My Life: The War Years

I have been telling my wife some stories about my life and she has encouraged me to write about it.  So I will.

I had spent the war in the Aleutians, South Pacific and now I was my on way to Europe. We took a troop ship. We marched down the highway in New York with crowds gathered around, cheering us off.  People rushed up to me to hand me things, mostly beer which I did not drink. But we were treated like heroes already. Getting on the ship was another matter.  Hundreds of us packed into what looked like beds but were jut light cots. This was not a three star voyage and our comfort was of no concern to anyone. Many got seasick, which was highly unpleasant because no one planned for that. Just like when I got to the Aleutians there was no foul weather gear. In 40 degrees below we were wearing towels. An officer stopped by to give us all nose clips. I asked what it was for?  He said, “You’ll see.”  And I did as everything in my nose froze into solid ice and I could not breathe.

Back on the troopship to Europe began the chase: submarines everywhere. It was obvious we were a troopship and so a grand prize for the Germans. If they could wipe out a few thousand troops how happy they would be. They chased us across the Atlantic until we got to England. Because I had been a Commando, they transferred us to South England to a base. We were getting ready for crossing the Thames to land just before D-Day to capture the submarine base in Brest, which even to me was a suicide mission. Their base was half underground and built with steel and cement. A guy who wanted to see Paris offered to trade with me. We got the papers and the deed was done. I don’t know if he made it. 

Speaking of being chased by submarines, we had a hard time leaving the steel enclosure near Kodiak because we were told that Japanese subs were waiting for us to come out. We finally did to fight in the islands of Kiska and Attu with fog so thick we could only hear the shells coming overhead but could see nothing.  We then chased Japanese ships all the way back to their homeland. Remember I was on a 365,000 ton battleship. It was in Tarawa that they sent over a massive fleet of Mavis bombers to put us out of action.  They were right above my head; they never saw us.  It was so dark. 

Meanwhile I traveled all over England in a band, which was wonderful. They had Tea Dances everywhere and we played  their favorite songs, ending with, Good  Night Ladies, Til We Meet Tomorrow.  On leave, I went to see my pal Larry Allred from Chicago who wrote to me years later. He drove for the Admiral in London and there were bombs just before I got there, which left Piccadilly Circus in complete rubble.  Hard to believe the blocks had been wiped out by the Germans with their buzz bombs. The Brits got to work right away to rebuild; brave souls. 
I stood amid the rubble in the area for a long time, seeing what people can do to each other; and for what?

And then I was ordered to go kill.  I would not kill in anger; I didn't even know who I was killing. It was my “job.”  Imagine, I was convinced to kill as a job. And I did in the Pacific. I was a machine-gunner, don’t forget. It left me with an antipathy for war til this day. We invaded an island and the women and children natives ran into the sea to escape our big guns. We shot our 20MM shells into the sea where they were. A guilt I never got over.

By the way, I was transferred to many battle areas because I was marked low down on priority due to my color blindness. The commander who gave me the test took me to the street and asked me the colors of various signs and I got them right. But still I was marked “failure” and shipped out. I got help to pass the test later on and went on to become a fighter pilot trainee on a carrier. I never got there because the war  ended. I was discharged at 
Tacoma, Washington, where I was at the day the war ended and some of the women in the street danced naked. What a jubilant scene. I went straight to UCLA and signed in. More than 12 years and 4 universities later, I got my doctors degree and became staff at Los Angeles Children’s Hospital, Psychiatric Dept. After a few years, I could no longer take sick and wounded children so I left, but some of the kids stayed in touch for years. I wish I could say that I learned about human life and the human condition but that would be a lie. It was all statistical and numbers and graphs.

Back to Europe. I traveled Europe with my band the same time as bandleader Glen Miller, one of my idols.  He disappeared in an air crash and was never found. I danced to his music for years.  Such a loss.

