Why I Live Beyond

the DisUnited
States of
Northamerica

T he philosophical psychiatrist, R D Laing, was endowed

with immense courage, vision and vigour, and by reason
of his unique skills made valuable contributions to
psychiatry and caused to come to be events which startled and
disrupted long-established analysts of the mind. Laing was a
member of that mental health infantry squadron carrying out a
mission meant to clear the way for the main body of troops. His
insights into schizophrenia, the world’s most debilitating mental
disease, will never be forgotten.

Like many illustrious warriors favoured with superhuman eminence,

Laing’s first jumps, off the high board into the murky pools of the
unconscious, neurosis and psychosis, were belly flops. Heroic in
nature, Laing did not return home from battle after his preliminary
overthrows. He climbed up far above the ground again, lunged, cut
through gloomy waters, and touched bottom where he scraped his
skin and bruised his bones yet more. He went back again and again
and again and persevered, until his death, searching for something
new in the treatment of mental patients.

From page 102 to 104 in Self and Others, Laing’s masterpiece, he

talks about a little boy of five who runs to his mother holding a big
fat worm in his hand, and says, “Mommy, look what a big fat worm I
have got.” She says, “You are filthy—away and clean yourself
immediately.”
The mother’s response to the boy is an example of what Ruesch
(1958) has called a “tangential response.” In terms of the boy’s
feeling, the mother’s response is at a tangent. She does not say,
“Oh, yes, what a lovely worm.” She does not say, “What a filthy
worm—you mustn’t touch worms like that; throw it away.” In this
response there is a failure to endorse what the boy is doing. A state
of transitory confusion, anxiety or guilt might be generated in him.

Bateson, Jackson, Haley and Weakland in their article, “Toward a

Theory of Schizophrenia,” Behavioural Science (1956), discuss this
condition and term it the “double-bind” pattern. According to the
authors, the likelihood of such a configuration exists when these six
elements are present: two or more persons; repeated experience of
the state of affairs; a primary negative injunction: “Do not do this.
I will punish you if you do;” a secondary injunction conflicting with
the first at a more abstract level, and like the first, enforced by
punishment or signals which threaten survival: a negative gesture,
a tone of voice, a posture, etc; a tertiary negative injunction
prohibiting the victim from escaping from the field: false promises
of devotion, affection or love; and, the absence of these
constituents when the victim learns that his or her universe is
composed of, essentially, double-bind patterns.

The victims, in this scenario, are caught in a mesh of contradiction

between two conclusions and they cannot decide how to act or
react rationally. He or she cannot make a sane choice. The prey is
deceived and, to survive, must mislead others to protect himself or
herself. They learn to reject what is genuine, and lay blame on
what is unreal or real ridiculing as immature what might in fact be
responsible. Persons trapped in this double-bind pattern cannot
establish a sensation of genuineness with another human being.

W hen I pranced home from Vietnam in August 1968, I

began to enjoy one of the most beautiful times of
my life: I had made it home successfully--alive! I
was in one piece and had not been seriously wounded or maimed! I
had read seventy-two books in Vietnam where I had not wasted one
moment! Vietnam had not brought me to the nightmares of mental
instability, and if people want to say I am “crazy” nonetheless, I tell
them I was the way I am long before my tour in Southeast Asia!
Good comes from Bad; Bad comes from Good. Perhaps the most
fortuitous souvenir—what I cherish the most—that I hold from the
horrible twelve months I passed in the Central Highlands with the
Snowflake Division near the Cambodian and Laotian borders (Pleiku,
Kontum and Dak To), and in the Chu Lai and My Lai locales of the
Americal’s area of operations, is this: My life had been threatened
so many times that when I came back to New York and set off to
unwind so as to become a normal person all over again, I was so
exultant that the tension of combat had been eliminated, I stayed in
a secret state of euphoria for months. And from that day, I have
valued my life the more—certainly much more because it had been
put in jeopardy by elements beyond the expectations of my own
wishes.

