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FEATURE ARTICLE: DISABLED VETERANS AND DISABILITY HISTORY
As anyone who has submitted an article to the American Historical Review knows, your work must pass muster with five and sometimes six peer reviewers. Such was the case with my June 2003 piece, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other.’” I learned something important from the seemingly incredulous question of one reviewer who in effect commented: “The material all seems relevant, except for the two books on veterans, which seem out of place. The review would be stronger and more streamlined if these were left out.” While this prompted me to address the connections more directly, DHA member David Gerber argues below that historians of disability and those studying veterans remain too detached from one another, thereby missing important opportunities. Gerber is professor and chair, department of history, SUNY Buffalo and author of Disabled Veterans in History (Michigan, 2000).
Disabled Veterans: Why Are They Different? What Difference Does It Make?
David A. Gerber
University at Buffalo (SUNY)
The war disabled are once again in the news, and once again we are called upon to understand the meaning of disability in the context of sacrifice on behalf of the state. This should not be a surprise, for as long as war continues to exist, it will produce, as it has always produced, people with disabilities, whether military or civilian. Throughout time, war has probably been the single most constant and efficient, socially created mechanism for producing injured and ill bodies and minds. The difference today lies in the fact that wounds and illnesses incurred during military service are no longer as likely to result in death as they have been in the past, because military medical care and its delivery and battlefield equipment have combined to save more lives among the combat injured than ever before. Ironically, therefore, war has become an even more effective creator of disability than in the past.
Yet in spite of war’s prominence in creating disability, the war injured are marginal to the history of disability, as it has been recently conceived and written by the founders of the field. I speak especially of disabled veterans of the military, who have been such a potent symbol for the state and for society throughout time that one might think they would logically be seen as an important project for disability scholars. Though certainly the historical literature on disabled veterans is slowly increasing, it is largely concentrated in work on the twentieth century and on Western nations, and the vast subject of civilians disabled in war has barely been touched, though war has been especially cruel to civilians since the introduction of strategic air bombing and missile technology. But more significant for the point I wish to make is that literature is not necessarily being produced by people who consider themselves historians of disability. They are instead historians of war and society, or the welfare state and state formation, or military medicine, and the discourses remain mostly separate and only occasionally acknowledging one another.
This is revealed in some of the excellent works that constitute foundational monuments in the rise of disability scholarship in recent decades. Look at such edited collections as: Benedicte Ingstad and Susan Reynolds Whyte, Disability and Culture (1995); Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996); Kenny Fries, Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out (1997); David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (1997); and Paul Langmore and Lauri Umansky, The New Disability History: American Perspectives (2001); or such authored texts as Richard K. Scotch, From Good Will to Civil Rights: Transforming Federal Disability Policy (1984); Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (1998); Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability (English-language edition, 1999). While the war victims’ story is occasionally absent completely, this is less the case than that it appears simply as fragmentary tracings detached or barely integrated into central arguments, and largely decontextualized from its own larger historical sources in war. The reader may discover an essay here and there in a collection, but find that the other essays, the large majority of the volume, make no reference at all to the history of war and war victims, even when it may well be connected at one level or another to a collection’s larger purposes. Representation of disability has been evoked in some of these collections, for example, but the rich iconography of the traumas and injuries caused by war is not present, or it is isolated in separate compartments. In interpretive works, on the other hand, the disabled veterans’ history might make a brief appearance as a fact here and there to substantiate a point, but it, too, is isolated and compartmentalized, and it is decontextualized from its larger historical sources in war. The direction is lent by the need to make points derived from another developing narrative.
I do not mean to suggest that these works are “defective” by any means, for they are uniformly excellent, and indeed, as I have said, foundational. I must acknowledge that I, too, have been published in some of them, for which I remain indeed grateful. I say only that we might have a wider plane of conceptualization for disability history and deeper understandings of what knowledge we wish to create, if war and the war victim were to be better integrated into works in the study of disability such as these.
