms with "mystery," as you call it, arriving (perhaps) at a changing attitude towards your very craft?

Svoboda: Since modernism, maybe even since Chekhov, readers have not always insisted on epiphanic tidiness, but have come to respect a resolution that offers the fullness of experience without warping that experience with a resounding finish. Black Glasses was never going to be a book about redemption, that holy of holies offering perfect closure for the memoir genre. I hope to have dug up national issues more compelling than what turns up in a police procedural. I see the book as moving from the particular to the universal, from one man’s suicide to a nation rife with betrayal.

Barlow: The last tape from your uncle [before his death, Don Svoboda had sent his niece a series of cassette tapes recalling his experiences in Japan] contained a reference to Abu Ghraib. Was it this that started you towards connecting contemporary situations with the older, or were you already headed down this path?

Svoboda: My Dad was the one who believed my uncle’s depression stemmed from something to do with Abu Ghraib. If it weren’t for him coaxing me to call my uncle, I’d never have received the tapes. I didn’t listen to the last tape with its Abu Ghraib reference until after my uncle’s funeral.

Barlow: You deal gently with the fact that such a high proportion of the prisoners in the camp your uncle guarded in Japan were black. Since publication of the book, the candidacy of Barack Obama has begun to lead us to what may become a different, more open or candid, discussion of race in America. Do you see what you have written as offering an early contribution to this renewed discussion? If so, how? If not, why not?

Svoboda: I began work on the book long before Obama became a presidential candidate so I am pleased that it has some resonance in the current discussion of race in America. The Iraq War renews the issue of racism in war, targeting people of color as the enemy; the figures for black American volunteers have plummeted in response. Race is still an issue within the ranks as well. MacArthur was no help. He refused integration even after President Truman ordered it in 1948.

Barlow: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is little understood in part because no nation wants to examine the "failures" of its heros, not even after they've long been home. Yet all of us who are either veterans or members of their families have felt the impact of PTSD, at least to some small degree. Recently, in response to the problems faced by veterans of the Iraq war and occumpation, there has been a growing movement demanding taht American culture and government face the problem more directly. Did you, or do you now, see your book as contributing to this movement?

Svoboda: I think it’s unconscionable to train soldiers to kill and then offer them only two years of treatment after they return to recover from the experience of killing. The Bush administration and its thinktank, the American Enterprise Institute, has been very active in trying to discredit PTSD and the veterans’ experiences after their service, calling them freeloaders and cowards. One might notice that those making those charges have never been to war. The administration has also discouraged veterans from even seeking help, going so far as to refusing to assist them in the paperwork at the hospitals. Treating returned vets for the trauma they endured does not help the power structure’s bottom line, which is the sale of arms and all else of war’s accoutrement.

Barlow: Guilt is a powerful motivator, for writers and for researchers into the past--not to mention for those struggling to come to terms with their own pasts. As a country, the United States has done an excellent job of hiding its sins and denying its guilt, leading to a sense of "American exceptionalism," a belief that the country really is better than any other has ever been. Did your personal view of America change over the course of researching and writing this book? If so, how? If not, were your older beliefs confirmed?

Svoboda: Writers are forever eight, over-aware and indignant, wrote Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker a month ago. The indignant part of my upbringing was fueled by flag-burning and protests, poet David Shapiro with a cigar in the president’s office. I’m from a generation that believed, in the Lennon sense. How that belief sank in the face of greed is another story, and not mine. At the National Archives, I was made to feel guilty and a kook for even wanting to research this book. After a black scholar wrote to me to tell me that I was clearly mistaken about how the military behaved, I knew I had to pursue the story.

Pursue it she did, ultimately providing a needed warning for the United States as it starts to seriously deal with the impact of the Iraq war and occupation on the future of the nation. Already, too high a number of returning Iraq vets have killed themselves or have died in ways their actions triggered. The number will only grow, unless we heed the warning Black Glasses Like Clark Kent provides.

Svoboda is a skilled writer and diligent researcher. But the importance of this book goes far beyond her own talents. Along with people like ePluribus Media's own Ilona Meagher and the thousands of others who are insisting that PTSD (and the actions forced on our soldiers) become a subject to our national discourse, Svoboda is attempting to change the course of a nation, to bring it back to a path we could all be proud to follow.

Read the book. It will lead you to tears, but also to hope.

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About the Author: Aaron Barlow teaches English at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) in Brooklyn. He is a Columbia School of Journalism Sulzberger Fellow, ePluribus Media Director and Editor. He is also the author of The Rise of the Blogosphere and Blogging America, both from Praeger Publishers.

 

ePluribus Media Contributors: carol white, Greyhawk, bronxdem, cho