I Am Everywhere - Race and PTSD in Media by Max Koch

Race and PTSD in Media

Introduction

    This page serves as the catalog for my Creative Social Action Project (CSAP), which focuses on the representation of PTSD in media (real with newspapers and fictitious with movies) and how race affects said representation. The intended audience is the general American public, preferably those without much exposure to veterans or service members with PTSD. This page contains a fictional short story demonstrating how damaging inaccurate and/or unnecessarily negative media portrayals are to those suffering with PTSD, shown through an ever-shifting viewpoint of the single-entity Veteran. Beyond this page, the short story will also be shared on Wattpad, a free publishing website for independent writers, where it can shared with readers and found by hashtags. This method of displaying my research plays off of PTSD representation in film – I'm using a form of fiction to display what I've found recurrent in fiction; Someone looking for a more concrete/ professional display of information would not belong to the general public taking information about PTSD from these movies, but would more likely look into documentaries or movies specifically centered on the ailment. I instead looked into representation found in war movies, a broader and more commonly viewed category of film which most Americans have at least some experience with. With this project I hope to demonstrate how negative or inaccurate representations can affect the mental health of veterans with PTSD, encouraging the general public to be more understanding of those suffering from this disability. I also hope to encourage (vaguely, through a shifting of public understanding) media companies to portray accuracies over expectancies. The general public unexposed to real veterans and real people suffering from PTSD gathers their understandings of it from these types of media sources, which perpetuate stereotypes in a way debilitating to those seeking treatment and understanding. 

What follows is the short story "I Am Everywhere." For a detailed write-up of my research, contact me at mekoch@mail.roanoke.edu, or leave a comment under the secondary publication of I Am Everywhere on Wattpad (XerxesMax19). 

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I Am Everywhere

    I am everywhere, and yet I don’t exist. 

    I am one being, one body, the culmination of everyone from internal and external wars, all forced together into one vessel. The room around me always changes. Right now, it’s a dirty trailer, smelling of cigarette walls and dollar store booze, my clothes tattered and waxy, the shower long since abandoned. I turn and now it’s a middle-class home with fake wooden floors, the windows tinted with age, but it has a second story. I walk over to the table – there’s always a table, sometimes low by the couch or high by the door, sometimes it’s a smooth counter or a dusty workshop bench – and look at the paper. Sometimes I find them in the mailbox, sometimes on the driveway, sometimes my yard if I have one. I don’t remember the last time I signed up for a newspaper, the last time I asked, but I get them all. I feel everything they all feel, see everything they see, hear everything they hear. The papers appear on tables, desks, couches, beds. Under ashtrays and whisky bottles, folded neatly by the computer in a sterile office. 

    I’ve discovered some things in my time as this body – I don’t care enough to remember before I was this, if I ever existed before. Some things are more obvious, like the papers and news I didn’t ask for. The regional papers talk about us, the nationals talk about the government. They all talk about crime, alcohol and drugs, our disabilities. They all mention bad marriages, domestic violence, and of course, no paper would be successful without reporting on our suicides or harmful acts. Public opinion was shifting steadily, but that slowed down when the papers tried to help. “Report on the bigger issue” they said, but they blew it out of proportion, and now everyone’s scared of us. They never meet us themselves, so they rely on the media for truth, as if that’s ever worked out well. 

    I look at the newest paper on the top of the pile – this time on a small round coffee table by a lonely recliner. It’s a nice place, I think, looking around, but it’ll shift any second. Another headline about how we’re broken, or victims of something or other. I turn away. It’s no use to actually move anything, toss anything away, throw it to a fireplace, it’ll still be there until that soul decides to move it. You get used to a lot of shifting things like that. Just like you get used to the word “vet” replacing names in papers. Not that that makes it any better, most people say “vet” to mean the athletes and coaches who have been doing the same thing for thirty years, not my brothers and sisters and co-pilots who smile at the thought of returning to hell. 

    The good headlines are us moving out of homelessness, or being praised in general on one of the national appreciation days, or because we’re old and just got our high school diploma. There’s praise and thanks in our death, but nobody talks about rehab or the hospitals unless we’re violent, and they never say the dirty word, only “badly wounded” because disabilities are sinful, even to those who watched unimaginable horror to protect freedom. 