In this essay, I would like to explore the marginality of the disabled veteran’s history to the emerging field of the history of disability, and, though I do not believe that this gulf can ever completely be eliminated, I will offer some suggestions for bridging the gap between the two fields of inquiry. Beyond conceptual and thematic marginality, moreover, there has been an element of political and ideological resistance of many disability scholars and activists to the integration of disabled veterans as subjects of study, and I also seek to explore that divide.
ii.
I have experienced the marginality of disabled veterans within disability history both as scholar in search of a discourse and as an observer of the evolution of the literature on disabled veterans and on disability. I entered into research in this field about seventeen years ago, with a personal agenda that I have come to see was distinctly different than that widely shared by the founding generation of American historians in the history of disability. It was not only that I did not have a disability, and lacked the existential and practical politics of disability that has been a powerful, creative inspiration for so much of the excellent work in the field and in disability studies generally. This source of inspiration makes the disability studies meetings I attend, the most exciting sites for the discussion of ideas I encounter today. For disability scholars, ideas matter profoundly. They are not simply a way to get ahead in the academic world. This sense of purpose, I admire greatly, though I am, at best, a fellow traveler in the revolution they are making.
But my own marginality to that politics is only a small part of the story. Instead, I was motivated by a wholly different political agenda: a concern for the moral integrity of United States as it reached out to be the world’s policeman in the post-Cold War world, and a fear that we Americans would never cease to be the victim of our own propaganda about war. In the 1980s and 1990s, we witnessed a reinterpretation of the Vietnam War that sought to valorize participation in that conflict after years in which it was rightly understood as a disaster for the United States and for Southeast Asia. Especially powerful in this re-mythologizing of the Vietnam conflict, which could be heard, for example, in the speeches of President Ronald Reagan and President George H.W. Bush, was the symbol of the disabled veteran of that war. From being seen widely as victims of the conflict, the war’s veterans were now to be rehabilitated as heroes. In a language that few dared speak in the 1970s, when it was difficult to muster up the courage to find anything positive to say about the policy that had led us into war, the military effort that had failed in Asia, and sadly, about the men who had been conscripted into the armed forces to fight the war, service in Vietnam was being aggressively valorized.
Hero and heroism applied to most of those who fight modern wars are inappropriate categories. It is not only that many people in the military, including those disabled while in service, never see battlefield conflict, but instead that even those who do are part of a vast bureaucratic machine that hardly gives the large majority of them the space to emerge, as individuals, in acts of heroism. In modern armies, people fight for their own survival and those of their comrades who are battling immediately around them rather than for abstract patriotic symbols, and they often take little, if any, pleasure in the violence they are forced by desperate circumstances to play a role in creating. Besides, they are probably justifiably terrified most of the time they are in danger. No one recognizes the reality of behavior in war more than the typical combat veteran, who is embarrassed by such talk, because it can never come close to recognizing the complexity of the personal or moral situation of those individuals who fight in wars. Nor, as one elderly veteran, who had been badly wounded at Guadalcanal, told me in an interview, can invoking the language of heroism ever help us memorialize the countless numbers of forgotten young men who die on the battlefield under the most conventional and unheroic circumstances, and who represent the brutal reality of the ordinary soldier’s experience?
Yet those in active military service and veterans alike accept, mostly passively, the praise of a worshipful public and the honors and benefits that come with it; and they probably do not wish, under any circumstance, to be impolite to the well-meaning people who shower veneration on them. They may also lack the confidence in their own abilities to challenge the official version, because they are less educated and not especially well-spoken. Whatever the reason, they lapse into a silence about their experience, reinforced by horrific images that can never completely disappear from memory, never addressing beyond their own cohort their true memories and their own moral conclusions. Their silence often comes to be the way their children and grandchildren describe the way these men related to their experience of war. We need greatly to encourage these men to speak, while recognizing how painful it is for them to do so, because these manufactured heroic myths that percolate around us so insidiously do not serve us well. They work only to prepare us to be uncritical and docile in the face of movement toward the war.