There were a couple of “Welcome Home from the War” gestures

from relatives and friends, and I’ll never forget the doorman at the
Essex House who greeted me with a “Welcome home, Lieutenant,”
gave me my room number, saluted me, and pointed the way to
where I found a complimentary bottle of champagne and a bowl of
fruit. After a pair of weeks passed by, I “escaped” to Florida. I had
to get out of New York and I followed my plan, formulated in
Vietnam, to do so. I did not really comprehend at that time why I
had to break away from my much-loved New York. I would
understand later on.
It did not take me long to gather that I had achieved the status of
having a new unsavoury reputation: Vietnam Veteran. In fact, my
relatives were the first to hint to me that my service to my country
was of dubious make-up. I was told, flat out: “The Army screwed
you, you should screw the Army!” I was dumbfounded when it was
suggested that I fake back pain, go to a VA hospital, and obtain a
lifelong disability check! I think it was this mind-set which
instigated in me the predisposition to reflect at that time upon the
level-headedness of the United States of America—and quite
seriously so. I had to know why my fellow countrymen and women
thought they deserved to have their cake and eat it, too! And I
wanted to know why I was being wedged into a double bind state of
being.

Outside of closed social circles, Vietnam was not a subject

habitually broached with Vietnam veterans, accordingly I had to
rummage around the mass media and, in particular, political
journals and other outlets of enlightenment which replicated the
thoughts of my confreres. I speculated that, in the 1960s and
1970s, about sixty percent of my fellows disapproved of what I
represented because I “killed babies,” and forty percent approved
of me for doing so. An outlandish emotional rift.

The fact of the matter is that I did not kill in Vietnam. I state this
unequivocally and to the best of my knowledge. I soldiered as an
artillery 1193 and even though defective projectiles and inaccurate
maps frequently complicated, to an inordinate degree, our missions
as I “humped” with the grunts on the battlefield, I, personally,
cannot refer to an incident in which I was involved killing people
with artillery or any other armament. I heard that one erratic
artillery shell had slayed nine American soldiers because the Fire
Direction Officer had confused an “8” with a “3;” moreover, on my
first day out to the field in close proximity to the Fourth Division
Base Camp, we were “attacked” by a volley of our own 155mm
rounds which set our company into such a state of terror and
turmoil that, to my utter amazement, it caused one grunt to fall to
the ground—in the foetal position, his M-16 discarded—praying with
rosary beads wrapped through his fingers. What had I done to
merit this lunacy?

The folly did not terminate there for me. Years later I would hear on
CNN that during the Vietnam “War” an almost 70% of United States’
military personnel were killed or maimed in Vietnam by mines, and
that 90% of these armaments were US military ordnance! And I can
believe it. Whenever I was transferred to a different artillery unit, I
came into the red leg fold asking: “What’s the dud rate here?”
30%? 40%? 50%? It is certainly true that exceptional
meteorological “tricky situations” compromised the accuracy of our
FDC calculations, yet no one can deny that the haste—it makes
waste—to join in on the economic boom (remember the 1962
recession?) which exemplified the Vietnam “War,” caused
projectiles to be manufactured with substandard worth. When
these rounds were converted into booby traps by our clever enemy,
the results could be sordid. As an artillery battalion liaison officer
flying with the battalion CO in his C&C Huey, we often swooped
down to a grunt broken into pieces by a booby trap, and then
MEDIVACed him to the nearest field hospital where maintenance
crews hosed off the blood on the helicopter’s floor before we were
able to return for more.
The My Lai area was notorious for the percentage of booby traps it
secreted. Imagine. You are marching with your buddy through rice
paddies when, in a flash, you see him go flying with members of his
body slashed or gone astray. You can’t find a way to embrace a
fond affection for the Vietnam people; and, you have to be a finicky
person not to want to seek out a vendetta. Nineteen-year-olds
cannot be depended upon to discriminate judiciously especially
when under pressure. (I was a university graduate, with a degree in
philosophy, and it was hard enough for me to weigh up at times
these niceties, but not even a ten-star general could have ordered
me to kill women and children and old folk—even in a ditch.) I have
no condolences for Lieutenant Calley because all of us—arriving in-
country—read and signed that we read the Geneva Convention and
division memos instructing us how to treat prisoners of war and
Vietnamese nationals. The United States’ government and the
United States Army commanded us to behave in one way (CYA:
Cover Your Ass!), and when we did not, they turned their backs on
what was dishonourable and not above-board making out of the
Vietnam conflict something that it unquestionably was not: a
righteous initiative, one to be satisfied about supporting. A double
bind state of mind?