I already wrote about my return to the south Pacific and more battles including the most beautiful island I ever saw: Majuro. When you see photos of WW2 there is a picture of Kwajalein with a giant plume of smoke rising over the island. That was us. We saturated that island and blew down every house and building and then we decided they were hiding under the trees so we destroyed every tree there. Thank the Japanese for that. Why on earth would they attack a country as well armed as the USA is beyond me? But they did. Not “they” but those crazy leaders far removed from battle decided it might be a good idea. And millions died, some horrendously, burned alive by the Hydrogen bomb.  These were thousands of children, mind you. President Truman believed it was the only way to end the war.  It helped but there might have been a more human way. We bombed citizens near Japan, not the fleet of ships in the harbor, but people going to work. The US helped keep their fleet intact. But hang on, mine not to question why, mine only to do or die. And we did. I was in the bloodiest of pacific battles: Tarawa. They knew we were coming and put out false reefs and slaughtered thousands of us; bodies floating in the water everywhere. We were the first ship in and bombed them non-stop and used gasoline spray to burn them out of the caves where they hid. After all, they were the “enemy.”  And then I learned an important lesson:  if you make someone an enemy, even in politics, you can do anything you want to them with impunity. We burned the “enemy.”
 
I have written how out at sea en route to another battle the captain called me in to say that I was being picked up by a destroyer and taken back to the States to go to the university.  The shock of my life; I was sure they made a mistake but my intelligence test said I was smart so I went on the destroyer whose screws had been shot off, making it list heavily to the right. And we entered San Francisco and I traveled to Oregon, a most beautiful town. Soon I organized a 26 piece band with two gorgeous singers, one of whom was my girlfriend and we traveled and broadcast over KOA Portland.  Is it still there?  More than 50 years later?
 
I never would have considered university without the Navy sending me, even without my asking.  They even chose the University for me: Oregon State,  and then I chose UCLA, USC, and then Claremont Graduate School… But  I never realized that my father had to make me stupid over and over again until we were driving East on Melrose when I was in my twenties, and he stopped at a signal where all alone, to no one, he blurted out, "I’m a failure." He never looked at me or addressed me.  It was so importuning that he could not hold it back; he was an utter failure. I mean, driving a meat truck is not the summum bonum of success. And in trying to be smart, he was obsessed with making me dumb. And he did. That is why I never considered university. My grades were terrible. I felt it was way above me. When I started Oregon 
State, I studied Portuguese for no rational reason and got A’s. For the first time in my life, my teacher asked me to stay because I was such a good student. That was a major epiphany of my life and a turning point. I felt I could do things and I began to study voraciously. I became a top student and an academic hall of fame. I received a lifetime achievement award from Los Angeles High School. All because I needed to hear just two words of praise. That is all it took. Parents remember that: PRAISE. You never build character through criticism.  NEVER.  Just “you are good and you can do it." That is what we all need and it is what I see in patients screaming out their need. HOLD ME,TOUCH ME, SEE ME, LOOK AT ME, WANT ME, CHERISH ME. How how hard is that? My neurosis made me well prepared for a therapy of pain.

End of part A

Treating Depression with LSD: Cure or Hallucination (2/2)

In our research we had much more evidence of how the liberated pain militated towards the last cerebral defense; the neocortex to concoct all sorts of nonsense to explain the inexplicable…..deep imprinted pain that is preverbal and therefore has no name. There exists no words in that repertoire to explain what is happening. A true mystery which Is now whispered in beneficent tones as the ethereal mystical experience, acclaimed as an exalted experience. It seems ethereal because it borders on the religious, unknown, unexplained, out of reach of ordinary intellect. It sounds so sweet….. mystical.

Of the 20 subjects we studied, all took at least ten LSD trips and almost every one had trouble sleeping for months and months. Even tranquilizers could not lower the activation levels to allow a calm system. Is that helpful for depression? Yes of course, if we open up the gating system and release the heavy mound of suppression weighing down the system. Yes, it is a momentary release, but what happens afterward? Is it biologic? As deep depressive patients travel down into the nervous system there is an accompanying lowering of blood pressure. The whole system is approaching fail. Their feelings of impending death is not mysterious; it is truly a state of impending death and the body accommodates. And of course as blood pressure dips into deep lower levels, to accompany a system drenched by hallucinogens, there are feelings of approaching death and thoughts of suicide.

The massive upheaval of pain from the lower depths floods the neo-cortex, infiltrating it with such input that concentration is impossible. It happens to our patients without drugs when they have undergone an infancy, and earlier, of constant and chronic neglect and abuse. The mounting layers of pain soon become laminated agony that no longer can be integrated.

As patients relive these pains in methodical order they begin to eliminate their anxiety and ADD. The thinking inventing neocortex is the last developed part of the brain and called into service when all else has failed. In our therapy patients soon learn what it is and what needs to be done; not to call on Allah or mysterious forces but on their history. To follow messages from the underground that point to stored pain.

