PTSD, Politics, and America’s Troubled Veterans of the Left and the Right

Many pundits express surprise – even disgust – that media stories of Graham Platner’s history of problematic behavior failed to discourage Maine Democrats from voting for him in June’s primary election. He won 72% of the vote and has a decent chance of defeating Republican Susan Collins in November. As The Guardian reports, “He’s admitted to a rocky past, to being a lost young man, to infidelity, etc. The avalanche of accusations just confirmed who Platner said he was. Voters chose him despite these flaws and instead because they believed his political appeals.”

Easily overlooked in this drama is how allegations against Platner are understood through the lens of his PTSD story. It’s a new version of an old story. Throughout the history of America’s wars, postwar syndromes include mounting public anxieties over the mental states of returning soldiers. American films reflect these anxieties, from John Huston’s classic documentary Let There Be Light (1946), a sympathetic portrayal of emotional broken, hospitalized WW II veterans, to Taxi Driver (1976) and Deer Hunter (1978) - films that draw out the psychopathic side of Vietnam era veterans.

Photo by Israel Palacio

The Rise of PTSD as a Redemptive Narrative

PTSD emerged in the 1980s as a redemptive diagnosis – a condition tied to the situational madness of war. (As promoters routinely exclaimed, “PTSD is a normal response to an abnormal situation.”) Unlike the psychotic or psychopathic veterans of earlier eras, the veteran with PTSD arouses far less anxiety. At the same time, the diagnosis grew alongside public recognition of how military culture fosters sexism and aggressive acting out. Military discipline and rules of engagement often break down on the battlefront and on the home front. Higher rates of suicide and domestic violence are among the signature problems of returning service members.

Addressing a crowd of cheering supporters at a YMCA gym in Blue Hill Maine, Platner acknowledged voters’ concerns about his past behavior. But he broke from the PTSD clinical frame in positioning himself in the tradition of veterans for peace, fighters whose struggles with personal demons speak to fights on the home front. “If you believe, as I do, that we can change our politics and change our country, then you must also believe that people can change,” he told supporters.

Two Veterans, Two Visions of Recovery

Pete Hegseth also offers a PTSD story in explaining his history of bad behavior, but he provides a very different denouement. Both joined the military as young men after 9/11 and both served many tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan during the “long wars.” Both acknowledge histories of heavy drinking, sexual misconduct and aggressive behavior related to their extensive combat experience. But their politics are very far apart as are the lessons they drew from those wars.

While enlisting the PTSD script, Hegseth distances himself from the debilitating aspects of this condition. His hyper-masculine persona conforms to the Trump regime’s view that vulnerability and weakness are incompatible with manliness. In a 2020 Fox news interview where he “opens up“ about his emotional problems, he offers that “I’m sure I was a mess... I didn’t talk about things like post-traumatic stress and all that. I definitely had it… I don’t call it PTSD because I don’t think you live with a disorder all the time – not everyone does... I don’t live with the disorder today, but I definitely had it. [I spent] a lot of time drinking and laying on the couch.” When he got off that couch, he vaulted into a Fox News gig and then to the heights of power as Secretary of Defense/War.

Healing, Masculinity, and the Politics of Care

For Platner, recovering from PTSD means overcoming a very debilitating vision of manhood. He talks about learning to listen and caring for others as central to that process. It is noteworthy that he sought treatment through the VA during an era when military planners launched campaigns to overcome stigma around mental health problems. Throughout VA facilities, posters announced that “it takes a strong warrior to get help.” Platner often attributes his process of recovery to reconnecting with nature, as well as to his ongoing therapy. His story of how he became an oyster farmer opens into a wider tale of capitalist exploitation and calls for a different relationship with the natural world. One reporter sums up Platner’s oyster philosophy:

“From Indigenous subsistence to working-class staple, a species decimated by extractive capitalism and the predilections of the elite, [was] brought back to life by a public institution as a sustainable resource [oysters].

The Warrior Ethos and the Rejection of Restraint

The lesson Hegseth draws from his tours of duty point to anxieties around the castrating effects of rules on fighters. This complaint courses through Hegseth’s book, The War on Warriors. Military rules around engagement seem to fuse in his mind with a nanny state, that old cudgel of the right against any governmental restrictions on personal behavior. Hegseth’s psyche may have been shaped by his experience during the early years of the US War on Terrorism as well. In the spring of 2004, he deployed to Guantanamo Bay where he guarded detainees for a year. A 2008 UC Berkeley Law article titled Guantánamo and Its Aftermath presents an analysis of the traumatic impact of these black sites on detainees as well as their morally corrosive effects on military personnel.

“For over a century, the U.S. Army Field Manual has set out clear directions for the conduct of military personnel toward prisoners in their custody. But when the “gloves came off” at the direction of civilian and Pentagon leaders after 9/11 (against the expressed will of the military Judge Advocate General Corps and some courageous military advisors), the tradition of the military also became a casualty. Within months, high-level officials in the Departments of Justice and Defense had approved “enhanced” interrogation techniques and sidestepped our obligations under the Geneva Conventions.”

In his book American Crusade, Hegseth recalls telling his platoon to disregard the rules of engagement that are standard military protocol. “I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains,” he said. “Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat.” The enemy for Hegseth began as a holy war against Islam and extended into the wide reach of the fascists currently governing this country. The Crusader tattoos inking Hegseth’s chest and limbs proudly proclaim his far-right political identity, even as questions continue to swirl around Platner’s tattoo from his Marine days and whether it signified hidden Nazi sympathies.

Why Return to a War You Oppose?

I want to return at the end to Graham Platner and the lessons he brings home from his military service. Supporters have a right to answers about allegations of sexual misconduct and other concerns that might affect their support for the candidate. But we might ask why someone who expressed opposition to Bush’s war as a young man ended up spending most of his adult life in the military. Beginning with joining the Marines after high school in 2003 (against the opposition of his parents), he served repeated tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and then returned to Afghanistan as a State Department security contractor in 2018. These repeated deployments may explain why he had so many girlfriends (with no lasting domestic partners until his current partner) and why some of them found his moods and behavior “unsettling.” These are common biographies among professional Soldiers and Marines. But why did he keep returning to fight in wars that he had publicly opposed?

This is not meant to be accusatory in tone. My own psychoanalytic approach to therapy places considerable emphasis on ambivalence and conflict, how people struggle with the interplay of love and hate, and how adult choices are shaped by childhood experiences in complicated ways. In talking with service members in Afghanistan while filming Mind Zone: Therapists Behind the Front Lines, this theme of ambivalence and conflict over military missions was a recurring one. I came to recognize during this documentary project what many young people found of such value–forms of community and camaraderie that were often missing back home. Yet this camaraderie was in the service of maintaining the lethal American war machine. This may have also been the case for Platner. Those values he does seem to be bringing home in this campaign.

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💬 What Do You Think?

What are the important questions that we should be asking of progressive candidates such as Graham Platner? How important is his PTSD story to how we understand his politics?

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📖 Psychiatry, Politics and PTSD: Breaking Down

Providing a new way of thinking about PTSD and an alternative to both critics and defenders of the diagnosis, this text will be useful for scholars and practitioners in psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, public health policy as well as, sociology, social work, gender studies, and the law.

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🎞️ MIND ZONE

MIND ZONE follows therapists with the 113th Army Combat Stress Control detachment as they carry out two conflicting missions: protecting soldiers from battle fatigue and keeping these same soldiers in the fight.