Terror Can Hit Troops Hard

Oct. 13, 2000 — -- Survivors of the USS Cole disaster in Yemen are distraught yet in good spirits, fatigued but determined to stay with their ship. And, Navy officials add privately, volunteers have been streaming forward to serve on the crippled destroyer despite a scary situation.

Those aren’t necessarily contradictions, say psychologists and military observers.

After an apparent terrorist attack like the one on the USS Cole — where at least seven sailors have been killed, another 10 are missing and presumed dead, and dozens are injured — military victims become torn between duty and grief, discipline and shock, anger and despair, external toughness and internal turmoil.

‘Warriors Into Worriers’

“What terrorism does is turn warriors into worriers,” says Joseph L. Mancusi, who headed the Department of Veterans Affairs’ psychology program for five years in the early 1980s.

In the military, “you’re trained to take action in the face of danger,” he says. “But if you don’t know where it’s coming from you stay on heightened awareness and you worry.”

“It’s not like a combat engagement,” says Justin W. Schulz, a Denver psychologist who specializes in combat stress disorders.

“There’s nobody to respond to, to shoot back at,” he says. “It leaves people feeling helpless.”

American servicemen are not strangers to terrorist attack while posted abroad. In 1983, a suicide truck bomber killed 241 Marines and sailors when he crashed into their barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. In 1996, a truck bomb killed 19 Air Force personnel at the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia.

And many, including Mancusi and Schulz, believe that much of the Vietnam War, with its often unseen enemy, had the effect of terrorism.

“Most of the fatalities did not occur from fighting with people,” Schulz says. “Most occurred from booby traps and land mines, which is comparable to a terrorist attack.”

Based upon hat they’ve seen in the past, the two psychologists believe USS Cole survivors will be shaken.

“The men who were there should be really traumatized,” Mancusi says. “Every noise, every bump in the night will keep them awake.”

However, Mancusi adds, military men and women sometimes live in a culture where they tend not to talk openly about fear. That can heighten anxiety.

‘Good Spirits’

Despite this rather bleak prognosis, Rear Adm. Joe Henry, director of Navy military plans and policy in the Bureau of Personnel, described the crew of the Cole as “fatigued but in good spirits,” and said they were in the process of making telephone calls home.

Psychologists say such family contact is invaluable to sailors who’ve been through traumatic situations, because unlike domestic victims of terror, they are miles from the emotional support of family.

It also helps calm some of the uncertainty and fear the families themselves endure as the disaster pans out.

“The whole idea of terrorism is that if it happened now, it can happen tomorrow,” says Sue Schwartz, the associate director of government relations for the National Military Family Association, and the wife of a Marine Corps pilot. “Whenever this kind of thing occurs it brings it home — the stark realities that this can happen. We kind of get quiet and hold our breath.”

Sailors Come Together

Experts are not surprised by Navy officials’ comments to ABCNEWS that dozens of sailors from all over the world are volunteering to relieve their victimized colleagues on the Cole. Nor are they surprised at how the Cole survivors reportedly are pulling together.

“The crew will absolutely remain with their ship, for all that aren’t injured,” Henry told reporters today. “And I think we’d have to drag them away. They just saved the ship, so they want to stay there.”

Eugene R. Fidell, a Washington lawyer and president of the National Institute of Military Justice, says incidents such as these tend to galvanize well-trained soldiers and sailors.

“It’s for situations like this that people have spent all their time in training,” says Fidell, a Vietnam veteran. “People pull together, put aside all of the petty concerns they may have with each other.”

Sailors from two other ships in the area already are relieving Cole crew members of some of the tasks they’ve been performing to keep their ship in operation.

“Obviously, the crew left on the USS Cole is tired and distraught,” said Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon. “They have been through shock. And, therefore, it’s very helpful to them to have reinforcements and other sailors to bear some of the burden and to help with the pumping and the other tasks going on now.”

Trauma Reverberates

Psychologists say the stresses of a terrorist attack can stay with anybody for years.

“There’s a saying: ‘Anything that does not kill me makes me stronger,’” Mancusi says. “I don’t believe that saying. No one is better off for having been raped. No one is better off for having been called names because of their color. Nobody is better off for having been beaten as a child.

“I think incidents like these in any normal person will leave permanent scars that don’t necessarily damage forever, but are always there in the back of the mind.”

ABCNEWS.com’s Julia Campbell and ABCNEWS’ Barbara Starr contributed to this report.