Down Around Midnight by Robert Sabbag

Author:Robert Sabbag
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

I do not dismiss the value of therapy—I didn’t question my fellow survivors about any help they might have sought—but I have trouble taking it seriously in the forum it has come to exploit. Individual therapy has measurable benefits, and I assume group therapy, in support of it, has its salutary effects. But therapy has lately transgressed the limits of the group, and grief and trauma counseling have gone public. Recovery today is entertainment.

In this, the age of information oversupply, the age of celebrity without delay, has the willingness to step forward opened us up to what is perhaps a more salubrious way of dealing with trauma? The experts tell me no. Such scrutiny so distorts the experience as to render any of the benefits of openness trifling. Talking does seem to come naturally at times, and in its way may be therapeutic, but such talk is not necessarily driven by a need for therapy; it’s simply instinctive. Instinctive in certain circumstances. It’s not instinctive in the company of strangers. War stories are rare even among intimates. Veterans, we know, don’t talk to their spouses about combat. They don’t share such memories with their children, not even, in my experience, when those children reach adulthood. All I know of what my father saw in the South Pacific I gleaned from the albums compiled by my mother of the photographs he had sent home with his letters, pictures more atmospheric of the Broadway musical of that name than of the drama that was playing out in places like Guadalcanal. War stories, when they are shared at all, are typically traded by comrades, understandable and fully explicable only when growing out of the common experience of brothers-in-arms. Coming from that guy sitting alone at the other end of the bar, they are a symptom of dissociative behavior.

“You run into guys, in various stages . . . they haven’t left there yet,” my friend Kevin Roberts tells me.

I’ve known Kevin for some thirty years now. We’ve experienced a lot together, most of it good, some of it bad, the worst of it his. There’s not a lot we don’t talk about. “There” is Vietnam, where he served with the U.S. Marines about fifteen years before he and I met. In all the years we’ve been friends, we’ve never talked about that. When he and other veterans cross paths, they don’t talk about it much either.

“ ‘When were you there, where were you?’—and that’s about as far as it goes. It certainly never gets into combat.”

Calling upon such memories outside intimate circles is seldom rewarded, though there are circumstances in which doing so is entirely natural. In discussion of a plane crash reported in the news, or in discussion of air travel in general, I, for example, am not averse to bringing some perspective to the exchange of ideas.

“The reason she wants you to raise your seat back,” I might notify the argumentative passenger reclining in front of me, “is not for your safety, it’s for mine.

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