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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
As important now as then...,
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This review is from: Home from the War: VIETNAM VETERANS Neither Victims nor Executioners (Paperback)
R.J. Lifton has made a career out of reckoning with horror - interviewing people who committed terrible deeds, who survived terrible deeds, who witnessed terrible deeds - asking how people could do such things, how people could survive such things, and what happens to both groups on the other side. Lifton says in the title that Vietnam veterans are "neither victims nor executioners" - having spent several years in the early 1970's working in group therapy with veterans returning from Vietnam, he is faithful to asking what happened and respectful of the men involved. From men who admitted partaking in abuses to those who tried to stop their fellow soldiers from abusing to those who dealt with the pain of fear and loss and death, Lifton presents these soldiers' stories in their own words while exploring the psychic processes at work in those stories. He returns to his concept of "psychic numbing," developed and explicated in earlier works (including Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima and The Nazi Doctors) to reckon with the way many soldiers distanced themselves from the effects of their actions - via euphemistic "officialese," by technological and bureaucratic means, among others. Key for him is the humanity of these soldiers, some of whose deeds demanded means of maintaining their psychic integrity.Lifton's style can be tediously thick with detail at times, but it is worth the effort - the nuggets that can be mined from his works are pure gold. An important work in its own right, but the ideas it develops about the human psyche go far beyond the Vietnam War to having something crucial to say about all of us - soldiers and civilians - in any era. As a side note, an interesting dialogue could be had between Lifton, a pacifist, and Col. Dave Grossman (On Killing), a career military man and psychologist, who comes to many of the same conclusions as Lifton, but from a very different place. Lifton's conclusions about the psychic processes involved in war have strong resonances, I think, with Grossman's statement that the history of the modern military can be seen as a history of overcoming the innate human resistance to killing.
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