-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.metalab.unc.edu/warrior/ <A HREF="http://www.metalab.unc.edu/warrior/">Healing the Warrior, Cover</A> ----- HEALING THE WARRIOR ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Spiritual Journey of a Forgotten Child Soldier ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Writing about my childhood experience of military exploitation by the United States Department of Defense is part of a healing process. Enter at your own discretion. down to more words On the surface my story may seem hard to believe, but in time -- probably after my death -- the sifted sands will show that my claims have merit. I imagine there will be further attempts to intimidate me, to mis-characterize my emotional struggle and to discredit my integrity. I hope people will look beyond all that and seek the truth. The United States government has already admitted various instances of military abuses, medical abuses and experimentation on human beings during the cold war, and my story is rooted in such realities. I feel it is important to make clear up front that I respect the adults who have chosen to serve and who serve with honour in the Armed Forces. I am at odds with the attitudes inside the United States Department of Defense which brought rise to the military exploitation of my childhood. In a free society military service needs to be an informed choice, and the secrets kept by the government should not destroy a sense of individual identity or cultural heritage. The internal rage and chaos of a person lost from self are soon enough visited upon the society that nurtured them. Personally I am grateful to believe that nonviolence is the strongest force for constructive change in a free society, and I am thankful that I was able to find words to express my experience. ===== from: http://www.metalab.unc.edu/warrior/passage1.htm <A HREF="http://www.metalab.unc.edu/warrior/passage1.htm">Healing the Warrior, Passages One </A> ----- Kenn Prevans HTW ©1999 HEALING THE WARRIOR The Journey of a Forgotten Child Soldier "Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever." Albert Einstein ------------------------------------------------------------------------ There are mysteries in this world, things that words cannot fully describe and that logic cannot explain. And we live in a dubious time: a time when science is looked to for definitive answers and creative thinking and imagination are minimized, ridiculed, even blamed for our societal ills. But human progress always comes by way of the imagination. It comes by braving the unknown and the unconnected and then returning to solid ground with a new piece of the puzzle. Bit by bit the veil enshrouding the mystery is pushed back and what once seemed unexplainable can be put into a logical framework. I was lost in utter chaos for most of my life, overwhelmed by seemingly baseless emotions and flooded by intrusive images. There was a pervasive hollowness inside me that I believed (as my parents had always told me) was "the way that life is." My thoughts raced hyperactively as if time was short and I had to make sense of something. I saw the end of the world coming. The Book of Revelations was unfolding before my eyes and I pictured myself leading a band of post-apocalyptic survivors through the mountains to some paradise of a place where a great new society would be built. And then one day -- not long before the supposed end of the world -- something changed and a different kind of journey began. Eventually I emerged from the chaos and my life and my childhood started making sense. . . . I found my solid ground. The story of my childhood starts out sounding somewhat 'out there.' I am a survivor of organized military exploitation that was conducted by people within the United States Department of Defense. My experiences as a child included military training scenarios and what I can only describe as mind control experiments consistent with some descriptions of the CIA's MK-Ultra program. It was part of a Department of Defense violation of the United Nations 1947 Nuremberg code. As a child I could not have consented to the end-of-the-world training contingencies that took place -- in part -- on Fort Bragg Military Reservation. Beyond that, the psychological trauma experiments and Electro-convulsive shock treatments designed to split my psyche and dissociate my memories of what happened were outside the bounds of any justification. I know the disbelief and the skepticism, and I think it's a healthy and appropriate first reaction to my claims. I lived in denial, disbelief and skepticism of the messages from my subconscious for twelve years. In that time I told myself many things about my inborn nature and my childhood nurturing. Eventually, as I learned more about surviving trauma and started to listen to the messages from my subconscious mind and my scarred body, my skepticism gave way to a new understanding. For me, the proof of my secret past is in the process of healing I went through. Secrets are kept in compartments, locked away from the probing eyes of the masses. The secrets of my past were no different. They were locked away in a compartment in my psyche, the doorway sealed by a psychiatrist I'll refer to as The Mole Doctor. It was a passageway that was very cleverly disguised, like a forgotten door at the end of a forbidden hallway. If I dared to get 3 