“I say no way to a wife beater” – easy to judge, harder to understand

My book, Walking Wounded, the Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell, describes how Scannell came home from the war a broken man. The doctors could treat the bullets in his legs, but they couldn’t see the damage that had been done to his soul. Crouching in a hole in the ground as the shells scream overhead, clutching your hands over your groin and squeezing your head as deep into your shoulders as you can, does something to a man.

So too, no doubt, does picking up the body of your friend to find that he has been disembowelled by a shell that might just as easily have hit you. ‘Survivor’s guilt’ is an easy phrase to say, but a dreadful and debilitating emotion to experience.

In Scannell’s case, the War left him with what would nowadays be described as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, leading to massive alcoholic binges, periods of black depression, terrifying flashbacks, wild and overpowering episodes of unreasonable sexual jealousy and – worst of all for him and for those around him – sudden outbreaks of violence aimed at the women who shared his life.

It doesn’t cost much to be opposed to domestic violence. Like murder or rape, it’s a crime that everyone condemns. So, at the end of a review of Walking Wounded online, it was easy for a reader to add the comment “I say no way to a wife beater.”

Well, yes, all of us say that. And many people have said similar things about Scannell after other stories about the book.

But perhaps, at the same time as condemning the violence, we should look at where it comes from. After all, if Scannell had come home from the War without a leg or an arm, he would have been hailed as a war hero. He wasn’t of course – he had served time for desertion in North Africa, and he readily admitted that he was a bad soldier. He would have scoffed at the idea that anyone should call him a hero – like most soldiers in any war, he struggled through as best he could, trying not to get killed and not to kill anyone else.

But since it was his head that was scrambled rather than his limbs, it’s suddenly all right to write him off as worthless. Just a wife beater.

In a way, of course, it doesn’t matter. I’m foolish to let it anger me – after all, he’s beyond our praise or blame. And no doubt it’s reasonable, in pursuit of the gratifying rush of moral superiority that accompanies a simple moral judgement, to ignore the hurt that such comments might do to his children and the women who shared his life – the women, incidentally, who were the victims of his violence, and who still love and admire him.

But there are other Scannells – other young men, some of them barely more than boys, who have come home from combat in Iraq, perhaps, or Afghanistan, in much the same condition. Some drink and get into trouble; some end up in prison, some on the streets. And some beat their wives. If it’s true, as Auden said that all schoolchildren learn that “Those to whom evil is done |Do evil in return,” then we seem to have forgotten it.

So what to do? “I say no way to a wife beater” doesn’t really cut it when we’re trying to deal with a young man who lashes out wildly because he finds himself somehow back in a hell that he thought he had left behind. Treatment is expensive, takes a long time, and doesn’t always work.

There are no easy solutions, but I think we might start by acknowledging that life is complicated, that easy moral responses that cost us little are cheap in more ways than one. Even that a little humility is in order when talking about someone who has done our fighting for us.

And that the soldiers that we send away to war deserve a degree of understanding when they come home in pieces.