    I turn to walk down the building. It would have ended in a wall in the trailer, but now it’s a hospital, burning my lungs with alcohol and antiseptic and cheap lemon scent to make it more bearable. My shoes are squeaking the smooth floor, and I can hear a wheelchair behind me – I don’t think it’s for me, this me doesn’t seem to have any mobility issues. That’s right, I’m going to see Billy, Billy who lost his leg. It didn’t get blown off or anything heroic like that, it just got banged up too bad in a car wreck, but for the rest of his life he’ll be thanked for missing a limb. Billy’s good, he’ll take it in stride. 

    I’m sitting at a decent table with coffee running down my throat. The windows are open with a cool breeze, and here’s yet another paper praising us as a unit instead of people. The newspaper shifts in my hand, but my body doesn’t change – sometimes that happens when the souls are focusing on different things. I can feel clean hardwood under my bare feet, but instead of the New York Times, there’s a research study readout in my hands. Apparently, we’re only second to nurses in emotional warmth, according to the American public. The white people in the study figured we would have less PTSD in general compared to the nonwhite participants, but the paper doesn’t say why. I feel my tags on my chest as I sip my coffee again. We always wear them longer than people expect, some of us never take them off, some of them are in glass cases on walls, some tucked into drawers. The name on the tags always changes, the details change, but I like when I wear them. 

    The world changes when the names do, but I never bother to remember them – they get scratched and faded over time, restamped and dusty. The world changes with my skin, too. When I’m pale, people pay attention, but they fear me. I’m from The Hurt Locker, threatening a doctor with a rifle, talking about suicide or I’m James threatening merchants and breaking into people’s houses to ask about a body I found. I’m private Pyle after the night beating, unstable and bound to end in murder-suicide. I’m the shell-shocked soldier from Dunkirk, ready to blind and kill a child with blunt force trauma at a moment’s notice. Or I’m one of the soldiers from Apocalypse Now, violently chasing a playboy bunny and later turning into a cult leader. Sometimes my skin doesn’t matter, and people still assume I killed remorselessly in the Vietnamese river, shooting up a civilian vegetable boat for the hell of it. 

    But other times my skin does matter. I’m a criminal rather than a victim if I’m black or Latino, my face will only be the thumbnail if the story has to do with drugs. I’m only shown in thumbnails about veterans as a whole if the story is directly about me, otherwise veterans are white and fought in Vietnam, Korea, or WWII. None of us from the wars in the Middle East are shown, and no one with nonwhite skin has PTSD according to the papers. 

    I walk through the park. It’s a bright, sunny day, birds are chirping, the air is fresh. The sky turns to buildings and the air to smog, the sun to dusk, and I’m not where I was anymore. I see another me, or at least another piece, huddled in a box in an alley. He looks at me. I know I’m in a hoodie and my old camo cargos – I know he knows we’re the same. I glance around to see if anyone’s nearby. I didn’t expect to stay in this one for this long, but I’m not complaining. I walk up and crouch in front of him. His hair is long and greasy, his beard unkept. I can feel my face changing again, but he doesn’t notice. The world doesn’t move, but my face, my body, my clothes are different, it’s early morning now and I’m in a suit. It’s curious, typically I would’ve jumped to his body by now, felt the harsh cardboard wilting under me, had to feel my cracking old skin and breaking lungs. He just looks at me and does nothing. I could walk away, see what else happens, but I’ve seen them leave too many times. Everyone stays away because our disability is dangerous, because we can’t get help, even though those perceptions push us away from the clinics. They don’t want to hire us once they see the service on our resume or discover that we never truly came back. They don’t want to hire the rest of them that served that didn’t get this affliction, which is nearly all of them. They don’t understand our rarity, but they don’t want to either. 

    I sit down next to him with my back against the wall. I feel my clothes change again, into a polo and some nice clean pants that I don’t care to keep clean right now. I remember when we couldn’t get a clinic because we were “in the wrong place” being so close to a school. It wasn’t even exclusive to us, it for all the souls that saw what we saw, not just the ones who got mentally stained and couldn’t come back with the boat. 