Healing the Warrior Bartoo close to it, I would become overwhelmed by all that was hidden there. My conscious mind would shut down, and the secrets would stay concealed. It was easy to live in denial because my past was so unbelievable. I dismissed the scattered images and emotions that haunted me as products of an overactive imagination. To accept all those things at once would have meant insanity. When I did have the inkling to believe -- when I was bold enough to venture down that hallway and pry open the door to peak in on my forgotten past -- I was knocked back on my ass. The door slammed shut and I was thankful to escape and hide. I didn't want the things in that secret compartment to be real. So I lived my life as best as I could cut off from that portion of myself. I was only half a person, depressed and lonely, or when I neared the door and tried to make sense of something, overwhelmed and feeling insane. It was a pattern that repeated ad nauseam. Then finally I found a piece of information that made me begin to believe it might all be real. I found the key to my forgotten past resting firmly in the hand of The Mole Doctor. The door had been sealed by him in 1981, the last year of my childhood. Twelve years later I came across the following entry in a medical notebook kept by my mother: 5-21-81 Depression Began Dr.[The Mole Doctor] psychiatrist on 6-10 7 sessions till 7-31 -discontinued . . . 7-17-81 Complete Physical exam -- . . . hospital . . . "body aches, weakness, fatigue" A simple little entry that was a telling enigma to me because I couldn't remember in my normal memory having ever been treated by The Mole Doctor. It wasn't just a lack of recall of an event. It was a specific hole in my memory, like having a word on the tip of the tongue, but this was a set of memories on the edge of my recall. Whatever did happen with The Mole Doctor was lost, and he wouldn't release my childhood medical records. When I tried to probe the void in my memory, I often ended up feeling nauseous. I came to understand that "memory holes" like mine were sometimes the result of Electro-Convulsive shock Treatments (E.C.T.). I was having flashbacks and nightmares about The Mole Doctor, medical facilities and E.C.T., but it went far beyond that. The fragmented childhood images and emotions of military training were back with a new intensity. The doctor had done his best to confuse and obscure the clues to my past, but the memories were still alive in my mind and my body and I had to make sense of them to find peace. Integrating my lost experiences was by no means easy at this point, but finding the entry in the medical notebook was the lynchpin to a whole new level of childhood memory. Before this concrete clue to my past emerged, I went through a period that I now call my 'lost time.' The trauma and the E.C.T. had left me with a void inside. I wandered about -- in many ways a lost soul -- looking for someone to take me over and guide me toward a destiny of their choosing. Fortunately, I didn't fall into some hate group that could exploit my hidden rage. What I had instead was the middle class access to a higher education. Intellectual pursuits helped to fill the emptiness inside me, and when the emotional overwhelm of the past did intrude, I had knowledge of the principles of rational thought to temper my rage and exposure to philosophies of nonviolence to calm my heart. So I managed to stay ahead of the demons that tried to tempt me, and I pursued three college degrees. During this time, I was learning about creativity and storytelling, things that would benefit me greatly when it came to reintegrating my past. Beyond learning the craft of writing, I was gaining knowledge of how the subconscious mind communicates using symbolism, metaphors and essences. The more I learned, the harder it became to deny the reality of my past. Not long after leaving college I discovered the entry in the medical notebook -- that key to the doorway sealed by The Mole Doctor years earlier. With my new knowledge and a new sense of belief in myself, I swung the door open and the full force of my trauma experiences came at me in a way that began to make sense. So I started to believe, first accepting my traumatic past in terms of child abuse and later in terms of ritual abuse. Finally, when these explanations proved inadequate, I saw through the many guises used to confuse me and the larger picture of what I survived began to come together. Has an overactive imagination taken over? It hits like a brick wall when I come right out and say what took me more than 12 years to come to terms with. I know the negative thinking. Perhaps I survived some horrible abuse and have manifested it into something it wasn't. I mean there is horrible abuse, the crazy acts of crazy people that create more crazy people, but it's not done deliberately. We know the victims and their shattered psyches, their alternate and multiple personalities, their delusional natures, and we know it's because they were born weak or they went through something that made them snap. The idea that someone would ever try to do this to a person deliberately and disguise it as something else, and that these perpetrators are 'prestigious' doctors in the community or people paid by our governments . . . No, if someone did do these kinds of things they'd be easily identifiable as sick and deranged, maybe even worshiping Satan