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REPORTER: I’m here with Major Freedman, one of many doctors dispatched to the Korean theater as a part of the war effort, but one of relatively few psychiatrists. Unlike the doctors whose role is to perform life-saving surgery on wounded soldiers, Doctor Freedman has a task that’s more difficult to pin down; he is here to provide psychiatric counseling for those suffering from the mental and emotional wounds sometimes inflicted by the stress of battle. Now, you’re not attached to this particular MASH unit, are you, Doctor Freedman?
FREEDMAN: Well, I’m partial to it, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m attached, no.
REPORTER: So you go where they send you?
FREEDMAN: I go where I’m needed. Every CO south of the 38th Parallel has my number and they use it when they get a case that’s out of their wheelhouse.
REPORTER: And what exactly is your wheelhouse?
FREEDMAN: Well. [Pause] In the normal course of things, a psychiatrist’s job is to help people uncover and understand their own inner workings, and to assist in adjusting and adapting to the workings of the world around them. But this could hardly be called ‘the normal course of things,’ physically or psychologically speaking. What it really comes down to is that I attempt to help the people over here – the soldiers, the officers, even the other doctors – make sense of a senseless situation.
REPORTER: Do you feel that war is always senseless?
FREEDMAN: I do. Always.
REPORTER: What is your professional take on the reasons for the United States getting involved in the Korean police action?
FREEDMAN: Well I think that calling it a ‘police action’ makes just about as much sense as the US getting involved in a place it has no business. This is a war, however they're trying to sell it back home. But since you asked for my professional opinion, I’ll just say that I think we’re setting ourselves back decades, if not more, in a number of areas. For one thing, Asians already face an enormous amount of prejudice in the United States, and now here we are sending a whole generation of young men into battle against a so-called enemy who never did anything to them, personally. The resentment, the anger, the fear that we are engendering – nothing is worth that.
REPORTER: You’re a major, as well as a doctor; I assume that this isn’t your first war?
FREEDMAN: Unfortunately, no. I only hope it’ll be my last.
REPORTER: It’s plain to see the ways in which war takes its toll on the human body – I’m talking to you from the office of a field hospital – but what of the toll it takes on the mind? You said that the doctors here and elsewhere will call you in when they see a patient who needs your kind of help; what does that criteria look like, how do they know when to call you?
FREEDMAN: I’m glad you ask that, because in truth a big part of my job here has been educating the officers and doctors about the role that psychology plays in taking care of their men. The first several months I was over here I found myself having the same damn conversation – excuse me – over and over again with officers and soldiers who would have rather – [Pause] The stigma surrounding any kind of mental or emotional struggle is so enormous, and I’ve spoken with young, otherwise healthy men who’ve told me in no uncertain terms that they would rather walk into a mine field than be seen speaking to a psychiatrist. But I’m glad to have met a number of people over here who understand that seeking help in a place like this isn’t a marker of insanity, but rather the opposite. The realities of battle – whether that’s witnessing your best friend gunned down at your side or the experience of watching someone die at your own hand – it can wreak havoc on our ability to process the world around us or even to function as a human being let alone as a soldier. The symptoms exhibited by the young men who come under my care can be quite varied, from paralysis to memory loss to overwhelming fatigue. What’s crucial is that they be allowed and encouraged to speak about what they’re going through. Naming the demons they’re facing is half the battle.
REPORTER: I spoke with a doctor earlier who corrected me on my use of the phrase ‘shell shock’ as a term that was outdated, possibly even offensive.
FREEDMAN: Yes, the diagnoses we use now are a lot more nuanced. You may hear doctors speak of ‘battle fatigue’ or ‘combat exhaustion’ instead. The term ‘shell shock’ carries a lot of baggage, it came into use in the first World War alongside the idea that a soldier who was prone to shell shock was lacking in moral character or fundamental manliness, which simply isn’t the case. Freud wrote that violence has its roots in our animal instincts, but that war itself runs entirely in opposition to what he called the ‘psychic disposition’ that we have grown into with the advance of civilization and culture in the modern era. In other words, since a healthy human being would find the realities of war to be utterly intolerable, experiencing battle fatigue is not a sign of illness or weakness. There are days, though, when it feels like a Sisyphean task; treating patients to the best of my abilities on the one hand while fighting against outmoded ideas and ingrained prejudice on the other.