I entered into writing about disabled veterans, therefore, not to understand disability per se, or to take part in creating knowledge on behalf of the liberation of people with disabilities, but to deconstruct these oppressive and destructive myths about war. But to whom was I going to talk about my work? Whose work would I read to educate myself? Certainly, it appeared to me early in my research, not the war and society social scientists, or the military historians, or the social welfare historians. The war and society scholars are for the most part behaviorists, and their methodologies are of no interest to me to the extent I like to write narrative, have no interest in collecting quantitative data, and have no pretensions about being a scientist. All veterans, and especially disabled veterans, are social welfare projects of the state, but social welfare history is the history of state processes, policy and regulation, and fails to touch directly enough, if at all, on the moral, ideological, and political matters that were part of my attraction to the disabled veteran’s history. Both the war and society scholars and the military historians want to study war and the military, neither of which directly interested me except in so far as I have been eager to subvert the ideological underpinnings of both, or that they form one context for the disabled veterans I have studied, alongside in the case of my own work the Hollywood motion picture studio system, the civilian community, and the disabled veterans’ peer organizations.
My logical scholarly allies, and the people from whom I would ultimately learn the most, have been disability historians. To the extent I wanted to explore the great and abiding gap between myths of war and war’s real consequences, the history of disability would teach me how to think about the lives and identities of those veterans with disabilities, as disability has been lived and represented in a variety of social and cultural realms controlled by the able-bodied. But this intersection of agendas has never been complete, because the people I have studied do not comfortably fit into the paradigms created by historians of disability. They are largely outside the circle of subjects of interest to most disability historians, and when they are considered, it is in a discourse that has largely become a separate realm of disability history research.
iii.
In seeking to understand why this is the case, we move quickly toward a deeper investigation of the disabled veterans’ singular relation to the state and its various consequences for their identity as a group. In modern history the large majority of disabled veterans have been conscripted civilians, mobilized into mass armies by governments possessing enormous powers to gather together a variety of random human beings and material resources in order to defend society and to advance the state’s own interests. Yet governments, whether democracies or tyrannies, have understood that most ordinary folk have an inner resistance to war: they know that it destabilizes life, not to mention frequently destroys it, and that it jeopardizes the security and predictability for which most individuals strive. Especially in modern democracies, such as the United States, in which the people are supposed to have a say in governing and in creating the methods and goals of state policy, and in which the state is supposed to be an instrument for their protection, going to war has created a potential legitimacy crisis for the state and certainly for those who at the moment are in control of it.
War has thus created a need for the most elaborate justifications, whether lies, truths or half-truths, for without them war can easily be construed as a failure of the state to uphold its duties to safeguard its citizens. Under these potentially destabilizing conditions, the disabled veteran as heroic symbol has been a necessary ideological tool of the modern state in advancing its interests and goals. The psychological and social pressures on disabled veterans to accept and to make part of their identity the valorization of their disabilities and illnesses have been both abiding and powerful, and they have been profoundly reinforced by the development and expansion of the veterans’ welfare state, which has produced broad ranging and well-financed programs for their assistance. As we have become aware in the midst of the Iraq War, those programs have often been subject to gross bureaucratic mismanagement, and they are during times of fiscal stringency under-funded. But the sense of moral debt embodied in them has been a near-irresistible force in the emergence of disabled veterans as a favored class with special claims on public resources.
At the same time, however, becoming a project of the modern state is at odds with normalization of their lives and the ordinary social invisibility that disabled veterans also crave. Most of them have not wanted to be poster boys for the advertisement of the military, but want instead to get on with their lives. Nor have they wanted to be pampered, for that encourages indolently sitting at home, jobless and without a social role, while the government provides support. There has been no civic dignity in that for Americans, most of whom have believed and continue to believe in the traditional virtues of self-reliance. Early on in my research on disabled veterans I came to understand this tension in the case of individual veterans and of veterans’ organizations, such as the Blinded Veterans Association, which was busy simultaneously seeking state benefits for its members, while warning its members against the dangers of dependence on those very same benefits.
