The Unassailable Wisdom and Courage of Mike Prysner

Iraq War Veteran Mike Prysner's "Winter Soldier" Speech (Scroll to end for VIDEO)

 
My name is Mike Prysner. I joined the Army and went for basic training on my eighteenth birthday in June of 2001. I was assigned to the 10th Mountain Division and in March of 2003 I was attached to the 173rd Airborne Brigade deployed to norther Iraq.

Um, so when I first joined the Army, we were told that racism no longer existed in the military. A legacy of inequality and discrimination was suddenly washed away by something called the 'Equal Opportunity Program." We would sit through mandatory classes and every unit had this EO representative to ensure that no elements of racism could resurface. The Army seemed firmly dedicated to smashing any hint of racism. And then September 11th happened and I began to hear new words like 'towel head' and 'camel jockey' and the most disturbing: 'sand nigger.' And these words did not initially come from my fellow soldiers but from my superiors: my platoon sergeant, my company first sergeant, battalion commander. All the way up the chain of command these terms, these viciously racist terms were suddenly acceptable.

And I noticed that the most overt racism came from veterans of the first Gulf War. And those were the words they used when incinerating civilian convoys. Those were the words they used when this government delivered any target(ing) of civilian infrastructure; bombing water supplies knowing it would kill hundreds of thousands of children. Those are the words the American people used when they allowed this government to sanction Iraq. And this is something many people forget. And we can't forget.

We've just learned that we've killed over a million Iraqis since the invasion. But we already killed a million Iraqis in the '90s through sanctions and bombings prior to this invasion. But the number is truly much higher.

When I got to Iraq in 2003 I learned a new word and that word was "Hajji". Hajji was the enemy. Hajji was every Iraqi. He was not a person, a father, a teacher, or a worker. And it's important, we've heard this word a lot during Winter Soldier but it's important to understand where this word came from and to Muslims the most important thing is to take a pilgrimage to Mecca. It's the Haj. And taking this pilgrimage is the Hajji. And, it's something in traditional Islam that is the highest calling in their religion. So we took the best thing from the Muslim and made it into the worst thing.

But, history did not start with us and since the creation of this country, racism has been used to justify expansion and oppression. The Native Americans were called savages. The Africans were called all sorts of things to excuse slavery. And Vietnam veterans know of the multitude of words used to justify that imperialist war. So, Hajji was the word we used...it was the word we used on this particular mission I'm going to talk about and we've heard a lot about different raids and kicking down doors of people's houses and ransacking their houses. But this mission was a different kind of raid. I never got any explanation for these orders. We were only told that this group of houses, of five or six houses, were now property of the U.S. military and we had to go in and make those families leave those houses.

So, we went to these houses and informed the families that those homes were no longer their homes. We provided them no alternative, nowhere to go, no compensation. And they were very confused and very scared and did not know what to do, would not leave, so we had to remove them from those houses. One family in particular, a woman with two small girls, very elderly man and two middle-aged men, we dragged them out of their houses and threw them onto the street and arrested the men because they refused to leave. Uh, arrested the old man and sent them off to prison. And, at that time I didn't know what happened to people when we tied their hands behind their back and put a sandbag over their head.

Unfortunately, a few months later, I had to find out. We were short interrogators so I was assigned to work as an interrogator. I oversaw and participated in hundreds of interrogations, one in particular I'm going to share with you was a moment for me that really showed me the nature of this occupation. This particular detainee...when I was sent to interrogate him he was stripped down to his underwear, hands behind his back, and sandbag on his head. I never actually saw this man's face. My job was to take this metal folding chair and just smash it against the wall next to his head, he was faced against the wall with his nose touching the wall while a fellow soldier asked the same questions over and over again, no matter what his answer, my job was to slam this chair against the wall.

We did this until, basically, we got tired. And, I was told to make sure he stood against the wall for however long and I was guarding this prisoner and my job was to make sure he kept standing up. But I noticed that there was something wrong with his leg and he was injured and he kept, like, falling to the ground. And the sargeant in charge would come and tell me to get him up on his feet so I'd have to pick him up and put him against the wall and he kept going down and I'd have to keep pulling him up and putting him against the wall. And my sergeant came around and he was upset with me for not, you know, continue making him to stand. He picked him up and slammed him against the wall several times and then he left and when the man went down on the ground again I notice blood pouring down from under the sandbag. And so I let him sit and I noticed my sergeant coming again and I would tell him quickly to stand up and I realized that I was supposed to be guarding my unit from this detainee and I realized at that moment that I was guarding the detainee from my unit.

