Last Remembrance Day a soldier in New Brunswick sat at home knocking back beer and coffee, a potent recipe for a wide-awake drunk. His wife left the house. After a while he lit out after his two sons, aged seven and nine, chasing them around the house and striking them with a wooden spoon, kicking them and calling them “piggies.”
Eventually they left the home, told someone what had happened and child welfare authorities were called. The cops were brought in. Seven months later in court the prosecutor called for jail time, but the judge imposed probation, accepting that the soldier was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) due to events in his military service. She attempted, wrongly in my opinion, to differentiate offenders influenced by PTSD from ordinary criminals who were said to make choices to break the law. The judge indicated these soldiers aren't choosing to harm family members but are under the effects of trauma.
Excuse me? They know what they’re doing, and they have a choice not to do it. And in terms of the effect on the children they beat up, this is a distinction without a difference.
When I was three years old, my soldier father beat me black and blue with an army web belt — waist-wear weighing in at just over half a pound. My introduction to my father came when I was one-and-a-half just after the Second World War ended and featured him cuffing me along the sides and back of my head for about a mile as we walked home from a visit downtown. The last instance of actual violence I remember from him was when I was 10, less than a year after his return from the Korean War, when he tried kicking me with his double soled, toe capped army boots. Luckily I was able to dodge out of the way. Alcohol featured only in the web belt beating.
My father was probably suffering from PTSD stemming from his war service, but a point often overlooked is that people can enter the military already suffering from personal problems, often from events in their own childhood, such that PTSD serves to exacerbate an existing propensity to drinking and violence.
I have been told that after the Second World War it was common for lawyers representing former soldiers hauled into court after getting out of hand to attempt to explain their client’s conduct by pointing out that they were “army trained killers.” Nowadays defence counsel can legitimately point to PTSD. After over two decades involvement as a lawyer in criminal court defence work, I have no difficulty with lawyers saying what can be said for their clients. But the court system must avoid endorsing PTSD in military personnel as minimizing intolerable behaviour. Othello may have “done the state some service.” It gave him no right to smother Desdemona.
Where the child is lucky enough not to get killed or badly injured, such parental treatment nonetheless leaves severe and enduring mental scarring. I invite anyone wanting to know more about this to go though books like Toxic Families by Susan Forward, Trauma Through A Child’s Eyes by Peter Levine and Maggie Kline, or to review the Adverse Childhood Experiences concept developed by Vincent Felitti.
However my father’s difficulties originated, his failure to stifle his angry propensity to violence and caustic commentary promoted a psychological gulf between us that was never bridged. My other psychological marks and scars from the experience I carry with me.
St. Albert resident David Haas is a retired lawyer and military officer with regular and reserve experience.
