Veterans Mark
Thomas, left, and
Gary McMahon
bond over coffee
after a M4M’s
dawn workout.‘‘They are not taught how to deal with the
trauma of actually killing another human”
Many veterans who’ve felt adrift report
that at the root of their troubles is not trauma
but a hypercritical view of the society to
which they’ve returned. To understand
how that comes about, you need to revisit
their basic training, where the process of
transforming them into entities useful to the
task of fighting wars begins.
At a café in Sydney’s CBD I break bread
with former soldier Lloyd (not his real name),
now thriving in the corporate world. Like
Goodman, Melbourne-raised Lloyd enlisted
straight out of school and showed up at
Kapooka green and keen.
“Essentially, what the military does
is break you down,” he says. There’s the
physical transformation: you discard
the clothing and hairstyle that signal
personal taste for the homogenising green
or camouflage uniform and buzz cut. “At
the same time the army instills absolute
discipline. The values of the institution
- teamwork, self-sacrifice, moral courage
- are drummed into you.”
Which is all well and good. Until your
warrior days are over and you have to become
a regular guy again.
Lloyd crash-landed in a Melbourne
university. “I found myself surrounded
by people – anarchists, political activists,
gay people – who seemed to be openly
challenging the values I’d lived by,” he says.
Disorientation gripped him. Was everything
he’d absorbed while in the army still relevant?
“WasIrelevant?”
For 18 months civilian life felt too alien
to bear, and Lloyd made two halfhearted
attempts to re-enlist. Only with the support
of friends did he eventually resolve to stick
it out as a civilian.
But not all ex servicemen can pull off the
readjustment. Seemingly minor irritations- slow drivers; being blocked from using a
piece of gym equipment by show-offs talking
crap; people eating, speaking on the phone or
using Facebook while someone in authority
is addressing them; slovenly dress; imprecise
language – can infuriate veterans steeped in
self-discipline and efficiency.
“The fact these things are tolerated is very
hard to compute when you’ve had years of
a very clear standard,” says Heath Christie,
the lead psychologist at Mates4Mates. “I
work with Vietnam vets who are exactly
as regimented as someone who’s been
discharged for 12 months. Breaches make
them frothing mad and it doesn’t change over
time. That’s how effective the training is.”
SON, IF IT WAS UP TO ME...
Like John Rambo and the forlorn hero in
Springsteen’s Born in the USA, Goodman
couldn’t land work when he came home. “I
was an awesome soldier,” he says, not with
conceit but a sense of loss. “And I loved it. I
got along with everyone. Everyone got along
with me. I had a bit of respect in the place.”
A “ridiculous” number of applications
yielded two interviews. “I couldn’t get a
job on a council. I couldn’t get a job as abarman or in a gym. I couldn’t get a job
doing anything.” The feeling of fading as a
worthwhile being had a physical corollary:
once a granite-like 90 kilograms, he shrunk to
74kg at his nadir. Rage. Anxiety. Depression.
“I had it all. Big time.”
There was a time, says Soldier On’s Bale,
when employers looked favourably upon
returned servicemen. These days, however,
a gulf has opened up between them and the
rest of us that can leave veterans feeling
discarded, like a spent cartridge.
“We don’t understand them. There’s a
stigma that exists around them,” argues Bale,
a former signal corps officer. Sometimes
the obstacle to hiring is the ex serviceman’s
fragile mental state. Just as often employers
hold to some movie-fuelled conception of
veterans “as stiff, rigid, authoritarian and not
able to work within a business environment,”
Bale says.
But is that always a misconception?
Psychologist Christie says many veterans
deplore the work habits of civilians: the
coming in late and unshaven, the smokos
and badmouthing of the boss. “These are all
violations of the standards of military life,
so they leave thinking, ‘There you go: these
civvies don’t understand me’ – and they
bounce from job to job.”
Among the hundreds of submissions to
the Senate inquiry is a standout from Sarah
Perkins, the wife of a “TPI” (totally and
permanently incapacitated) veteran who
served in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“His experience as a highly competent,116 MAY 2017