Introduction: Finding disabled veterans in history

Disabled veterans are neglected figures in the histories of war and peace, and the historical scholarship about them at present is fragmentary. There is no synthetic history of disabled veterans. This volume is the only historical collection on the subject. The volume exclusively reects the histories of large and relatively afuent Western societies, at times with particular emphasis on the United States that reects both imbalances in the literature and the editor's own specialization. The volume also concentrates upon the experiences of regular armies as opposed, for example, to guerrilla forces. One consequence is that the disabled veteran written about here is always "he," for women have been infrequent and statistically underrepresented participants in Western national armies, and have rarely served in active fighting roles in such forces, though serving with distinction at times in irregular combat forces, such as the World War II antifascist resistance movements. To be sure, women have served in regular armies, mostly as uniformed nurses, and have been injured in combat zones and become disabled while doing so. If the American experience is representative, these disabled women veterans have been seriously neglected by the governments they have served. They have certainly been neglected by historians, whatever their nationality, for there is even less written about their experiences than those of men.1 He, then, is a man injured or becoming chronically ill while in military service, usually though not necessarily in combat. His military service is often thus foreshortened. Technically, he becomes a veteran only when he leaves the armed forces, but for our purposes we will begin to call him "veteran" from the moment it is clear that he cannot return to active duty, and is headed for civilian life.* Whether physical or mental, injury or illness may cause permanent impairment or disfigurement, and hence a changed appearance and a partial or complete loss of function and/or earning power and economic self-sufficiency. When especially severe, moreover, disabilities and disfigurements become a particularly significant marker for an individual's or group's social identity and self-understanding.2 Especially traumatic, visible injuries have tended to become the primary way in which the general population of disabled veterans often seems to have been conceived in the minds of experts, artists, and the general citizenry. In much of the rehabilitation and medical literature about, and the cultural representations of, disabled veterans of the two world wars, we find amputees garnering attention vastly out of proportion to their relatively small numbers, and in effect, becoming representative of all disabled veterans.3 The drama of their injury crowds out everything else about them, and about others, with different, less visible injuries or illnesses. Awareness of the presence of disabled veterans in Western societies runs continuously, if mostly in muted forms, from ancient texts to the present. But that awareness has greatly grown, alongside the significant growth of their numbers, in the last two centuries, and particularly in the twentieth. The growth in numbers reects the increasingly massive mobilizations of conscripted citizens by the nation-state to fight modern wars and the increasingly lethal potentialities of modern weaponry. It also reects both a long, accelerating list of breakthroughs in such areas of general and military medicine as wound ballistics, vascular surgery, anesthesia, infection, and tropical disease, and the creation of systems for the delivery of medical services to frontline troops and for the evacuation of fighting forces to rear positions for intensive treatment.4 One dramatic consequence of these developments may be seen in the stunning reversal of mortality rates for those men sustaining spinal cord injuries, and hence prone to deadly urinary tract infections, in twentieth-century conicts. In World War I, only 20 percent of the Canadians and Americans with spinal cord injuries survived to be repatriated in North America; in World War II, largely because of the use of antibiotics, the figure was more than reversed, so that approximately 90 percent survived to return. Of all repatriated World War I injured survivors, 61 percent died in hospitals within two months of their return. In contrast, British, Canadian, and American data from World War II showed mortality rates of the repatriated cut to between 2.2 percent and 7.8 percent. 5 Sixty thousand Americans, Canadians and British, it is estimated, survived World War II hospitalization who would have died in World War I.6 Our growing awareness of the disabled veteran also results from the greater normalization of his existence. In the distant past, many disabled veterans were pauperized, roleless, and utterly dependent, and they were reduced to street begging, to residence in poorhouses and monasteries, or to thievery, while often also sentimentally lionized in the abstract as heroes. In the twentieth century, disabled veterans became a major project of the modern state, which endowed them with recognition as a group worthy of continuing assistance, and with entitlements in the form of advanced medical care and prosthetics, pension schemes, vocational rehabilitation, and job placement. Alongside this state assistance, activism by disabled veterans in behalf of enhancement of this special provision and of their right to a normalized existence contributed to the nearly complete social reintegration of even the most severely disabled men, such as bilateral limb amputees, the blinded, and those paralyzed by spinal cord injuries.7 If the visibility of the disabled generally, and for our purposes disabled veterans specifically, has increased in this century, so, too, has our ability to see them-to conceive of the meanings and consequences of disability and to understand the lived experiences of people with disabilities in the context of both war and peace. This conceptual breakthrough has advanced from a number of directions. In the twentieth century, war came to be associated with bureaucratized and technologized slaughter and large-scale environmental destruction that increasingly found its victims more or less indiscriminately among combatants and civilians alike. As Fussell demonstrated, in the hellish circumstances of trench warfare during World War I men fought desperately to survive, and war failed to retain the romantic haze of heroic values that was perhaps its principal ideological legacy from distant times to the imagination of modern cultures. Soldiers found their courage not in archetypes of good character, but in the desire to avoid displaying humiliating cowardice before their peers.8 Much more common than the expectation of chivalric behavior has become the understanding of war one finds in the works of psychiatrists from Abram Kardiner to Jonathan Shay and of the neurologist William H. R. Rivers. Their reports on clinical practice document in excruciating detail the devastating psychoneurotic effects of war on the character of those who do the fighting. It is not difficult retrospectively to find these effects throughout history, but in the past they were mixed with the physical problems all soldiers faced from deprivation, disease, and exposure, so the balance of the mental and the physical was unclear. In the twentieth century, armies were healthier and better fed in the field than ever before; thus, the physical has been factored out increasingly, and we are left with war's destruction of the mind. Powerful antiwar implications are also found in the work of the philosopher Elaine Scarry, whose deconstruction of war and its official justifications and avowed purposes makes the case that war ultimately exists solely to create injury to minds and bodies of individuals, and hence, to create victims.9 Disability and disfigurement are not incidental to war's purposes nor marginal to its effects, but rather, alongside the murder of those killed, the point to begin with. Only in making victims can war achieve its political ends. If we are to understand war, we must come to intellectual, moral, and emotional terms with the disabled veteran.