    The wall in front of him was old gray brick, shifting slightly in front of us. I took a deep breath and relaxed, knowing this was going to be a big change. I looked around at the new trailer. It was tight, but not dirty. The breeze was fresh and smelled like sugar, the door propped open for more summer air. The carpet had vacuum lines and a collection of pill bottles was nestled carefully into a corner on the counter. My tags were still around my neck, and there was a smell of lavender coming from the closed door to the bathroom. Cooper was outside, smoking a cigarette with the wind blowing towards the lake. I remembered Cooper, I always did. There was a reason we stayed together. The movies weren’t all wrong all the time, Cooper and I had proven that with what we’d seen of each other. Shaking hands, tearful screams in the midst of battle before crushing it down, deep into our chests to follow orders to charge or run or shoot. Rinsing blood off our uniforms with hoses outside as we sobbed, nobody bothering to stop or silence us, the nervousness we gained at a post-event scene, feeling the ghosts around us. It was never us, but we saw the others having their own crashes, like Jack throwing away his pocketknife when he remembered how it got dirty, as if it was a bag of teeth from the Pacific Theater. We’d seen the titles above us cracking when our pullouts were delayed again or they lost entire troops, entire squadrons – silent and numb, that’s what we turned into to protect ourselves. The numbness was bliss, that’s what it felt like, that’s what people thought it was. Turn every off and nothing hurts, not until you land back in your country, filled with regret for fighting for profit instead of freedom, feeling violated by lies, lonely around everyone but each other. 

    It's never like Bridge on the River Kwai, not that simple. We couldn’t just go home, there was no way to tell anyone anything we’d done or seen. That’s why Cooper and I stayed together. We knew the stare, the monologue of failures that we could have saved more if we did this or didn’t do that, practically reciting Schindler’s List. We understood the fear of death on the field that we avoided, the uncertainty if we’d ever have kids, and when we finally did, the reality that we weren’t meant to be fathers. We understood the nightmares, waking up begging for forgiveness of Otto and Keys, and another soul remembering WhiteMan and Glover. 

    I look across the lake knowing Yancy was still in the trailer, still coming back to his body. I gave him time, I had it. We both had time, all had time now. Our seven shrunk by bullets and ropes and marriages, and now there were just us three, me, Yance’, and Eleven. We relied on each other when we landed again, our wives and girlfriends not understanding what we were anymore. We liked the commissary; it was simple and blunt. Moving off base we struggled. Supermarkets were too big, too overwhelming with choice. How many times had we grabbed the grossest cereal, the cheapest milk, the generic food because it was easier than testing them all. How many nights did we sit in front of the tv, numb and silently crying with beers in hand, knowing we were getting bad, but at least we were trying to pull each other all back up. 

    Another body. I liked that story, those thoughts, but it wasn’t that soul’s turn with me anymore, I guess. This one was riding a motorcycle, occupied by nothing but his thoughts. He still worked on base, still wore his tags every day. They bounced against my chest now, the wind waving them with my shirt. I knew I’d get another deployment soon, and I knew where. At least, I knew the options on the table. They wanted to make sure I was clear before sending me, and even if I wasn’t, that I was safe. Civilian life didn’t work; I tried it for a while, but it was too much, too messy. I needed the structure. I don’t think I’m capable of loving anything anymore, but it doesn’t bother me. My last remaining love is for the field, that dangerous obsession with war and danger in general. They warned me about it, but if it gets the job done and I feel good doing it, why not? We all drunkenly flirted with danger, death, and knives when we were in the dirt, what’s wrong with going a bit further? Why not put me back in the suit, put me back in my headset with wire cutters and a timer. I understand how the magic works, that’s why I’m on the EOD team in the first place. 

    And now I’m at a computer. In an office building, in a corner room with a good view of everything else on the floor. The doors close softly, and the drawers and cabinets in the breakroom have cushions so they aren’t loud. I’m wearing a medical bracelet on my left wrist in place of the tags hanging in my house with decorations. It’s not often I’m channeled into a writer, or I suppose technically I’m a journalist of sorts… It’s nice to focus on words for once, something static and unchanging. Stevie will be happy I’ve finally finished editing this piece on the latest war movie. She doesn’t get why I watch them, but she never will. One day we might be represented right, one day they might actually hire us for a movie. I chuckled to myself. As if, I thought, we aren’t Hollywood material. That much was evident from my skin, the fact that I’d never seen a corpse like me in the movies until last year, and he was in the first ten minutes. Oh well, maybe someday. 