And I tried hard to be proud of my service but all I could feel was shame and racism could no longer mask the occupation. These were people. There were human beings. I've since been plagued by guilt anytime I see an elderly man, like the one who couldn't walk and we rolled onto a stretcher, told the Iraqi police to take him away. I feel guilt anytime I see a mother with her children like the one who cried hysterically and screamed that we were worse than Saddam as we forced her from her home. I feel guilt anytime I see a young girl like the one I grabbed by the arm and dragged into the street.

We were told we were fighting terrorists, but the real terrorist was me and the real terrorism is this occupation. Racism within the military has long been an important tool to justify the destruction and occupation of another country. It has long been used to justify the killing, subjugation, and torture of another people. Racism is a vital weapon deployed by this government. It is a more important weapon than a rifle, a tank, a bomber or a battleship. It is more destructive than an artillery shell, or a bunker buster, or a tomahawk missile. While all of those weapons are created and owned by this government, they are harmless without people willing to use them.

Those who send us to war do not have to pull a trigger or lob a mortar round. They do not have to fight the war. They merely have to sell the war. They need a public who is willing to send their soldiers into harm's way and they need soldiers who are willing to kill or be killed without question. They can spend millions on a single bomb, but that bomb only becomes a weapon when the ranks in the military are willing to follow orders to use it. They can send every last soldier anywhere on earth, but there will only be a war if soldiers are willing to fight, and the ruling class: the billionaires who profit from human suffering care only about expanding their wealth, controlling the world economy, understand that their power lies only in their ability to convince us that war, oppression, and exploitation is in our interests. They understand that their wealth is dependent on their ability to convince the working class to die to control the market of another country. And convincing us to kill and die is based on their ability to make us think that we are somehow superior. Soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, have nothing to gain from this occupation.

The vast majority of people living in the US have nothing to gain from this occupation. In fact, not only do we have nothing to gain, but we suffer more because of it. We lose limbs, endure trauma, and give our lives. Our families have to watch flag draped coffins lowered into the earth. Millions in this country without healthcare, jobs, or access to education must watch this government squander over $450 million a day on this occupation. Poor and working people in this country are sent to kill poor and working people in another country to make the rich richer, and without racism soldiers would realize that they have more in common with the Iraqi people than they do with the billionaires who send us to war.

I threw families onto the street in Iraq only to come home and find families thrown onto the street in this country in this tragic, tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis; only to wake up and realize that our real enemies are not in some distant land. But not people whose names we don't know, and cultures we don't understand. The enemy is people we know very well and people we can identify. The enemy is a system that wages war when it's profitable. The enemy is the CEO's who lay us off our jobs when it's profitable; it's the insurance companies who deny us health care when it's profitable; it's the banks who take away our homes when it's profitable. Our enemies are not 5000 miles away, they are right here at home. If we organize and fight with our sisters and brothers, we can stop this war, we can stop this government, and we can create a better world.

Here is the video.

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The Grieving Man and The Sacred Masculine 2.0

Sometimes, when I am sitting alone, in the dark, I wonder how many men on the planet, have never told their fathers, either in person or in spirit, that they love them. And I also wonder, how many fathers have also never said the same to their sons. And every single time I do this, it ends the exact same way-- I start to weep and I gain a little more insight, each time, into why the world is the way it is... sage

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The Grieving Man and The Sacred Masculine

"...Men are essentially grieving because we do not know how to love men, half the world's human population. And we need to know how to love men to lead fully productive lives. This is all directly related to the experience of not feeling loved by the father or feeling abandoned or not understood or not accepted by the father, etc. Most men realize this on some level, mostly subconsciously. So many of us then seek out women to teach us how to love. And in many cases these women we seek out (including our mothers) variously succeed at this task. I have found this desire for men to be taught to love by women, by the way, is just as true for gay men as for men who identify as heterosexual.