The contrast of the public situation of disabled veterans with the much larger number of the non-military disabled could not be more profound. The civilian disabled have dealt with deeply aversive representations of themselves, suffused with pity and fear, and they have been forced historically to the very margins of society, or, especially in the case of disabled women, they have fallen entirely off the social map to become virtually roleless. They have come increasingly to desire complete normalization - street invisibility, full social inclusion, civil dignity, and an end to stereotypes that limit social participation -embedded in legal rights; and they want government assistance only to bring about these practical goals.
The American Disability Rights and Independent Living Movements of the 1970s embody these goals, and have generally articulated convincing visions of the role of the state in bringing them about. The goal of public transportation that can accommodate people in wheelchairs, for example, is not urged on the state as just compensation for lives rendered more difficult by disability. Such pathos is so completely antithetical to the ethos of these movements, it is absurd even to consider that sort of discourse. Instead, the argument is more or less, “Damn it, I want to have a life, and how in the hell am I going to get one, if I can’t go to work, or go to the library, or to the dentist?”
In contrast, the same rights and benefits seem to find their way relatively easily to disabled veterans. A veterans’ welfare state, constructed on legally based entitlements, has been created over nearly 150 years in America, since the Civil War. But the same benefits to which disabled veterans are entitled by law have to be fought for through street protests and lawbreaking demonstrations by disabled civilians. This has been a source of understandable resentment for many disabled civilians, and not coincidentally to the scholars who identify so closely with and participate in the liberation movements that act in their name. One sees the roots of this division of military and civilian people with disabilities, of course, in the recent political histories of the two groups. While government funding for veterans certainly waxes and wanes with the health of the capitalist economy, the morally plausible political premise is that the veteran, and especially the disabled veteran, must be provided for, and that anything else is simply shameful. The leaders of veterans’ organizations make it there business to remind Congress and various presidential administrations of this obligation. Rarely indeed have street mobilizations, let alone civil disobedience, been a factor in this politics. Not so, the history of the disabled civilians relations to the state, which has called for more than prodding or even angry words. Inspired by the civil rights movement, disability rights for civilians have often required a veritable democratic revolution in the streets at every level of the federal system.
There is another way in which the symbolization of the disabled veterans creates a discourse of disability that has isolated them from other people with disabilities. That symbolization has for centuries been so suffused with traditional tropes of masculinity that it has offered nothing to women with disabilities, and has thus deepened the isolation of disabled veterans. Contemporary disability liberation movements arose almost simultaneously in time with Second Wave Feminism, which was born with a deep consciousness not only of the general social inequities resulting from the patriarchal division of public authority and power, but also of the subordination of women in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. In both the feminist and disability movements, as in disability studies within academia, the voices on behalf of women’s inclusion and leadership have been insistent and pervasive. One cannot imagine current disability politics or scholarship without a consciousness of gender and a formative place for gender politics within them.
Not so in the world of disabled veterans historically. Of course, the news from Iraq and Afghanistan suggests that world will have to change. For the first time in our history, women are present on the battlefield, not in active combat roles, but in combat support roles (as drivers, technicians, and couriers, etc.) that nonetheless place them in harm’s way. The result has been that women, who now account for approximately 15% of battlefield casualties, have joined the ranks of disabled veterans. It is too soon to know whether the representational world of disabled veterans will change to accommodate the entrance of women into the ranks of the war disabled, but minimally we can say that there is a great deal of history, going back at least to Greek antiquity, to overcome to make that possible. Practically speaking an aspect of that history, related psychologically to the representational field, has been the long history of the organizations of disabled veterans, like the organizations of veterans generally, to set themselves off from society, celebrating and commemorating the common experience of military service, commiserating over the lasting effects of their wounds, and enjoying the tipsy masculine fellowship of the smoke-filled local post or club. Gender integration of these institutions has been tentative, because today it requires accommodation for young single mothers among the veterans who have children to care for, and object to bringing them to facilities where there is smoking and drinking. Of course, if the veterans’ organizations wish to survive, they will need to find ways to accommodate the increasing presence of potentially dues-paying women in the ranks of veterans. The Blinded Veterans Association, for example, has already integrated its leadership by gender. But accommodations by veterans’ organizations at the local level, amidst ordinary social interactions, may be more difficult to achieve.
iv.