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Works Cited

Scholarly Articles

Parrott, Scott, Albright, David L., and Eckhart Nicholas. "Veterans and Media: The Effects of News Exposure on Thoughts, Attitudes, and Support of Military Veterans." Armed Forces & Society, 20 Jan 2021, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348633350_Veterans_and_Media_The_Effects_of_News_Exposure_on_Thoughts_Attitudes_and_Support_of_Military_Veterans.  

Parrott, Scott, Albright, David L., Steele, Hailey Grace, and Dyche, Caitlin. "The U.S. Military Veteran in News Photographs: Representation and Stereotypes." Visual Communication Quarterly, vol. 26, issue 2, 3 Jun 2019, https://web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=11&sid=2c5e58e5-ec0f-4edd-ab9f-2f68d639718e%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=136806693&db=a9h. 

Spoont, Michele R., Hodges, James, Murdoch, Maureen, and Nugent, Sean. "Race and Ethnicity as Factors in Mental Health Service Use Among Veterans with PTSD." Journal of Traumatic Stress, vol. 22, issue 6, 6 December 2009, https://web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=2c5e58e5-ec0f-4edd-ab9f-2f68d639718e%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=47134930&db=pbh. 

"The “Dangerous” Veteran: An Inaccurate Media Narrative Takes Hold." VAntage Point, 6 Mar 2012, https://blogs.va.gov/VAntage/6026/the-%E2%80%9Cdangerous%E2%80%9D-veteran-an-inaccurate-media-narrative-takes-hold/. 

Wu, Lu. "US media representation of post-traumatic stress disorder: a comparative study of regional newspapers and national newspapers." Journal of Mental Health, vol. 26, issue 3, 6 Apr 2016, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299989046_US_media_representation_of_post-traumatic_stress_disorder_a_comparative_study_of_regional_newspapers_and_national_newspapers. 

Newspapers

Chicago Tribune [veterans] : 7 December 2021 – 28 February 2022*

Houston Chronicle [veteran] : 18 August 2021 – 28 February 2022*

Los Angeles Times [veteran] : 21 August 2021 – 1 November 2021

New York Daily News [veteran] : 31 January 2022 – 15 February 2022

New York Post [veteran] : 14 February 2022 – 28 February 2022*

New York Times [veteran] : 14 May 2009 – 24 November 2021

Star Tribune [veterans] : 11 November 2019 – 12 December 2021

USAToday [veteran] : 8 January 2022 – 23 February 2022

[purple heart] : 7 December 2020 – 5 December 2021

Wall Street Journal [veterans] : 31 May 2018 – 3 October 2021

Washington Post [veteran] : 15 November 2021 – 28 February 2022*

*Ending dates of 28 February 2022 are what could be found in search results by that day. Different ending dates are the publication dates of most recent specific articles I could find, rather than just an overview of titles/thumbnails. Bracketed terms are the search terms for each paper.   

War Movies

Bigelow, Kathryn, director. The Hurt Locker. Performances by Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie, Summit Entertainment, 2008. 

Coppola, Francis Ford, director. Apocalypse Now. United Artists, 1979. 

Kubrick, Stanley, director. Full Metal Jacket. Warner Bros. Pictures and Columbia-Cannon-Warner Distributors, 1987. 

Lean, David, director. Bridge on the River Kwai. Columbia Pictures, 1957. 

Malick, Terrance, director. The Thin Red Line. Performances by Sean Penn, George Clooney, and Woody Harrelson, 20th Century Fox, 1998. 

Mendes, Sam, director. 1917. Universal Pictures and Entertainment One, 2019. 

Nolan, Christopher, director. Dunkirk. Performances by Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Cilian Murphy, and Tom Hardy, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2017. 

Scott, Ridley, director. Black Hawk Down. Sony Pictures Releasing, 2001.

Spielberg, Steven, director. Saving Private Ryan. Performances by Tom Hanks and Matt Damon, DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures Studios, 1998. 

Spielberg, Steven, director. Schindler’s List. Performances by Liam Neeson and Ben Kingsley, Universal Pictures, 1993. 

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All work for this project was done by Maxwell Koch for Dr. Milbrodt's INQ-271: Race and Disability course through Roanoke College, Spring Semester 2022. All sources used are properly cited and all film stills were taken by the author for the purpose of this project. For further creative works and to see the other digital location I Am Everywhere was published, please see https://www.wattpad.com/user/XerxesMax19.