Myth, Memory and the National Mall
Part One of Seven
A shorter version of this essay appeared in Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche, in August, 2008
You can’t stop me. I spend 30,000 men a month. — Napoleon
Richard Johnson, an infantry captain in the U.S. Army, came ashore in the first wave on Omaha Beach, D-Day, 1944. He served with distinction throughout World War Two, participating in several major battles, losing many friends. At war’s end he returned home in triumph, went to college on the G.I. Bill and started a family. He rose to become the C.E.O. of a major corporation and retired after a full and productive career. He was feted as a member of the “Greatest Generation”.
Then Johnson drank himself to death in two years. He had been able to avoid confronting his war trauma for as long as possible, but in the end the memories overwhelmed him. Was his death a suicide? As we will see, there are no simple answers. Regardless, the soul has found other ways to defeat memory.
Alzheimer’s disease – the plague of forgetfulness – increased 220% from 1994 to 2003 to become the nation’s seventh-leading cause of death. Between 2000 and 2021, while deaths from stroke, heart disease and HIV decreased, reported deaths from AD increased by over 140%. In 2021, nearly 7 million were living with it and 120,000 died of it. Total payments in 2024 for health care, long-term care and hospice services for elders with various forms of dementia reached $360 billion.
Some attribute its increase to changes in reporting and better diagnosis. Others link an expanding senior population – due to people living longer than ever before – to the growing numbers afflicted. At age 65, a person has a one in ten chance of contracting Alzheimer’s; but by 85, those chances increase to one in two. Certainly, an aging population is a major factor. But why this particular population?
A psychologist friend of mine worked at Veterans’ Administration hospitals his entire career, mostly with Viet Nam vets. But in the late-1980s, he noticed a new trend: large numbers of World War II vets, most for the first time, were requiring psychotherapy. The timing was curious. Their war had been over for two generations. It was the last “good war,” a crusade that had liberated enslaved Europe and Asia.
They had won their war, decisively, and had returned as heroes, having lived out, as cultural historian Fred Turner writes, “the masculine prescriptions of American mythology”. Unlike the soldiers of the next generation, however, they hadn’t spoken much about their war, except amongst themselves. And they’d returned to a bustling economy, to which most had contributed forty years of productive engagement. They’d worked hard, very hard. Having bought homes, raised families, and served their communities, they were now contemplating or experiencing well-deserved retirement.
Perhaps some had worked so hard to keep their minds on positive things – and to avoid memories of Anzio, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal or the liberation of the Nazi death camps.
In fact, 20-30% of their nonfatal casualties had been psychiatric; over 500,000 had been sent home with battle fatigue (previously known as shell shock, nostalgia, neurasthenia, irritable heart or soldier’s heart). And at the beginning of that war, of 300,000 disabled World War One veterans, some 50,000 had been still hospitalized for psychiatric illnesses. By 1943, writes Penny Coleman, “the number of psychiatric discharges exceeded the number of new enlistees”.
By the late 1940s, the psychiatric casualties of World War II, combined with those left over from the previous war, had swelled the asylum and hospital populations…According to the VA, its 102,000 hospital beds were filled, and 20,700 patients were waiting for admission. Fully 60% of the postwar VA patients were psychiatric.
My psychologist friend theorized that many of old men he was treating had come to the VA because for the first time they had time, too much of it, and the old memories were flooding their minds. It was a mass case of what Freud called “the return of the repressed.”
For decades, some had struggled with the need to share their pain – and the shame of doing so. Dr. Judith Herman, another therapist who has worked extensively with trauma victims, writes, “The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma”. She quotes one vet who admitted decades after the war, “When we got out, you couldn’t talk about things like that…You held it all in. I didn’t want to take it to my family…If you’d say anything, people wouldn’t believe half of what you say, anyway.”