and offering sacrifices. They wouldn't be doing it to try to create controllable 'natural born' warriors. Our government -- our great protector -- wouldn't have a hand in such things. Why, certainly, certainly, we've slipped into the realm of imagination. But are we in the realm of imagination? We all know that our government keeps secrets. Perhaps sometimes they do it so well that oversight can fail and a small group can exploit government resources for inhumane purposes. Experimentation on humans in the United States is not without precedent. In the 1950's and 60's the Department of Defense and the CIA conducted the MK-ULTRA behavior control experiments which in their own definition explored "additional avenues to the control of human behavior including . . . electroshock, various fields of psychology . . . and paramilitary devices and materials." Separate from that, in the 1990s government officials admi tted that doctors and scientists had conducted radiation experiments on unsuspecting U.S. citizens including children as late as the 1970s. In the context of the cold war, the sacrifice of one child to prepare for possible Armageddon can be justified. If democracy and freedom were collapsing and the United States were being invaded, having groups of 'natural born' warriors in the mountains trying to re-establish a free society is a logical contingency. The training of these soldiers would be guarded in the name of national security. Is it implausible to think that such an idea would arise inside a warrior culture where individual sacrifice is considered heroic? Might the Department of Defense take the risk of illegally training some boys -- say the sons of former special unit soldiers -- to prepare for a possible Armageddon out of the sight of enemies and mothers? But within a secret contingency what happens when something goes wrong? What happens when the intended psychological conditioning of the boy doesn't go as planned? When unknowingly they choose a sensitive male with a hyperactive mind whose warrior side doesn't split off completely, a child with a wholistic view of the world who begins to show signs of trying to integrate and understand the larger forces shaping his life. What happens if the child is accidentally injured or when the child asks the wrong questions, becomes lucid when he's not supposed to be, and begins putting the secrecy of the military training project at risk? And what if there's a doctor -- a control freak of a doctor -- who cannot accept his failure at achieving a dissociative split . . . ? What lies down the road of a child who knows too much and needs to be made quiet, the same road that intersects with that of a 'mad' doctor bent on achieving a split in the little boy who is defying his expertise? The naive child doesn't understand his predicament, and the doctor knows that the emotional overwhelm of psychological trauma and later Electro-shock should effectively isolate the memories in a lost compartment in the boy's mind. Is this imagination? The latest research into trauma shows that extreme emotional distress alters the way the brain functions. In a heightened fight or flight emotional state normal cognition is replaced by an animalistic survival oriented type of functioning. Memories are stored in the brain in a dissociated and disjointed manner. This is not an unpredictable response as Psychiatry might lead you to believe with labels such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The trauma response is the natural adaptation to overwhelming distress. It happens every time and it is the first stage of memory dissociation and mind control techniques. In effect, the extreme fear and other emotions leave a lasting impression on the brain of the survivor, cutting them off from vital energies within their being. The key to healing is reconnecting with the traumatic events and telling them over and over again until they come together into a cohesive story. It is a natural process because the trauma calls out from its isolated wilderness in the mind and asks to be understood. The dissociated images and emotions of the past rush out at the survivor like a predatory animal. The fight or flight response is triggered again and with it there's a new chance to make sense of the traumatic events. "The trauma is resolved only when the survivor develops a new [and accurate] mental schema for understanding what has happened." ( Dr. Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992, p.41) In my life, healing was complicated by the denial tactics used against me. As a child I never had any support to help me integrate the dissociated memories that haunted me. I learned from adults to explain away the intruding images and emotions as products of an overactive imagination or signs of mental instability. And I felt empty inside. Depressed . . . a part of me was missing in action. The remnants of what happened came to the surface at times, overwhelming me into disbelief for the most part, but also asking me to put the experiences into their proper context. Each time my lost past intruded I fit more pieces in place. Eventually the story came together and as it did the nightmares and inner turmoil slowly eased. I realized that my childhood memories were always with me, but for a long time I didn't have the skills, knowledge and associations to make sense of them. For me, the proof is in the healing process. If