Trained not to cry: the challenge of being a soldier | Richard Doss | TEDxNaperville

[Music] [Applause] airplanes are interesting it's one of the few places in the world where you can sit for 90 minutes and talk to a complete stranger who's willing to tell you their deepest darkest most intimate secrets now the funny thing is that I am in secret-keeping business a few years ago I was on a flight to Little Rock to talk to a group of soldiers who were about to deploy into combat and I was sitting next to a gentleman who was interested in the fact that I worked for the Department of Defense and so he told me a story about his best friend Jason now Jason was an amazing saxophone player he could have started his own band he probably could have played in the Symphony Orchestra he could have gone to Juilliard but in his senior year people were asking him what are you going to do and Jason with pride held his head high stuck his chest out and said I've received a distinguished honor I'm going to play in the Marine Corps band this graduation came the war in Iraq broke out and when Jason went to Iraq they didn't send him with his saxophone he was Manning a fifty caliber machine gun atop a Humvee and as they were doing route clearance the first person that came running out of a ditch with a gun was a little boy and Jason said I don't want to kill no kid and his fellow Marines say it'd take him out so he looked back down into the Humvee and he said it again I don't want to kill no kid and they said Marine do what you were trained to do and now in this story by saying that every night when Jason goes to sleep the face that he sees is the face of that little boy so how what a little audience participation today I need to breathe the question that I want to ask you is what do you think the correlation is between deployment are going to combat a war what's the correlation between deployment and suicide your options are going to be there's a high correlation there's a medium correlation or there's a low correlation want everybody to participate how many people think thinking about that story of Jason that there is a high correlation between deployment and suicide how many of you think that there is a medium correlation between deployments suicide and then how many of you think that there is a low correlation between employment and suicide so most of you believe that there is a high correlation between deployment and suicide so the first thing that I want to teach you is that there is no correlation between deployment and suicide what that means simply is that there are just as many soldiers who die by suicide who have deployed are gone into war as those soldiers who have never gone into war there's a reason for this and shortly I'll tell you the reason why today I want to talk to you about why men should be allowed to cry why soldiers should be allowed to talk and pain should be allowed to be shared today I want to give you some insights that might help you understand the emotional fortresses that soldiers and veterans learn to build but you don't have to wait until you join the army to begin to practice what we believe it's like that movie from the 70s when a stranger calls you know she's in the house alone and and she's giving these threatening phone calls now of course this was before a caller ID that would've been a short movie but in one of the calls she's on the phone with the police and they say we've traced the call the call is coming from inside the house so the army simply reinforces something that we were taught a long time ago that's simply that men don't cry when a little girl falls down and hurts her knee we go into the high voice oh my baby all right let me kiss that boo-boo oh can I put a bandaid on that are we but when a little boy Falls the message is very different we say things like get up and stop crying because boys don't cry or worse yet we say things like get up and stop crying before I give you something to cry about and so the military has endless versions of this in this versions suck it up drink water drive on there are even people when we lose a loved one who would tell us to pull it together so that we can be strong for somebody else a few days ago I saw a shirt that red to err is human to forgive divine neither of which is Marine Corps policy as one drill sergeant put it I can't teach two things at the same time either I'm teaching you to be hard or I am teaching you to be solved and we ain't trying to create no soft army and so the lesson that we learn is that soldiers don't know when they can begin to talk about their problems I was at Fort Hunter Liggett in California a few months ago and a retired command sergeant major stood up erect in his civilian clothes now and he said you can talk once you retire sir once you retire it's not always the obvious things that can take us out until recently the Department of Veterans Affairs was reporting that we were losing 22 veterans a day to suicide the new numbers suggest that we're losing 20 veterans a day that's still 7400 veterans that we lose each year to suicide and of those 7400 veterans that we lost in 2014 70% was not receiving services from the VA so the first thing that I taught you is that there is no correlation between deployment and suicide so soldiers don't suicide because of the deployment the soldiers don't suicide because they're afraid of the enemy and soldiers in war look forward to coming home but once home some soldiers ask to return to war in a study that I did with other military research researchers at Fort Bragg we found in looking at suicides in the Army Reserve that there were three primary stressors that were present in most of the suicides that we investigated the first stressing was relationship problems the second stressing was financial problems and the third stressful was legal problems so now that we know what lethal stressors look like how do we defeat them or first let's look at what we know about soldiers they're not good at asking for help they wear camouflage that allows them to hide in plain sight that so - are they able to hide their feelings and emotions and pain and sorrow in plain sight soldiers are not allowed to wide the mission always comes first and soldiers don't always have somebody to share their experience with my experience with soldiers and veterans is soldiers like to talk to other soldiers about their experiences veterans like to talk to other veterans about their experiences and because we believe that they are strong we don't always do a good job of checking in on them to see how they're doing and despite what we've been told soldiers are not invincible so while soldiers are not afraid of dying some soldiers find it difficult to find a reason to keep living I love the line from the movie a few good men where Jack Nicholson says the truth you can't handle the truth but I want to take it a step further and suggest the truth we really don't want to know the truth I wonder how much fun life would be if I was constantly bombarded with the truth the truth about the military is that war is not fun killing is not fun saying that you have a problem can be a punishable offense and when soldiers and veterans die by suicide it's rarely because they went to war now here's the secret the reason that there is no correlation between deployment and suicide is because the change that takes place happens long before they ever leave boot camp or basic training in my opinion there are a couple of things that the military takes out of every soldier out of every Marine and it's something that they never really put back the first thing is empathy the ability to care about how somebody else is feeling now for me that makes sense how can you take a man's life if you're thinking about his family if you're thinking about his young daughter or his elderly mother that he's caring for to take a life requires a certain degree of emotional numbness and while that's effective in combat it's not necessarily effective in your marriage while the military doesn't take away a soldier's will to live for some it takes away their excitement for life in the process of instilling emotional numbness in preparation for killing so I meet soldiers who have difficulty feeling who have difficulty loving because they've prepared themselves to avoid hurt and sorrow the second thing that the military takes out of soldiers is comfort in being able to ask for help when you have a problem for soldiers the penalty for saying that you have a problem like post-traumatic stress disorder is real the consequences are real they could lose their security clearance there are opportunities to get promoted could be limited they could have their weapon taken they could be found unfit for duty and ultimately they could be medically boarded out of the military and just because the soldier is no longer in the Armed Forces doesn't mean that he doesn't still think like a soldier after years of being told to suck it up drink water and drive on it's hard for veterans to ask for help the third thing is not so much something that the military takes as much as it is something that it gives and it's training on how to kill secrets wouldn't be taboo to acknowledge that we all have secrets pain wouldn't be taboo if we acknowledge that we all have pain problems wouldn't be taboo if we acknowledged that we all have problems so what do we do when we don't know what to do oftentimes we do nothing so I've taught you that there's no correlation between deployment and suicide that we teach soldiers to become emotionally numb that we teach them that it's not safe to ask for help and we've taught them to kill they deserve to reconnect they deserve to love again to feel again as civilians we need to help them redefine the reasons for living the charge that I'll put to you is to ask not who did you heal but how did you heal thank you for listening you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 731,670

Rating: 4.9081841 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Social Science, Behavior

Id: WkCq6BWFBAM

Length: 18min 32sec (1112 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 06 2016