[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 3]
[House]
[Page 4004]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




THE CREATION OF A COMMISSION ON HEALING THE PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL 
                             WOUNDS OF WAR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Washington (Mr. McDermott) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, after a painful decade of war, the United 
States needs to take the time to regain its equilibrium and find peace. 
Without a formal process for acknowledging the physical and 
psychological costs of war, our collective trauma can undermine our 
country for decades.
  As Ernest Hemingway wrote:

       The killing is necessary, I know, but still the doing of it 
     is very bad for a man, and I think that, after all this is 
     over and we have won the war, there must be a penance of some 
     kind for the cleansing of us all.

  War involves staggering amounts of loss and--equally important--of 
killing. Despite great efforts by our soldiers to protect civilians, an 
overwhelming majority of casualties in modern war are innocent people. 
This incurs a deep spiritual and emotional cost to those who witness it 
and are sometimes responsible for it. Many initiatives exist that 
provide help for the men and women who have fought, but we must go 
beyond the policy initiatives. Soldiers returning from war need to 
share their experiences and unburden their souls.
  Our soldiers volunteered to serve their country in war, but they did 
not volunteer to take over the entire moral burden that comes with it. 
Our Nation needs to discuss the complicated spiritual and emotional 
obstacles faced by any society that has waged war. This is not a 
partisan debate about the rightness or wrongness of war. This is a 
national effort to take care of our soldiers by publicly sharing some 
of their burdens. We must be willing to explore the responsibility that 
comes with asking them to fight.
  In preindustrial societies, leaders were intimately involved in war, 
itself--often with a sword in hand--and religious and spiritual leaders 
were fully engaged in the aftermath. Rituals and ceremonies 
decommissioned the fighters and made the entire community conscious of 
the sacrifice. These processes are missing today, and they remain 
vitally important. The agony suffered by our veterans is vivid 
testimony: 22 veterans commit suicide every day while an average of 
almost one active duty soldier a day took his or her life in 2012. 
That's higher than in combat. Many other soldiers suffer from 
posttraumatic stress disorder, become addicted to drugs and alcohol, or 
fall into violence and prison.
  If a society fails to address these emotional and moral issues 
publicly, soldiers and vets will struggle with them privately. Many of 
them will lose that struggle and leave us all affected by their loss.
  The Nation requires concrete ways to address the wounds of the war. 
We need a national day of solemn ceremonies that acknowledge the costs 
in lives, trauma, lost limbs, families, a renewed commitment to the 
social and health issues of veterans, a discussion about national 
service for young, nonmilitary Americans, and a systematic interaction 
between combat veterans and civilians.
  I worked with Karl Marlantes, who wrote the book ``What It Is Like to 
Go to War,'' and with Sebastian Junger, who did the documentary called 
``Restrepo,'' which was about Afghanistan, in order to create this bill 
that would address these issues. We propose a commission to examine and 
articulate the spiritual challenges and to help heal the psychological 
wounds faced by a Nation emerging from a decade of war.
  We call on the President, on the Senate majority and minority 
leaders, and on the House Speaker and minority leader to appoint a 
group of distinguished citizens to explore ways to heal this society. 
The committee should include veterans, spiritual leaders, 
psychologists, journalists, maybe even a poet. It should strive to 
reach beyond the politics of war and into the true moral and emotional 
consequences that violence always incurs. It may be hard for us, but we 
must do it if we are to remain a humane society.
  Some see things as they are and ask why. I dream of things as they 
never were. The question we must ask now is: Why can't we do for our 
soldiers what needs to be done? They need to be taken home and received 
and understood by the populace for what they went and did for us.

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