I am wrong about my past than I can only conclude that the whole landscape of emotional recovery is a falsehood. Adhering to the principles and processes of healing from trauma has meant more clarity about my past, more grounding in the present, and more optimism about the future. There are no other explanations that can bring together the complexities of the images, emotions and other aftereffects that have haunted me. I understand what I survived with a depth I could never feel before. The storm clouds have cleared, and I have found the sense of grounding and peace that goes with genuine healing. And looking back on it now, I can see that while my behaviors in dealing with the trauma of my childhood have varied, my motivation has always been the same. I do not want to live in a world where such things happen. So I lived in denial, I flirted with suicide, and finally I chose perhaps the craziest path of them all. I decided that my healing was bigger than myself, and that there might be a power in my story that could help to change the world. The shameful truth is that in the depths of the cold war many boys were subjected to secret forms of preparation for conflict. While most of it was not as organized or deliberate as what I survived, I have no doubt that there are others who carry within them the rage and emotional scars of "warrior-making" ritual. The government likes to perpetuate the notion that men are born to be aggressive and war-like, but my experience tells me otherwise. The internal rage that I once believed was inborn, I now know comes from the conditioning I faced in childhood. So much energy was put into making me a warrior like my father that finding peace has taken a monumental effort. It was only by piecing together and understanding the kinds of secret things I was subjected to as a boy that I have been able to heal. But this book isn't so much about the events of my childhood . . . about the emotions, the physical scars and the chronic pain that match my memories of trauma. It's not about a secret little war in the bowels of the Department of Defense over my fate, about the possibility I was left for dead and rescued at the last minute, that I maybe even died and was resuscitated, because all of that is speculation based on the haunting shadows of an unsubstantiated past. This is not an attempt to unravel the logistics of how these things were done and kept a secret. I have nothing to prove to the doubters. This is about what I learned during my journey out of lostness to find my solid ground. I was lucky enough to have stumbled upon some supportive and caring people at several crucial turning points in my healing process. I cannot say where I'd be if these healing people had not been there or if there had been bad-hearted people in their place. I imagine I would still be lost and believing in the end of the world, perhaps acting to bring it about. It scares me to think what I would have done to hide from my past when it started coming up. I can see myself alone, completely isolated from others, sinking deeper and deeper into pathological behavior. Maybe I would have lashed out by committing some horrible and rage-filled act that emotionally overloaded me so I'd never have any chance to sort out the emotions of my past. But none of that did happen. Instead, I found healing, and I came to accept and communicate about what happened to me. My mood and outlook have improved dramatically but the emotional scars of my past are still with me. I look out through eyes that see differently because of these scars. I have danced on the edge of it all, and solved the mystery that was my life, making it back to solid ground with handful of new puzzle pieces. Coming out of my experience I feel that I see a bigger picture that others do not always recognize. There were times when I reached crucial turning points in my healing, and I see that humankind as a whole has reached a crucial turning point of its own. We are not as civilized as we like to believe. Many aspects of our culture are structured for the purpose of making war efficiently, but now with our weapons of mass killing and our scientific knowledge to enhance or control the human mind, it's time to lay down the ancient arms of war and embrace new ways of relating to each other. Is it foolish to suggest such a fundamental change in human cultures can take place? An individual is a culture of one and perhaps my story offers some hope. I was a shattered individual, a great war raged inside me for years and I was sometimes on the verge of self-annihilation, but somehow I made it through and came together. Prepared for war, I found some semblance of peace. What purpose does my healing have? Perhaps it is only a message of hope to that someone all alone in their lost time, or just a message to my old self saying I've made it through and that things are gonna be all right now. This is only a story of individual healing, but any fundamental human change starts on an individual level. The question becomes, what does it take to change a culture of One? On to Chapter Two, Pt. 1 of Out of Darkness Coming Soon All material, passages and images on this site are Copyright protected. ©1998-1999 Kenn Prevans, MAComments, EMail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] More Info: ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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