PTSD and Folk Therapy: Everyday Practices of American Masculinity in the Combat Zone explores how men in the military, mostly during the U.S. conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, utilize a variety of “vernacular” or “everyday practices” as self-therapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other combat-related stresses. The book is a collaboration between John Paul Wallis, a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, and Jay Mechling, a senior scholar of American Studies and folklore.
The authors focus primarily on men in the military who navigate the heavily masculine military culture steeped in violence and dominance while struggling with the emotional challenges that combat inevitably invokes. The central argument is that a number of the “everyday practices” of men during combat that might on the surface seem to be superficial or for pleasure serve deeper psychological purposes. These forms of “self-therapy” help men survive the duress of wartime, for example, feelings of fear, sadness, and grief, emotions that are discouraged in the mainstream socializing of American boys and men.
The book is divided into two sections. The first, Cultural Contexts, Trauma, and Therapy, consists of two chapters. In “The Socialization of American Boys; or, from Boys to Men, from Play Soldiers to Real Soldiers,” the authors position the masculine culture in the military within the larger context of how American boys are socialized, often within all-male groups, into normative ideals of masculinity, where the emotions that are allowed, or encouraged, are those associated with anger and violence, while those deemed soft or feminine are actively suppressed. The chapter ends with a brief discussion distinguishing the biological make-up and socialization of American girls and women, thus alluding to how women are situated differently from men within military culture. Chapter 2, “Male Vernacular Culture as Therapy in the Combat Zone,” offers some information about the prevalence of PTSD within the military along with background information about “folk therapy” and more formalized therapeutic strategies used to treat PTSD.
Each chapter in the second part of the book, Folklore Genres, examines one type of cultural phenomenon and analyzes how it can contribute to “self-therapy.” The authors’ generalized descriptions and analyses come from their review of memoirs by (mostly male) combat veterans, documentary films, press and vernacular photography, Wallis’s personal experiences, and some scholarship. A strength of the book is that their selection of “everyday practices” extends outside of what might typically be given attention in a study of either military mental health or folklore, which yields insights into the creativity and psychology of male troops at war. In the chapter “Animal Companions” the authors explain that, as in civilian life where pets and service dogs can have therapeutic value to those with emotional challenges, troops often turn to dogs (work and stray) during their deployments for friendship and support. In “Rough-and-Tumble Playfighting” the authors examine social interactions amongst male troops that occur within a “play frame,” which masks the deeper conscious and subconscious work being done. Video gaming at war, the subject of chapter 5, contributes to male bonding, allows for sexual play (often tied to violence), and provides an escape from stress. Chapter 6, “The Jack Shack,” establishes male masturbation as not just a solitary activity, but part and parcel of military culture as is evidenced by its popularity in folk speech, chants, songs, stories, and games. As with most of the chapters, they tack on here a section about women in which they explain that they don’t have enough evidence from women’s testimony to say much about their solo sexual adventures. The final chapter, “Dark Play and Deep Play,” analyzes a range of male troops’ behavior from “black humor or gallows humor” to self-harming to playing with corpses and body parts. The analysis spans troops using these behaviors to manage and process difficult experiences, express conflicting emotions, or otherwise contend with PTSD. In their conclusion, the authors state that without access to adequate formal therapies while in combat, troops consciously or unconsciously engage in these types of activities, which “survive in the folk groups of the warriors because they actually provide some therapeutic relief” (139).
The authors situate the book within the interdisciplinary field of American Studies and rely primarily on the analysis of existing texts in addition to Wallis’s personal experiences. My bias as a folklorist and ethnographer causes me to aver that ethnographic fieldwork beyond Wallis’s personal experience would have yielded a deeper and more nuanced analysis. Many of the generalizations about men do not account for the multiplicities of both masculinities within the military and experiences during war. For example, they do not attend to differences between men across race/ethnicity, rank, branch, sexual orientation, gender identity, personality, and so on. I appreciate that the authors state openly in their introduction that the book is about men. I wish that they had stuck to that and omitted the paragraphs about women, which mostly explain that they do not have enough information to say much. What I appreciate most about the book was that it is co-authored by a combat veteran (who was an undergraduate when the two first met) and a senior scholar, a type of collaboration that is relatively rare in the field and that yielded a productive analysis from a variety of subject positions.
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[Review length: 879 words • Review posted on September 25, 2020]