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

Planes 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 is willing to tell you their deepest, darkest, most intimate secrets. Now the funny thing is that I'm in the business of keeping secrets. A few years ago I was on a flight to Little Rock to talk to a group of

soldier

s who were about to deploy to combat and I was sitting next to a gentleman who was interested in the fact that I worked for the Department of Defense and therefore that he told me a story about his best friend Jason now Jason was an amazing saxophonist 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 asked him what are you going to do and Jason proudly held his head high, stuck out his chest, and said, "I've received a distinguished honor.

I'm going to play in the Marine Corps band." He came this graduation, the war broke out in Iraq and when Jason went to Iraq. They didn't send it with his saxophone. He was manning a fifty caliber machine gun on top of a Humvee and while they were clearing the road, the first person to run out of a ditch with a gun was a little boy and Jason said, "I don't do it." I don't want to kill any children and his fellow Marines say that would take him out so he looked at the Humvee and said it again I don't want to kill any children and they told him Marine, do what you were

trained

to do. and now in this story saying that every night when Jason goes to sleep the face he sees is that little boy's face so how little audience participation do I need to breathe today?

The question I want to ask you is what do you do? you think the correlation is between deployment they are going to fight a war what is the correlation between deployment and suicide your options are going to be there is a high correlation there is a medium correlation or there is a low correlation I want everyone to participate how many people think thinking In that Jason story that there is a high correlation between deployment and suicide how many of you think there is a medium correlation between deployment and suicide and then how many of you think 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 I want to teach you is that there is no correlation between deployment and suicide.

What that simply means is that there are as many

soldier

s who die by suicide as there are who have deployed and left. to war like those soldiers who have never gone to war there is a reason for this and shortly I will 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 cry. It must allow you to speak and feel pain. It should be allowed to be shared today. I want to give you some ideas that might help you understand the emotional strengths that soldiers and veterans learn to build, but you don't have to wait until you join the military to start practicing what we think it is. like that 70's movie when a stranger calls you know she's alone in the house and now she's making these threatening phone calls of course this was before caller id it would have been a short movie but in one of the calls he's on We phone the police and they say we've traced the call, the call is coming from inside the house, so the military is just reinforcing something they taught us a long time ago, which is simply that men They don't cry when a girl falls. and his knee hurts, we talk out loud, oh my baby, it's okay, let me kiss that boo-boo, oh, can I put a band-aid on it?

But when a toddler falls, the message is very different, we say things like get up and stop crying because children don't cry or, worse yet, we say things like get up and stop crying before I give you something to cry about, that's why the military has endless versions of this in these versions, hang in there, drink water, drive, there are even people who when we lose a loved one would tell us to work hard so we can be strong for someone else a few days ago I saw a red shirt to err is human to forgive divine neither of which is Marine Corps policy as a The drill sergeant put it: I can't teach two things at the same time, either I'm teaching you to be tough or I'm teaching you to be decisive and we're not trying of creating a soft army, so the lesson we learn is that soldiers don't know when they can start talking about their problems.

I was at Fort Hunter Liggett in California a few months ago and a retired command sergeant major stood up, in civilian clothes, and said, "you can talk once you retire sir, once you retire, it's not always the obvious things." the ones that can take us out until recently, the Department of Veterans Affairs reported that we were losing 22 veterans a day to suicide, the new figures suggest that we are losing 20 veterans a day, that is still 7,400 veterans that we lose each year to suicide and those 7,400 veterans that we lost in 2014, 70% were not receiving services from the VA, so the first thing I taught them is that there is no correlation between deployment and suicide, so soldiers do not commit suicide due to deployment, the Soldiers do not commit suicide because they are afraid of the enemy and soldiers in war hope to return home, but once home, some soldiers ask to return to war in a study I did with other military researchers.

At Fort Bragg, looking at suicides in the Army Reserve, we found that there were three main stressors that were present in the majority of the suicides we investigated: the first stressor was relationship problems, the second was financial problems, and The third was legal problems, so Now that we know what lethal stressors look like, how do we defeat them? Or first let's see what we know about soldiers. They are not good at asking for help. They use camouflage that allows them to hide in plain sight. They are capable? to hide their feelings, emotions, pain and sadness in plain sight, soldiers are not allowed to spread themselves, the mission always comes first and soldiers do not always have someone to share their experience with.

My experience with soldiers and veterans is that soldiers like to talk to others. to soldiers about their experiences. Veterans like to talk to other veterans about their experiences, and because we think they are strong, we don't always do a good job checking in with them to see how they are doing and despite what we have been through. I was told that soldiers are not invincible, so although soldiers are not afraid of dying, some soldiers find it difficult to find a reason to continue living. I love the line from the movie A Few Good Men where Jack Nicholson tells the truth, you can't handle the truth, but I want to go 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 killing is no fun in war. It's not fun to say you have a problem. It can be a punishable offense and when soldiers and veterans commit suicide it is rarely because they went to war. Here is the secret. The reason there is no correlation between deployment and suicide is because of the change that takes place. This happens long before they leave boot camp or basic training. In my opinion, there are a couple of things that the military takes out of every soldier and every Marine that they never give back.

The first thing is empathy, the ability to care about how another person feels about me now, that makes sense, how can you take a man's life if you're thinking about his family, if you're thinking about his little daughter or his elderly mother he is caring for? a certain degree of emotional numbness and while that is effective in combat, it is not necessarily effective in your marriage, while the army does not take away a soldier's will to live, it takes away some of their enthusiasm for life in the process of instilling emotional numbness into preparation. to kill, so I know soldiers who have difficulty feeling, who have difficulty loving, because they have prepared themselves to avoid pain and pain.

The second thing the military gets from soldiers is the comfort of

being

able to ask for help when you have a problem. soldiers the penalty for saying they have a problem like post-traumatic stress disorder is real the consequences are real they could lose their security clearance there are opportunities for promotion they could be limited their weapon could be taken away they could be declared unfit for duty and in They could ultimately be medically excluded from the military and just because the soldier is no longer in the Armed Forces doesn't mean he still doesn't think like a soldier after years of

being

told to drink water and drive.

It's hard for veterans to ask for help. The third thing is not so much something the military takes but something they give and their training on how to kill secrets would not be taboo to recognize that we all have secrets. pain would not be taboo if we recognized that we all have pain problems it would not be taboo if we recognized that we all have problems so what do we do when we don't know what to do? Many times we do nothing so we teach them that there is no correlation between deployment and suicide we teach soldiers to numb themselves emotionally we teach them that it is not safe to ask for help and we have 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 task I will give you is to ask not who you healed but how you healed. Thanks for listening to you.