Snowden is a character from the pivotal scene in Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22. During a bombing mission, Yossarian, the hero, must give aid to the recently wounded Snowden. Yossarian knows that he faces a critical situation, but he has been well trained and should be able to manage. He bandages all the wounds he can find. As he works, he half-consciously congratulates himself that he has faced one of war’s worst moments and he is, nevertheless, still coping.
But the gods of War are toying with Yossarian. Snowden’s visible wounds are minor compared to the internal havoc that has been wrought: a fragment of a shell has pierced Snowden’s side, passed through his body, and exited through the other side, effectively disemboweling him. Yossarian notices a spot of blood near Snowden’s armpit and adjusts the flier’s flak-suit, a device designed to protect the heart and other vital organs. As Yossarian adjusts the flak suit, Snowden’s intestines spill out.
In a blinding instant, Yossarian understands the secret of war: whatever the preparation for it, no one can really cope. Function, perhaps, yes, but cope? No.
It is curious it had to be Heller, a former airman, who best described the disruptive thrust of an experience that is rarely a part of the impersonal air war and rarely absent from land combat. When you know Snowden, you know War. But such intimacy comes at a price, a price that makes it very difficult to come home again.
The trauma of Snowden is not primarily physical. While the terrible hurts caused by modern weaponry do befuddle the imagination, emergency rooms or random accidents can produce impressions of comparable magnitude. The hammering significance of Snowden is that this thing that has been done to a fellow human being, this savaging of the body that is the temple of the spirit, is not an accident, not a fluke, but the direct, purposeful consequence of war.
For men engaged in war the moment of knowing Snowden is not unlike the feeling of invasion and loss reported by women who have been raped. People can tell you it wasn’t “your fault,” you can know it wasn’t “your fault,” but a sense of deprivation remains and one feels soiled.
The sense of deprivation is real, because something has been stripped away: some of the moral and spiritual covering that surrounds each person’s soul is no longer present. Like the protective enamel covering a tooth, one only notices it when it is not there.
Historically, the rape victim and the soldier returning home are wrapped in and reinforced by the collective spiritual values of family, friends, and society. But, as some women say and as an Israeli tankman told me late one night, even then the process of re-entry into normality is difficult. Even then, as a Marine Corps veteran of Iwo Jima confessed to me after countless beers, you have to live with your personal Snowden lurking in the back of your mind, devilishly darting into your awareness every five or seven years, or six minutes.
Yet, as both of these men explained in their different ways, you can coexist with Snowden because those close to you provide care and concern. True, no one fully understands, but they all try, and they all somehow share the right and wrong of the experience.
Except when Johnny came flying home from Viet Nam and tried to pick up the pieces of his life. America pretended that he didn’t exist.
Perhaps it is this absence of concern that explains why, when Nam veterans mutter inarticulately into cameras and microphones, “We got screwed,” they are not as inarticulate as they seem. War is a rampant invasion of one’s secret parts. All soldiers get screwed.
But when a country refuses to come to terms with its war, when there is no reunion between the nation that accepted the war and the men who agreed to fight it, when there is no