REPORTER: What is the general attitude of other medical personnel towards you?
FREEDMAN: Curiosity. [Laughs] I’m something of an anomaly in the otherwise organized bore of this war machine. Officers remember the days when saying hello to a head doctor was liable to brand you for life, and surgeons don’t always care to admit that they do not have a corner on the market of health. But over the past year I’ve met some remarkable people and we’ve been finding ways to work together.
REPORTER: You seem to be highly-regarded by the men at this MASH unit.
FREEDMAN: The men and women of the 4077 are some of the most incredible people I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. The commanding officer and the chief surgeon especially are remarkable physicians and remarkably open-minded about the role that psychology and psychotherapy can play in the treatment of their patients. They’ve been proactive about adopting my methods and they’ve seen those methods work and their confidence, I believe, is helping to break through the stigma of psychological treatment one patient at a time.
REPORTER: Do you see that as a benefit, perhaps, as something positive that might come out of this war?
FREEDMAN: I don’t believe that a point made at gunpoint is a point worth making at all. I would rather change minds slowly, one at a time, than see thousands of boys come marching home convinced of the efficacy of talk therapy because they’re going to need it for the rest of their lives.
REPORTER: It’s that serious, that some of these boys facing battle fatigue could struggle with it for the rest of their lives?
FREEDMAN: In some cases, yes. But the human brain is a remarkable thing. In the face of tragedy and trauma, sometimes on its own, sometimes with a little help, we are often able to heal ourselves. Which is something of a relief to me, or I’d never get to take a day off once I’m back home.
REPORTER: Where’s home?
FREEDMAN: Brooklyn, New York, born and raised.
REPORTER: You have family waiting for you back there?
FREEDMAN: Oh, they should know better than to wait for me by now, I’m always late getting home. [Pause] Yes, I come from – I have quite a large family.
REPORTER: Anyone you’d like to say hello to on camera?
FREEDMAN: [To the camera] Hello.
REPORTER: Are you in private practice, there in Brooklyn?
FREEDMAN: I see a small number of patients on an individual basis, but most of my time is spent between the VA hospital in Brooklyn and the one in Queens. When I got back home in ’43, I realized that very few of my colleagues in the profession had any experience with what the returning soldiers had witnessed and experienced over there. You see, in civilian practice we’re most often treating one of two types of patients; those who have a serious mental illness that is not their fault nor the fault of anything that happened to them, it’s simply something they’re born with. Or, we’re attempting to treat and heal patients who experienced a trauma during childhood which then went on to affect their entire lives. By the time we are adults, our brains have developed to the point where they do a pretty good job of protecting us from troubling experiences, but in the case of war our capacity to protect ourselves is often taxed past the point of endurance. It is our human nature to attempt to make sense of our experiences but as I said, this is a senseless situation. We’re not meant to take it in stride.
REPORTER: So how do the people over here keep their wits about them?
FREEDMAN: Well you’ve hit on one of the key ingredients – wit. Many of the people I’ve met, especially here in this unit, use humor to cope. Practical jokes, antic lunacy, wild schemes. There’s a link between anger and wit and to a one, these people are very angry. And yet in the midst of that anger they have created something remarkably… They are extraordinarily devoted to each other. These people are not soldiers, they’re doctors, and yet you get the sense that any one of them would jump on top of a grenade for the man beside him. Then again, I’d lay the odds at two to one that the grenade would turn out to be a dud that someone got his hands on for a gag.
REPORTER: Do you think you’ll stay in touch with any of the people you’ve met over here?
FREEDMAN: I hope so. [Pause] There’s nothing that could make up for what we’ve seen, what we’ve participated in by being over here. But the experience of working alongside so many men and women that I wouldn’t otherwise have met, to have made connections across medical disciplines – the only thing more senseless than being here would be to close our hearts and minds to the connections that we built in the midst of all this destruction.