In sorting out these contrasts and conflicts, we have to acknowledge that not only manipulations for cynical and opportunistic state purposes are behind the creation of the world of disabled veterans. Gratitude for sacrifices in causes, just or widely and plausibly thought at the time to be just, is part of this construction, as is sympathy for those ordinary people removed from their peaceful pursuits, and made to become warriors and too often suffering grievously for that. We cannot really doubt for a moment that the World War II founders of the Blinded Veterans Association, whom I interviewed in the early 1990s and who have sadly now mostly passed from the scene, made a sacrifice in the cause of defeating fascism, Nazism, and militarism that made the world a safer and better place. These men did not ask to be blinded. Their own testimonies suggested to me that their passage into the country of the blind, as adults with fully formed personalities and, in some cases, careers and families with small children, was a lot more difficult than someone blinded at a much earlier stage of life, and was necessarily more fraught with emotional conflict and a profound sense of loss. For me, some of them came as close as anyone I have met in my own life to acting heroically, not on the battlefield, but in civilian life in making new and fulfilling lives for themselves. They not only challenged their own tendencies toward despair, but also the social prejudices and discrimination of an ignorant public, and the often insensitive and inert state agencies that fell short in assisting them in their efforts at normalization. (Others of them, of course, did not, and ended up in a variety of predictable situations --- self-pitying alcoholics, projects for their wife’s constant attention, deniers of their blindness, etc.) Good war or bad one, inspirational or ordinary individual, if the state is going to take civilians, remove them from their ordinary lives and make soldiers of them, and ask them to suffer in its behalf, it can be legitimately argued that it owes them assistance in reestablishing themselves in civilian life.
The larger point with which I began does not change in light of these ethical and political complications: the disabled veterans’ world is at odds with the world of non-military people with disabilities. Hence, too, it is at odds with the ideological assumptions mainstream disability scholars in the present have brought to understanding disability, as they have created the foundational knowledge for an emerging field of disability studies within the disciplines and across them. The result is the marginality of the disabled veteran and the study of disabled veterans within contemporary academic discourses of disability. Yet in rendering the world of disabled veterans there is no practical way to understand it except within the frameworks of the singular history that separates it from what is now mainstream disability scholarship.
It may legitimately be asked, I suppose, if this separation is necessarily implausible, to the extent it is based on some objective realities and to the extent that the paradigms of disability studies are based on the study of the large majority of people with disabilities, who have not incurred these in the military. To this I respond that the intellectual and ideological coherence of the field depends on inclusiveness, which, of course, has also been in principle an internal goal of the disability liberation movements in organizing themselves as well as a broadly proclaimed value standard held up to society itself by such movements.
Beyond that general principle, there are ways in which deliberate efforts to include the history of disabled veterans in the history of disability will broaden and deepen our knowledge of disability in society and culture, even while we acknowledge the singular aspects of the experience of disabled veterans.
I will identify three of these ways for the sake of illustration:
(1) While disabled veterans have often had the state on their side, they have also often, especially as individuals negotiating the ordinary, daily social world as disabled people, not had the assistance of the state. At any given time, they, too, might experience, discrimination, insults, slights, and all manner of practical difficulties imposed by an unthinking able-bodied majority, just as have disabled civilians.
A member of the founding generation of the Blinded Veterans Association whom I interviewed years ago provides an example of this combination of types of experience of disability. Ed Hoyczyk was blinded in the Battle of Iwo Jima during one of his first experiences of combat. He was denied admission to business school after the war, because, as he was told, the curriculum and the circumstances of attendance were such that a blind man simply could not keep up. He was known to be a disabled veteran, but this did not help him at the time in attempting to negotiate his own admission. With the assistance of powerful advocates, of the type that it was easy for a blinded veteran to find in the immediate postwar world, and through his own insistent determination to find supporters of his cause, Hoyczyk was eventually admitted. His tuition was, of course, provided him under the G.I. Bill, but he received no special public assistance with getting through the program, and depended largely, as many ambitious blind men at the time might have, on his wife to help him with reading assignments. But he did graduate, and thereafter got a job at a major Buffalo bank. That he was a disabled veteran helped him, of course, and it was relevant, too, cynically so, to the work he was specifically assigned: Hoyczyk and a driver provided to him went out to individual homeowners to inform them that their mortgages were being foreclosed. After all, his employer must have reasoned, what sort of people, even facing dispossession, were going to allow themselves to get angry enough to assault a blind man? Hoyczyk understood how he and his disability were being used, and many years later still bitterly resented the cynicism of his employer. He wanted a career in banking, not a job that combined being a poster-boy for pseudo-inclusion with doing the dirty work for his bank’s small loan committee.