The timing was curious for several other reasons. Just as Alzheimer’s was attaining the status of household word, President Ronald Reagan was pursuing four very public initiatives to influence the attitudes and beliefs of Americans. First, he was encouraging white males to perceive themselves as victims of liberals, feminists, minorities and big government. Second, he was scaring the hell out of the nation with apocalyptic scenarios of communism and nuclear war. Government needed to be reduced, he argued, except for the “Defense” Department. Third, he was skillfully articulating the national myth of innocence:
I know all the bad things that happened in that war. I was in uniform four years myself… By the time I got out of the Army Air Corps, all I wanted to do – in common with several million other veterans – was to rest up awhile, make love to my wife, and come up refreshed to a better job in an ideal world.
Reagan, who had remained in Hollywood during World War II, insisted that he’d personally photo-graphed the liberation of Nazi death camps. Only his adoring fans believed such easily-discounted mendacity – or perhaps this was a case of what Trumpus’ crowd would experience 40 years later: taking the man seriously but not literally, as liberals would take him literally but not (until too late) seriously. True to Hollywood standards, in Where’s the Rest of Me?, Reagan’s official biographer Edmund Morris dramatized his life with several invented characters, complete with fake footnotes.
But to mythologists, Reagan’s heroic fantasy was a unique form of memory, composed of scenes from movies he had watched and cowboy novels he’d read, tales of black-and-white morality in which Americans (white Americans) were always, unmistakably good guys. Reagan – who, it is said, kept meticulous diaries – would later tell investigators that he couldn’t remember his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Having just endured two decades of urban rebellion, offensives to public morality and challenges to their white male privileges, many World War II vets were happy to watch Reagan confuse memory and myth – while pursuing his fourth initiative. A decade after the end of the Viet Nam War, the U.S. was once again extending itself, claiming to defend democracy in Central America, Indonesia, Africa and the Middle East. To do so, however, the administration needed to reverse the “Viet Nam Syndrome” of public disgust at military intervention. Its invasion of the tiny island of Grenada, allegedly to rescue innocent American students, began two days after the terrorist bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon.
The timing was curious. Following the new popularity of Civil War battle reenactments, people had recently begun to reenact World War II battles as well. The nation had finally begun discussing AIDS, despite Reagan’s refusal to act. And millions were deeply concerned about prisoners of war. Polls showed that 69% of Americans believed that hundreds of American prisoners and others “missing in action” were still being held in Southeast Asian prisons.
This mass compulsion had begun much earlier. Within a week of his 1969 inauguration, Richard Nixon had introduced the MIA/POW subject into the Paris peace negotiations and soon made it a major issue. Two months later, he’d launched a massive drive to convince the public that the North Vietnamese were mistreating American prisoners, and the public had quickly responded. In 1970 alone, the post office had issued 135 million POW/MIA stamps. Between four and ten million had worn POW/MIA bracelets, vowing never to remove them until all Americans were accounted for.
In 1972 Nixon had changed the official name of Veterans Day to Prisoner of War Day. It was an easy right-wing rallying point. And it was also “an ingenious tool for building insurmountable roadblocks within the peace talks”, according to historian H. Bruce Franklin, who argued that each President from Nixon to Clinton manipulated the myth of the POWs for his own ends, until it finally became econo-mically expedient to drop the issue and engage in lucrative trade with Viet Nam.