Do not be fooled by the appearances many gay men give that we are wanting men to teach us how to love or that we even truly know how to love men ourselves. Most gay men are afraid of men on some very basic levels. This is because we had the same real or perceived distant and grieving fathers as our straight counterparts. I have found both as an out gay man and a therapist who has worked with hundreds of gay men--- gay men in general, do not know more about how to truly love men than straight men do and in many cases, we know less..."

Sage Mahosadha
Excerpted from the original essay, The Grieving Man
The original essay can be found here.

By Sage Mahosadha

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The Grieving Man

The Grieving Man

In the Spring of 1994 I began working at a job as a grief coordinator at a very large Hospice in the American Southeast. I stayed at that job for about 4 years. It was not as difficult as most imagined. By the time I left the hospice however, I was a changed man.

Four years earlier in 1990 I had begun working in a psychotherapy private practice. I stayed in this practice for 10 years. I had been invited into the practice by my major professor in graduate school. From the beginning of my time in the practice roughly 75%-85% of my therapy clients were female. This was also consistent with the caseloads of the other 5 therapists in the practice. When I began the job at the hospice, I reduced my hours in the private practice though continued to be highly involved in both seeing clients and the administrative aspects of the practice as well.

By early 1995 I began to see the beginnings of a dramatic shift in my caseload numbers in the practice. Previously, as I have mentioned, the female/male split in my caseload was approximately 80/20. By mid-1995 approximately 90% of my caseload consisted of males. This 90/10 male-female split lasted until my very last day in the practice.

What, you may wonder, could have possibly brought on such a dramatic and sustained shift in my caseload numbers and, not to mention, numbers that are completely inconsistent with the conventional wisdom and statistical analysis about, "who goes into therapy?" It was never a mystery to me. Because of my work at the hospice, I was able to tap into what I viewed then and what I view now as the single largest mental health issue facing men--grief and grieving.

Once I tapped into this I became the rare psychotherapist who understood how to work with men in therapy and how to address the issues of male grief and grieving. I eventually realized the vast majority of what I and my fellow students had learned in our clinical psychology graduate program was designed to relate to and address the way women think and process information. I began to understand this as one of the principal underlying reasons why women disproportionately go into therapy. Almost nothing was geared toward the average man's thinking process. And that very expensive time in graduate school had taught me absolutely nothing about male grief and grieving.

So what are most men grieving?

Most mens primary and in many cases lifelong grief experience is deeply connected to their relationship (or lack thereof) with their fathers. This is true even if the man has/had a wonderful relationship with the father (or father figure). I suspect however, the vast majority of men, at least in western cultures, have not had a good relationship with their fathers. This is not to say women do not also have grief around the relationship with father. Many women do. It's very different however and beyond the scope of what I can address here.

Men are essentially grieving because we do not know how to love men, half the world's human population. And we need to know how to love men to lead fully productive lives. This is all directly related to the experience of not feeling loved by the father or feeling abandoned or not understood or not accepted by the father, etc. Most men realize this on some level, mostly subconsciously. So many of us then seek out women to teach us how to love. And in many cases these women we seek out (including our mothers) variously succeed at this task. I have found this desire for men to be taught to love by women, by the way, is just as true for gay men as for men who identify as heterosexual.

Do not be fooled by the appearances many gay men give that we are wanting men to teach us how to love or that we even truly know how to love men ourselves. Most gay men are afraid of men on some basic levels. This is because we had the same real or perceived distant and grieving fathers as our straight counterparts. I have found both as an out gay man and a therapist who has worked with hundreds of gay men---gay men in general, do not know more about how to truly love men than straight men and in many cases, we know less.

Not knowing how to love men isn't an isolated case, unfortunately. Not knowing how to love men also means not truly knowing how to love women either, the other half of the human population. And like the burden many women have of often having to be both the mother and father to their children when they are younger, women are often also put in the position of consciously or unconsciously having to teach men how to love them throughout their adult female lives. Both are monumental tasks. So you see, "The grieving Man" is not just something that just affects men. It affects us all. It affects all our relationships. It affects all aspects of our lives.

