{"id":49450,"date":"2013-07-11T15:19:42","date_gmt":"2013-07-11T14:19:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/flashbacks-fireworks-and-cars-that-backfire\/49450\/"},"modified":"2013-07-11T15:19:42","modified_gmt":"2013-07-11T14:19:42","slug":"flashbacks-fireworks-and-cars-that-backfire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/flashbacks-fireworks-and-cars-that-backfire\/","title":{"rendered":"Flashbacks, Fireworks\u2013and Cars that Backfire?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Public Radio International<\/i> has been doing a series on war veterans with PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. For Its 4th<\/sup> of July edition this year, Marco Werman interviewed Hannah Allam, a national correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers who did tours in Iraq as a reporter. Allam told Werman that fireworks on the 4th<\/sup> \u201ctrigger all sorts of bad memories . . . \u201c You want to \u201chit the deck,\u201d she told Werman, \u201cbecause that\u2019s what you\u2019ve been taught.\u201d<\/p>\n

Allam\u2019s story gave me flashbacks\u2013not to Vietnam in 1969 but to an anti-war march in Madison, Wisconsin in the 1980s. The march against U.S. intervention in Central America and I was in the lead contingent of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). We were just a few yards down State Street from the University campus when a group of fraternity boys threw firecrackers in front of us, hoping, we guessed, that we would embarrass ourselves by \u201chitting the deck.\u201d None of us did.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t give the incident or the flashback phenomenon much thought until working on a book about claims that Vietnam veterans had been spat on by anti-war activists. Beyond the lack of evidence that the spitting incidents over occurred, I found it curious that so many people believed the stories when many of them contained implausible details that belie their truth. Claims, for example, that spitting protesters met GIs deplaning at the San Francisco Airport could not have been true because those planes landed at military airbases.<\/p>\n

The spitting stories sharpened my interest in flashbacks because many of the stories wove the two narratives together. And like with the accounts of spat-on veterans\u2013that \u201ceveryone knows happened,\u201d even though there is virtually no evidence that they did\u2013the record of veterans \u201chitting the deck\u201d when hearing firecrackers is thin at best. In teaching college classes on post-war culture, I\u2019ve heard a dozen students recount stories of uncles or neighbors who hit the deck on the 4th<\/sup> of July, or when a beer glass drops in a bar. When asked, no students ever say they actually saw something like that and yet they all seem to \u201cknow it\u2019s true.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, like many of the spitting stories, hit-the-deck stories have ancillary details that raise suspicion. One of my favorites is the veteran who hits the deck upon hearing a car backfire. I grew up in rural Iowa in the 1950s when gasoline engines were still evolving; the older models pre-dating World War II did, indeed, occasionally backfire. But when I read years later about backfiring cars causing Vietnam veterans to hit the deck, I wondered: really, in the 1970s or 1980s? Possible, I supposed, but pretty unlikely.<\/p>\n

Like the \u201cspitting hippy-chick\u201d who supposedly met returnees from Vietnam at the San Francisco Airport, backfiring cars became a staple prop in the flashback stories; they were a kind of folklore, perhaps a form of urban legend. They represented an attempt to enhance the story, perhaps because the teller himself was less than confident in what he was telling. Like elements of exaggeration in stories always do, they made me wonder what else was wrong with story.<\/p>\n

Many of the hit-the-deck stories combine firecrackers and backfiring cars so I should not have been
\"\"<\/a>surprised that Allam\u2019s would as well. Yet, this was a journalist interviewed by a journalist so I did not expect to hear Allam say that it wasn\u2019t just fireworks that set off memories, but \u201ccars backfiring . . .\u201d Really, in 2003-05 when she says she made return trips to the States from assignments abroad? Why is this in her story? And why did PRI<\/i> editors keep it in? The issue isn\u2019t so much the veracity of the claim but her resort to half-century-old imagery popularized in post-Vietnam War lore to make a point.<\/p>\n

Allam\u2019s follow-up that hitting the deck is \u201cwhat you\u2019ve been taught\u201d is another reach for authenticity that doesn\u2019t work\u2013standard though such claims are in stories like these. As something taught (and learned), hitting the deck would have to be as much about muscle memory as anything else, an act repeated hundreds, if not thousands of times, and closely associated with sensory perceptions honed by repeated exposure to the relevant sights, sounds, and circumstances. None of that is possible, if for no other reasons than training routines not having time for that, and events in war being episodic with devices like the roadside bombs she references presenting situations that are nearly one-of-a-kind.<\/p>\n

So what are we to make of Allam\u2019s story and PRI<\/i>\u2019s willingness to air it on a day when listeners were especially impressionable to veterans\u2019 stories and news on the well-being of Americans back from war?<\/p>\n

In a 1994 article, psychiatrist Fred Frankel wrote that flashbacks are as likely to be the product of imagination as memory. The imagined experiences can be pure fantasies, thoughts inspired by the \u201cwar stories\u201d of other veterans, or the story-lines created by novelists and screenwriters and then merged with memories of actual events. The claim of a flashback can credential for listeners the real-deal combat status of a veteran, and its resemblance to scenes made familiar through popular culture can enhance its authenticity.<\/p>\n

Since the very notion of flashbacks germane to PTSD derives from the Vietnam War context, it makes sense that Werman introduced his interview with Allam with a reference to the 1989 film Born on the 4th<\/sup> of July<\/i> about Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic. At a 4th<\/sup> of July parade in his honor, the Kovic character played by Tom Cruise, experiences what Werman calls \u201ca traumatic flashback to the firefights he was part of in Vietnam.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s the hard reality of PTSD,\u201d intones Werman.<\/p>\n

No, I thought, that\u2019s Hollywood. And considerable though the reality of war and post-war adjustments written into the film by Oliver Stone may have been, there is still the question of why Vietnam remains the reference point for making sense of American wars a half-century later, and why images like backfiring cars made iconic by raconteuring Vietnam veterans still work as story-telling devices today.<\/p>\n

Like good radio journalism should, Werman\u2019s interview with Allam raised important questions. Inadvertently, in this case, the questions raised are themselves as symptomatic of American culture as of the men and women home from its current wars\u2013questions that might be as much about the unsettled memories of Vietnam as of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Jerry Lembcke<\/strong>\u00a0is Associate Professor of Sociology at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. He is the author\u00a0<\/em>of The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam<\/a>\u00a0and <\/em>\u00a0Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal<\/a>. His next book PTSD: Diagnosis or Identity in Post-empire America? is is due out in January, 2014<\/em>. He can be reached at \u00a0jlembcke@holycross.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Republished with permission from: Counterpunch<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Public Radio International has been doing a series on war veterans with PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. For Its 4th of July edition this year, Marco Werman interviewed Hannah Allam, a national correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers who did tours in Iraq as a reporter. Allam told Werman that fireworks on the 4th \u201ctrigger all sorts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-49450","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}