Hollywood was producing immensely popular revenge fantasies. Rambo, First Blood, Part I was released in 1982 and Part II (in which Rambo asks, “Do we get to win this time?”) in 1985. Eventually, dozens of such films would feature American POWs, many of them deliberately inverting reality to portray Americans being tortured by bloodthirsty Vietnamese. “Rescuing POWs from the evil Vietnamese Communists,” wrote Franklin, “now became almost a rite of passage for Hollywood heroes.” Meanwhile, an estimated one million men were reading Soldier of Fortune Magazine and imagining themselves as paramilitary warriors. Viet Nam vets were speaking for the first time about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which had not been included in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a legitimate mental condition until 1980. Despite the tens of thousands of war vets filling up the VA hospitals, writes Morgan Godvin,
When the first DSM was published in 1952, it contained a temporary psychiatric disorder called “gross stress reaction.” By the time the second DSM was published in 1968…even that had been removed. Whether the Veterans Administration wanted to reduce their financial liability to Vietnam veterans or it was truly regarded as a nonspecific and/or nonclinical diagnosis is unclear. For the duration of the war, not a single diagnosis relating to stress exposure was ever accepted in the DSM…VA disability claims alleging psychological injury as a result of combat were resoundingly denied. Therapists at the VA avoided talking with their patients about what had occurred overseas since the dominant belief was that couldn’t be to blame for their psychological disturbance.
During the 1980s countless civilians were publicly confronting childhood trauma (often called false memory by their detractors). The recovery, 12-step, and self-help movements in general attained their greatest popularity. The Courage To Heal, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, on recovery from child-hood sexual abuse, was on its way to selling over a million copies.
And, in late 1982, after tremendous public controversy, the Viet Nam Veterans’ Memorial had been finally dedicated on Washington’s National Mall, sparking the first Welcome Home parades for Viet Nam vets. A nation with a forward-looking mythology was grudgingly speaking about the past. Memory was in the air, even as many old vets were losing theirs.
In 1988, the POW/MIA flag became the only flag besides the stars and stripes to be displayed over the White House, where it remains. Visitors to the Capitol Rotunda viewed another giant POW/MIA flag, the only flag that has ever been displayed amid the epic paintings and heroic statues. Since 1997 it has been flying over every U.S. post office. Every one of the states has mandated its display over public facilities such as state offices, municipal buildings, toll plazas, and police headquarters. It also hangs over the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange and waves at countless corporate headquarters, shopping malls, union halls and fraternal organizations such as the VFW, Elks, American Legion, and the Knights of Columbus. It is sewn into the right sleeve of the official Ku Klux Klan robe and adorns millions of bumper stickers, buttons, windows, motorcycle jackets, watches, post cards, coffee mugs, T-shirts, and Christmas-tree ornaments. By 1993, seventeen Americans (with a budget of $100 million/year) would be stationed in Hanoi to search for the missing and repatriate their remains.
But what about those older vets? Had Time, in the form of retirement – otherwise known as mandated uselessness – caught up with them? With time on their hands, many could no longer hold back the flood of war memories and were finally acknowledging that they needed help.
Perhaps others found a different solution: Alzheimer’s wiped away the terrible images forever. “Forgetting,” wrote psychologist James Hillman, “that marvel of the old mind, may actually be the truest form of forgiveness, and a blessing.” But this blessing came with its own special curse. When Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, departs, what remains in awareness is up to her, not to us. Allowing the painful memories to slip away, the old men may have been losing touch with good ones as well. As the poet Ranier Maria Rilke had once feared, losing one’s demons also risks losing one’s angels.
Mythologist Michael Meade has suggested that when a culture forgets its elders, the elders forget themselves. The old men had spent their lives working hard, some perhaps, to keep from crying, and now they were being cast aside to gated communities and golf courses, or worse, to old-age homes. Ironically, the exile of the elderly mirrored another one: hundreds of thousands of inner-city youth were being cast into prison, mostly for nonviolent drug offenses.
Although researchers still search for an organic cause for Alzheimer’s, we can also imagine the disease as a choice made at some level by certain traumatized psyches, a response to the return of the repressed.
Finally, we may see the sudden rise in the incidence of Alzheimer’s as a metaphor for national denial and the refusal to reimagine stories that have outlived their usefulness. The myth of American innocence is composed of a series of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. It reconciles the contradictions between our ideals of democracy, freedom, opportunity and individualism and the violent, conformist realities of racism and empire. This myth allows us, indeed encourages us, to forget.