So the grieving man is grieving in my view, largely because of a disconnect from at least a perceived loving and supportive relationship with the father or the primary male father figure in the young boy's life. And so a primary result of this particular disconnect is a propensity for men to then look to women to teach us how to love, regardless of the man's sexual orientation. Women are surreptitiously given this job. I don't know too many women who seek out men with an active desire to also teach them how to love. Most women I believe, find themselves in this situation mostly by surprise. The job is a huge one indeed. It is a job that would seem to be almost impossible to succeed at. Still, many women seem to have pretty fair success at this even though it is a job most did not ask for nor are seeking plus it is quite a daunting task indeed.

I know there are and have always been men who have had very loving and supportive fathers who were able to competently be guide, mentor and Zen Master to their sons or the young males in their charge who may not have been their biological sons. While this is not insignificant, I do not believe such men--men who had these loving, guiding and Zen Master type men around them--necessarily learn however, how to love other males. A big reason for this is that even if they were guided by such a loving male mentor from an early age they also had to live and interact in a world filled with young boys and men who model something quite different. The sheer numbers of such men and their direct and indirect, conscious and unconscious influence becomes a very large barrier to overcome.

My mother and father were divorced when I was very young. I hardly remember my father. I grew up living in a home with my mother, my maternal grandmother, my maternal grandfather and my sister who was 22 months older. To this day I thank God for the important foundation this has turned out to be. My grandfather was an exceptional man and an exceptional human being. I have studied with both male and female world renowned spiritual teachers who are known for their gentleness, compassion and inner beauty. Still, to this day, 21 years after my grandfather's passing, my grandfather is the most positively influential person in my life.

As I just stated, my grandfather is not just the most positively influential man in my life. He is the most positively influential person in my life. Growing up under the wings and tutelage of this man was wonderful and a good balance to the strong African American female presence that was all around me growing up. My mother was an only child. Her mother was an only child. Her mother was an only child. I was in my mid-twenties before the first of these women made their transition. They were always around and when they weren't around, their presence could still be strongly felt. It was a pretty good home to grow up in. It was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. It however, was good and every single day I am thankful for growing up in that home.

Still, with the excellent role modeling I had from my grandfather, I also consider myself to be a grieving man in virtually identical ways I view other grieving men to be grieving who had no father or father figure or who had a father figure who was not truly emotionally present or was completely invisible.

When I began to look at all of this more deeply there seemed to be a strong societal or cultural element to this phenomenon I am calling, the grieving man. There seemed to be something beyond the confines of the home life of young boys or even the relationship to the present or absent father figure. That inner knowing led me on a search to find something or someone who could say something about what I suspected was either innate, cultural or societal about the parts of the male experience that made it such an experience of grief.

I found many answers. I mostly found them in the form of books. I also found many people who had something to say about this, mostly writers of the so called men's movement. Among that group, the person and the book that resonated with me the most was Warren Farrell's, The Myth of Male Power. In this book I found many of the answers to questions about what I had by then come to call, the grieving man archetype. After reading this book I felt called to a specific type of healing work, a healing work between and among the genders. I continue in this work today. I have discovered much in the process.

Back when I was a therapist, I saw hundreds of younger and older adolescents and grown men in many different forms of counseling and group work. These males ranged in age from 12 to the mid- to late 80's. They came from almost every cultural background and socio-economic group imaginable. Some had and had always had a good relationship with their fathers. The vast majority had not. One thing I noticed was whether the relationship had been good, bad or non-existent, all the men had been profoundly impacted by this relationship. It took up a disproportionate amount of their psyche. The majority admitted, after feeling safe with me as a confidant, that it was the most influential relationship in their lives. And again, it did not matter if the relationship was good, bad or non-existent.

The relationship with mother, wife or significant other may have been the most important or positive or loving relationship. The relationship with father however, was often self reported as the most influential. And it was often the most conflicted as well. This was a profound discovery for me. One that eventually changed the entire focus of my life. What, I wondered, could compel men to make the effort to distinguish between the most important person in their lives and the most influential. The answer I came up with was grief. And grief, I also have learned, can eventually heal.

Farrell, W. (1993)  The Myth of Male Power, Hardcover, New York: Simon and Schuster.

© Raven/Sage Mahosadha

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