Hoyczyk’s testimony is as filled with such narratives of not unfamiliar poor treatment of a man with a disability, as it was of people and programs assisting him, often simply by letting him work up to his potential. That he sometimes had powerful advocates and the law on his side, long before the Americans with Disabilities Act, did not necessarily always guard him against discrimination and insensitive treatment. Some of the time, in fact, like all disabled veterans, in momentary encounters, the able-bodied people he dealt with probably did not know he was disabled in combat. At times like those, he was just another blind man, an individual with a disability, approached with the usual impatience, pity and fear, and deemed more or less socially in-valid.
To the extent we might be tempted to regard the disabled veteran as living in a bubble of privilege, and thus outside the realm of the history of disability, it is well to keep these experiences of ordinary, daily life in mind. In our histories of employment discrimination, for example, integrating the disabled veteran into our narratives might deepen our understanding of the pervasiveness of the biases that have governed the exclusion of people with disabilities from such social realms as job markets. In histories, singularly germane to disability studies discourses, of token, poster-child inclusion that plays incessantly on pity, it is well to think of veterans like Hoyczyk, who were simultaneously used and infantilized at the pleasure of employers wanting credit for the exercise of their own presumed virtues.
(2) It is true that disabled veterans have set themselves off in their own peer groups, and tended to isolate themselves from other people with disabilities, not surprisingly if only because of the intense generational, military, and medical-rehabilitation experience they share. But it is equally important to note that this has not invariably been the case everywhere throughout time. In some European countries in the twentieth century, massive war victims’ organizations that functioned as lobbies and protest groups combined the civilian and military victims of conflict. Some disabled veterans’ organizations, such as the World War II Canadian spinal cord injured veterans’ association, ultimately opened their ranks to everyone sharing their disability, and evolved into a general service organization. Other organizations remained limited to veterans, but achieved goals that profited a much larger population. When a blinded veteran with a guide dog was denied service at a restaurant in New York City following World War II, because city ordinances barred bringing pets into places that served food, the Blinded Veterans Association worked successfully to have the municipal ordinance changed, not only, of course, for blinded veterans, but for all visually impaired people using a guide dog.
Research is likely to reveal many additional types of exceptions to our expectation that the veterans are out there in their own space, enjoying their privileges, keeping as far away from the rest of us as they possibly can. If we change our expectations enough to ask new questions, we may find answers we have not yet anticipated. Part of our research agenda might well begin with questions such as one Richard Scotch very tentatively implied over two decades ago in From Good Will to Civil Rights (p.7), “What is the relationship between the Vietnam-era veterans, disabled and able-bodied alike, many of them when they got back to the state often protest-oriented and angry over the human consequences of the war, and the development of the disability rights and independent living movements in the 1960s and 1970s?” We all know what we have been told anecdotally: that the veterans and their organizations kept their distance. But how many encounters with the archives have validated this assumption? Until we look at the records of the Blinded Veterans Association, the Paralyzed Veterans of America, and other disabled veterans’ organizations, we ought to withhold judgment. We should not expect the veterans’ organizations to disband and immerse themselves in a general disability politics. If we expect that, we are destined to be disillusioned, but if we are willing to open our minds to more subtle forms of mutual cooperation and inspiration, we may be surprised by what we find.
