One of the first things he told me when we met was that he had been in the Hitler youth.  

The oddest thing about this was how casually he mentioned it.  My first week in College and all the 1st-year students were expected to meet with their advisors for an introductory lunch.

And here I was, face to face with a man who was part of an organization which would have willingly and obediently murdered me for my ethic heritage.

I didn’t understand why he did this at the time.  I did understand that he wasn’t proud of it.  He wasn’t telling me this to promote himself or to show me what it meant.

I knew that he had been a child at the time, and likely had little choice in the matter, but even so, I found it odd that he began a conversation with this, as though it weren’t something to be ashamed of, as though it weren’t something to hide from, to run from.

It was a few years before I really understood what was going on, and it took another story for it to make sense to me.

This is not a story about history, though it is tied to it.  It is a story about today, and what comes next.  It is a story about what we do when we finally acknowledge what we’ve been part of, what it says about our humanity and how we chose to respond to it.

My social psychology instructor, in a class I took some time later, told us a story.  I’m going to render it in first person for dramatic effect, and I’m telling it from memory, so I probably don’t have the details down, so this is the basic gist:

A few decades ago, I took a job on a fishing boat off of British Columbia.  It was difficult work and we were pretty isolated.  We’d spend most of our time out in sea, and most of that time was spent fishing.  

We would joke a lot and socialize, because there was nothing else to do.  There was only one man on that boat that I ever thought of as a friend, and he didn’t speak to me other than to give one- or two -word instructions for the first five months of this work.

When we finally did have a conversation, he told me about his history.  He’d been a soldier in Hitler’s army: a foot soldier; a grunt.  He didn’t understand the bigger picture.  He just knew that he was a soldier and it was his job to fight for his country.  He didn’t know about the concentration camps, the ovens, etc.

When he finally did realize what he’d been part of, it was just before the war had ended.  And he just walked away: he threw down his gun and left his army and left his country and just kept leaving it.  He took job after job, saying as little as possible to avoid having to discuss his German accent.

By the time I’d met him, he’d managed to make it across the Ocean and across Canada.  We didn’t talk about him having been a Nazi much.  It was clear that he was ashamed of it.  It was clear that he didn’t think there was redemption for it.  So he just hid: from himself, his history, the first twenty-five years of his life.  I don’t know why he told me.  He hadn’t told anyone else.  For whatever reason, I think he just knew I was someone who wouldn’t judge him.  

He never left fishing after that.  We continued to write from time to time, and eventually the letter stopped coming.  I heard later that he had died doing that work.  I don’t know whether it was suicide or an accident, but I don’t think he expected to ever do anything but die on that boat.  He never did learn to face what he’d been involved in and that fear of his own past pushed him to become a shadow of a man, someone who could never move beyond it.

It was then that I finally understood my advisor: he knew that what he had been involved in was horrendous and that it was largely viewed as mass inhumanity, the worst of his generation.  And he knew that there was no easy path to redemption from that.

But one way of dealing with it, for him, was to be unflinchingly honest about it: never let anyone know him without knowing what he was part of first.  Never let anyone even get to know him without first knowing who he was and some of what he had done.  For him, he chose not to run or to hide, but he chose to never allow him the simple pleasure of meeting someone new without being seen through a specific filter, one connected with unrelenting evil and horror.

One man chose to flee from his past, separating himself from almost all social interaction, retreating into himself, and having few human contacts.  Another chose to face his past, looking directly at it and not giving others the choice but to face it as well.  

So what are our own soldiers going to chose?  When those who engaged in atrocities come home, what are they going to do?  Hide?  Retreat?

What sort of psychological damage will it do to them, long term, to have been put through this?  If they had a clear mission with a moral clarity behind it, it would be different, but they have no clear idea as to what their mission was for most of their time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I read GregMitch’s diary, Why did soldier kill herself,  after refusing to torture? and one passage sticks out, with one woman talking about her experience after witnessing torture on the part of her fellow soldiers:

“It also made me think,” Williams says, “what are we as humans, that we do this to each other? It made me question my humanity and the humanity of all Americans. It was difficult, and to this day I can no longer think I am a really good person and will do the right thing in the right situation.”

Imagine this: being put through something that not only challenges your sense of morality, but places you in the position of not being convinced about your own humanity.

What do you think that does to a person?

While our soldiers come home, will we have a way of helping them deal with this?  Will we help them know what is and is not right and good?  

Will we help them face their past and learn to acknowledge it and move forward, or will they just retreat out of fear, living a life of quiet desperation, retreating from their friends, their families and their lives?  Will we embrace them and give them the opportunity to heal or will we just see the emptiness in their eyes and turn away, afraid of what it reflects in us?

Will we acknowledge our own complicity in the torture that was committed in our own name, in the violence that we helped fund?  And if we do, will we be able to handle it?

I don’t have good answers to any of these questions.

Does anyone?