Copyright ©1980 by Wendell Rawls, Jr. All rights reserved.
Every attempt has been made to contact copyright holders. If copyright holders have not been properly acknowledged, please contact us. Central Recovery Press will be happy to rectify the omission in future printings of this book.
Publisher’s Note: This is a memoir—a work based on facts recorded to the best of the author’s memory of her personal experiences with family trauma and PTSD. This book represents the experiences and opinions of the author, alone, and does not necessarily reflect the official position of the United States Marine Corps. Every effort has been made to ensure that events, institutions, and statistics presented in our books as facts are accurate and up-to-date. To protect their privacy, the names of some of the people, places, and institutions in this book may have been changed. This book is not an alternative to medical advice from your doctor or other professional healthcare provider.
Cover and interior design and layout by Sara Streifel, Think Creative Design
In honor of the
United States China Marines
&
in memory of
Lawrence Edward Oklota
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Theologian’s Tale: Elizabeth”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD
William P. Nash, MD, Director of Psychological Health, United States Marine Corps
PREFACE
PROLOGUE
The Murder—March 7, 1953
CHAPTER ONE
My Mother’s Donald
CHAPTER TWO
Getting to Know Donald
CHAPTER THREE
Out of Order
CHAPTER FOUR
For God and Country
CHAPTER FIVE
Missing History: Donald’s Past Has a Past
CHAPTER SIX
Nuts for the Nation: St. Elizabeths Hospital
CHAPTER SEVEN
Semper Fi: There’s No Purple Heart for Falling Apart
CHAPTER EIGHT
They Brought Home More Than Souvenirs
CHAPTER NINE
When My Mother Told Me
CHAPTER TEN
Cold Storage: Farview State Hospital
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Unveiling the Myth of Thomas Szasz
CHAPTER TWELVE
Getting Help and Getting Home Again
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Donald Crosses the Line
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There Are So Many Donalds
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Still Crazy After All These Years
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Iambic Pentameter and the Meter of War
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Never Leave Your Dead
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND THANKS
THE SYMPTOMS OF POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER
RESOURCES FOR VETERANS AND THEIR FAMILIES AND FRIENDS
Diane Cameron has enlarged my understanding of what it means to be a warrior. The stories she recounts of United States Marines stationed in China during the Japanese invasion and occupation at the beginning of World War II certainly illustrate one of the fundamental roles played by the profession of arms in our society—to protect life, property, commerce, and our national identity. Also the stories in this book suggest ways in which war can inflict deep and lasting psychological wounds in warriors. Yet the greatest lesson in Never Leave Your Dead is how the way of the warrior emerges not from the lives of the author’s beloved China Marines but from her own pilgrimage to imagine and understand the tragic life of one particular China Marine—the one who married her mother years later—and to bring home his memory, finally, with love and honor.
Whether engaged in warfare, peacekeeping, or humanitarian assistance, the greatest challenges warriors face are moral rather than physical. For deployed warriors, physical dangers come and go, but moral dangers are everywhere, all the time. In the high-stakes world of the warrior, there is usually one, or perhaps just a few, right things to do in each situation. And both the cost and consequences of those right actions can be enormous. For a Marine on guard duty, the right thing is to find every threat to those being guarded and to let none pass. For a Navy corpsman tending the wounds of Marines on a battlefield, the right thing is to save every life and limb. For a China Marine in Shanghai in 1937, the right thing was to do nothing—to merely watch as thousands were raped and killed. That’s not a tough job; it’s an impossible job. We now know that one of the consequences of failing to live up to one’s own moral expectation can be moral injury, a deep and lasting wound to one’s personal identity.
At a deeper level, perhaps the warrior’s challenge is more than just choosing right actions over wrong. Perhaps the most fundamental role warriors play in our society is to venture into the unclaimed territory between good and evil, to construct goodness right there on evil’s doorstep, and then to defend it with their lives. To serve selflessly while others exploit, to show compassion while others are cruel, to forgive the unforgiveable—these are all ways to create goodness in the face of evil. So also is making sense of a brutal double murder that happened decades ago in order to find and celebrate the humanity of a veteran China Marine.
This book is a creation of goodness on the doorstep of evil. And its author is as much a warrior as the Marines she writes about, even though she has never worn a uniform.
—William P. Nash, MD