Why do I think these power drugs are dangerous? Because it has a lasting effect and upsets the equilibrium of the brain which is now structured to include what the brain already underwent in its ontogeny. Traumatizing that precious brain can never be considered therapeutic. Except by those ethereal souls who tend to believe in the booga booga. I know, I worked with them, including associates of Tim Leary, the guru of drugs. Too often their research falls on prepared minds who can accept the mystical and received wisdom with alacrity. The wife of the director of research took me for a walk while high on LSD. We started to cross the street when I panicked. I looked down at the curb which seemed to me to be a mile down and a dangerous fall. I backed up. I had no aftereffects from it but knew to use caution. For those who are fragile it can cripple the neocortex by opening the lower level gating system and allowing the in-rush of immense, unintegrated, very early pain, which can lead to serious mental problems.

The job of the drug is to open the gates. But out comes voodoo land; latent imprints from the deep interior that scramble any coherence and replace perception with all kinds of irrationality. Irrational thinking is an attempt to maintain sanity, to make life experience make sense even in a twisted way. We not only see crazy; we think crazy. We think in the same way that some think when life has piled on trauma after trauma from very early on. Scrambling is a defense operation that prevents us from facing reality; the early reality of beatings and neglect, of no love, of being sent away alone at an early age….in brief, my life.

Here is an example from a patient describing the result of a psilocybin trip before entering therapy: “On the trip sitting in a car looking out the window at the sidewalk which became a bubbling liquid mass. It looked like bubbling cement. Later on when I judged it safe to exit the car in a residential neighborhood, I saw an alligator in the middle of the street; these were hallucinations that contained the feelings of my youth: fear and terror. Here was a safe place so the unsafe place was bubbling inside of me. The alligator nipping at my heels was only the fear and terror coming at me in symbolic form.”

In my case, further use of hallucinogens would have caused serious damage. If I had continued taking drugs, I believe the symbolism would have overwhelmed me because the gating system would not have been able to recover enough to withstand more pressure. When preverbal (first line) imprints of pain are thrown up indiscriminately they first attack the highest levels of consciousness. But because the nonverbal content cannot be assimilated and integrated on that level there is an overload of unconnected Primal information. If pains come up in a cohesive manner one would then be in the midst of Primal feelings. The problem is that with the drug it rises in undelineated form, vague, putting pressure on the gating system. It is coming up out of sequence and cannot be anchored in reality. Therefore, it takes on a mystical air. The hallucinogen does not allow an ordered sequence to develop. It prevents a slow unfolding of Primal Pain to achieve proper connection and instead it opens gates widely allowing pains from several levels at the same time that have no chance of integration. Those preverbal pains thrown up by the drug, thrust pre-birth traumas into the fray long before the person has relived much less forceful hurts and has prepared the way to live deeper pains. That is why it takes month to prepare the piste toward the inner depths.

This is the origin of abreaction, which I have written about extensively. Those patients who come in and begin to undergo birth Primals are often pre psychotic and need tranquilizers, never hallucinogens. The level of pain must be heavily controlled lest the patient slips into a beginning mental affliction. It is very difficult from that break in defenses to find normalcy again. This is also true of those chronic users of marijuana. The defense system is called in to help out but it loses its impact after a while and there can then be a break in defenses with strange ideation and hallucinations. Defenses are weakened so much that often there is no recovery or only partial recovery. If they go on with seemingly benign drugs such as hash they may lose their sanity and fall into periodic delusions and paranoia. I am against legalizing these seemingly innocuous drugs because they can cause psychosis in fragile souls. And they do not liberate anyone or anything.

In some literature these drugs are classified as hallucinogens. A person first taking cannabis may laugh or cry more easily and seems more relaxed and less depressed. But over time he will pay a heavier price as mental symptoms appear, not always obvious to him. These are also openers of the gates of repression, but more slowly done over great amounts of time. Their memory system will slowly suffer as will their cognitive abilities. We want a free lunch but it is wrapped in a nightmare. Unwrap the fragile covering and we get open mental illness.

One serious trauma can produce it at once. Incest by a parent can produce it as the person who is supposed to protect you becomes the danger. I have treated several of these cases; the earlier it occurs the more likely the psychosis. In Europe I once treated the daughters of a Nazi officer. They both kind of made it until the older daughter found out he was also sleeping with her sister. She fell into psychosis. It happened more than we imagine among the Nazis. The trauma was “I am no longer loved.”
There may be many roads to Nirvana, but all are posted with same sign: Danger Ahead. You will lose your mind if you stay on this road. Only feeling is healing.