The same possibility emerges from opening our minds to inquiries from the opposite direction: the role of general disability organizations, founded to aid non-military people with disabilities, in the lives of disabled veterans. The American Foundation for the Blind, for example, participated extensively during and after World War II in the organization of service provision for and practical rehabilitation of blinded veterans, working extensively in cooperation with the military to share its experience and personnel in such efforts. The military, in fact, learned a great deal about how to organize blind rehabilitation from blindness workers who had been involved before the war in civilian work. We need to consider this cross-fertilization of efforts and individuals in tracing influences on the organization of services during wartime and post-war periods. We may find that it had influences beyond wartime, and has created a number of crossovers and common understandings uniting, for example, medical care, rehabilitation, and social service delivery between military veterans and civilians with disabilities.
(3) Therapies, rehabilitation techniques, prosthetics and assistive devices, and medical knowledge created for application in the treatment and rehabilitation of those injured in combat and of disabled veterans have without a doubt been employed in providing for the needs of the disabled public-at- large. Pioneering efforts in medicine, rehabilitation, and assistive technology were certainly often an aspect of the privileging of fighting forces and veterans, but this did not stop them from working their way outward to the general population, which was widely seen, in fact, as a very desirable outcome. It is a case of an ill wind that blows many people some good. As I was told, not completely tongue-in-cheek, some years ago by a Northern Irish friend, when I went rather apprehensively to Belfast to do research, the battle-torn city was the best place in the world to be should I become a casualty either of the fighting or simply get hit by a bus crossing the street, and sustain a serious injury. Between the IRA, the Protestant para-militaries, and the British army, he said, Belfast’s doctors and hospitals had a world of experience in treating physical trauma.
There is a rich history in this process of transmission of knowledge and technology for anyone who has the patience to do the archival and oral history archeology that will uncover it. Some years ago, the Canadian scholar, Mary Tremblay, demonstrated how it was that the folding, self-propelled wheelchair came to Canada after World War II, tracing its progress from the manufacturer in the United States, to a spinal cord injured veteran in Toronto who was an early exemplar of independent living and wanted to drive around town and have his chair with him to assist him in shopping and visiting, to his cohort of spinal cord injured veterans, and then to the general population of people with spinal cord injuries. The Canadian veterans, in fact, became advocates for making these wheelchairs, which replaced the old chairs that had to be pushed from behind and could not be folded, available to the general population of those which could profit from them. A similar evolution can be seen in the development of white cane technique developed in the United States by Dr. Richard Hoover around 1944 for blind rehabilitation among veterans. This liberating aid for independent orientation and mobility soon became available to non-military people with visual impairments.
Such crossover therapies were by no means limited to physical disability, as the proliferation of knowledge about post-traumatic stress disorder in the United States after the Vietnam War. From a syndrome identified as combat-related and associated with a small cohort of deeply troubled Vietnam veterans, PTSD has been applied to a variety of segments of the population, from police to abused wives and children, who have experienced severe neurological stresses. While not without controversy for a proliferation of applications that some regard as excessive, the diagnosis of PTSD no doubt leaves us better able to offer more compassionate understanding and care to individuals who desperately require it.
In these three, admittedly sketchy sets of examples, we see suggestions that can extend our research agenda, and help us better to integrate the various formal discourses of disability studies. And, note, we have not even begun to address probably the single most neglected aspect of disability research internationally: the terrible toll that war has increasingly taken on massive numbers of civilians all over the world in the last century. Under-analyzed from this viewpoint are episodes in the recent history of war from the lethal air attacks on industrial targets and neighborhoods in European and Asian cities in World War II, to the massive numbers of victims of land mines and cluster bombs and the civilian casualties of urban guerilla fighting in civil wars in Central America in the 1980s and more recently in various Middle East conflicts, to the traumatic amputations employed on a large scale to terrorize noncombatants in West African civil wars. Below the surface of the most apparent and dramatic differences of experience and identity may well lurk a common, core history of disability that unites all people with disabilities in unanticipated ways. An understanding of inclusiveness that is true to our ideals places an ethical demand on us to make the effort to unite these histories of veterans and civilians.