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Diane Cameron
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I read Diane Cameron's story about her stepfather last summer and have been thinking about it ever since. Donald Watkins, a former Marine, returned in 1939 from military service in China and in 1953 murdered his first wife and his mother-in-law. He was sentenced to Fairview State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he remained for twenty-two years. From the foreword by William P. Nash, MD, Director of Psychological Health, United States Marine Corps:
Whether engaged in warfare, peacekeeping, or humanitarian assistance, the greatest challenges warriors face are moral rather than physical. For deployed warriors, physical dangers come and go, but moral dangers are everywhere, all the time. In the high-stakes world of the warrior, there is usually one, or perhaps just a few, right things to do in each situation. And both the cost and consequences of those right actions can be enormous. For a Marine on guard duty, the right thing is to find every threat to those being guarded and to let none pass. For a Navy corpsman tending the wounds of Marines on a battlefield, the right thing is to save every life and limb. For a China Marine in Shanghai in 1937, the right thing was to do nothing--to merely watch as thousands were raped and killed. That's not a tough job; it's an impossible job. We now know that one of the consequences of failing to live up to one's own moral expectation can be moral injury, a deep and lasting wound to one's personal identity.
At a deeper level, perhaps the warrior's challenge is more than just choosing right actions over wrong. Perhaps the most fundamental role warriors play in our society is to venture into the unclaimed territory between good and evil, to construct goodness right there on evil's doorstep, and then to defend it with their lives. To serve selflessly while others exploit, to show compassion while others are cruel, to forgive the unforgiveable--these are all ways to create goodness in the face of evil. So also is making sense of a brutal double murder that happened to decades ago in order to find and celebrate the humanity of a veteran China Marine.
Diane Cameron took a deep dive into her stepfather's life. She spent many months--years, really--digging for any bit of material that she could use to understand the particulars of his experience and to grasp how the trauma of war shaped his life. She put the pieces together with the attention and skill of an archaeologist assembling the bones of a dinosaur. Her book is a page-turner, as gripping as a suspenseful mystery novel. She moves back and forth through time as she charts her own development alongside Watkins'. As the child of someone fought with the US Army during WWII and who died before I had a chance to ask him about his service, Diane's book brings me closer to my father.
One of the more memorable passages is the following, in which Diane writes about her work as a community educator:
When I worked in community education programs, one of my jobs was to help family and community members better understand the experience of mental illness. We'd begin each session with an opening exercise that was intended to simulate the experience of schizophrenia. It begins by asking participants to work on a simple task like a jigsaw puzzle or easy crossword. While they are doing the task, the leader turns on several different radios placed around the room--each one tuned to a different station. There is a confusion of sounds and music. One of the leaders also changes the lighting, randomly turning lights on and off so that the room is alternately dimmed and brightened.
While all of this is going on, the participants have to continue their task. And as they begin to struggle to pay attention, the leader moves through the group and whispers to participants one at a time,"You look like shit," "No one cares what you think," or "These people hate you." This experience is, after a few minutes, unnerving at best, and yet it is only a fair approximation of what persistent, unscreened stimuli are like for a person with schizophrenia.
On this Memorial Day weekend, while you are thinking about those who serve, buy this book. You can do so here. Find out more about Diane Cameron here.
-- sdl
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