For the Vietnam veteran this forked tonguing was remarkably crass
when he or she returned home to the United States. They knew
very well the shenanigans that had gone on in Vietnam, and to be
thought of as a loser in a war which Americans did not cheer on but
made profit of by benefiting from the business enveloping it, was
truly more than a let-down. Some veterans could not bear the
rebuff that awaited them and they blew away their minds and
bodies, or their schizoid fellow citizens, in tragic acts of violence.
The history of the Vietnam veteran is well-documented, but I have
never seen price estimates for the heart-rending damage he or she
caused not only for themselves, but also for the victims of their
post-war violence—the divorces they were involved in, the crimes
they were sent to prison for, the alcohol and drug abuse their family
members suffered with them, and so many other dynamics which
enter into the fiscal tabulation of this national calamity. And make
no mistake about it, the Vietnam veteran might be loaded down
with diagnostic lingo and syndromes and other descriptions of
maladaptive behaviour, but no one will ever consider as being
mentally unbalanced those who sent him off to that insane police
action that did the United States of America more harm than
benefit.
When I left the United States for good in 1975, I knew it was on a
catastrophic course. I had not the words to say what I wanted to
explain. I had to test my premonitions and had to contrast them
with the viewpoints of others who were not Americans. I grasped
that the United States was ripped in two, although I never then
imagined that it would continue to cultivate a “split personality”
which would advance it to continually enlarge the chasm that
polarized it further and further. Today we have Red States and Blue
States, and no one has thought to mix red and blue together to get
violet—the colour of wretchedness and introversion. Americans are
fighting to be happy and they are so desperate to be so they will
even laugh, with a knee-jerk, at the overworked jokes of a David
Letterman.

The United States learned not much from Vietnam except how to
make sure that the atrocious errors, embarrassing for them, they
committed there would not be duplicated in future hostilities. That
is why the US Army is a voluntary organization today! It is more
martial than it ever was. Its regime is wielded throughout the globe
with fear and not the yearning to be respected. (The Americans are
a wonderful people—if they aren’t bombing you!) The Yankee is not
regarded even as a benevolent dictator, and he is truly hated when
his barter ($$$) stops circulating. It does not flabbergast me one
iota that Gore Vidal, or anyone else for that matter, could conceive
of a book entitled The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. The
United States of America is sliding down The Tubes.
Northamericans, out of despondency, have become awful losers
yet they persist in alleging that they are redoubtable winners. Just
another double bind stance—one they are very much accustomed
to.

I don’t want to be with a failure—especially one that does not have

the courage to penetrate its own limitations. Old Glory is hemmed
in. As the years pass, it will draw more and more into itself. The
United States is in a pitiable state and has not the expertise to
release itself from its own desolation. I want to be happy; I do not
want to live with a nation pretending to be so. I refuse to live in the
United States of America the more because it did not afford me the
chance to become a hero for it when I served it in Vietnam. I feel
that I was betrayed. How could I ever stand up erect at a baseball
or football game and sing with others “The Star-Spangled Banner?”
I would have to wait outside. I can only wish the United States of
America a hearty “Good Luck.” It’s going to need it. And I ask the
United States of America only one thing: that the renunciation of
my citizenship, sitting on the desk of the consulate general in
Florence, Italy since 1994, be approved by the Department of State
immediately.
Authored by Anthony St. John

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