Random Victims : Terrorism: the Psychic Scars Persist

At 9:10 a.m. on Oct. 11, Joie Phillips sat typing as usual at her desk in the Santa Ana office of Teachers Insurance Co., where she was a claims representative. At 9:11, a bomb blast ripped through the suite across the hall, killing one man and shattering Phillips’ peaceful world.

The blast pinned the Huntington Beach woman to her desk. A piece of shrapnel tore a hole in her sweater before ripping through three layers of steel to become embedded in the desk next to her.

Alex M. Odeh, regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, was not so lucky. When he opened the door to his office, Odeh triggered the bomb. He died on an operating room table two hours later. Phillips, 45, suffered a concussion, was treated at a local hospital and released. The FBI is investigating the bombing as a terrorist act. There have been no arrests.

Long-Term Therapy

Although her physical injury was relatively minor, Phillips spent seven weeks at home, suffering from headaches and anxiety attacks. She sees a therapist every week, “and it’ll be every week for a long time,” she said.

Phillips now feels safe in only three places--at home, at work and in her therapist’s office.

And while watching television reports of the Dec. 27 terrorist assaults on the Rome and Vienna airports, Phillips said, “I went into a kind of a trance and scratched on a piece of paper, ‘Places to avoid: L.A. International Airport, Orange County Airport, major banks.’ ”

Joie Phillips is one of terrorism’s random victims, and she is not alone. Terrorism-related deaths have more than quadrupled worldwide in the last five years, as terrorist acts themselves have become more prevalent and more violent. This new violence--marked by larger-scale, more random attacks--has meant that more incidental victims are left with the psychic scars of indiscriminate brutality.

Post-Traumatic Stress

Although the effects of terrorism on these people have yet to be studied on a large scale, psychiatrists and psychologists are finding that many bystanders of terrorist acts suffer long-term symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which is more commonly equated with combat veterans.

“Whether it’s an intended victim or an onlooker, we’re dealing with someone who has been traumatically exposed to a severe form of human cruelty,” said Dr. Frank Ochberg, past associate director of the National Institute of Mental Health and an expert on victims of crime and terrorism.

“Terrorism leaves in its wake a whole new area of concern and research--the area of incidental victims,” said Brian Jenkins, who studies terrorism for the Rand Corp. While hostages have been studied, he said, the reactions of bystanders have not been scrutinized in the same fashion.

Rand researchers are still counting but they expect to record at least 450 terrorist incidents and 700 deaths in 1986, making it the bloodiest year since Rand began tabulating such figures 18 years ago.

Last year left a catalogue of horrors: attacks on Rome and Vienna’s international airports; the death of 59 passengers in the hijacking of an EgyptAir Boeing 737; the hijacking of the Achille Lauro, which resulted in the death of one American; the hijacking in Athens of TWA Flight 847.

Those incidents, and others like them, branded for life those who bore witness: Jeanne Shinn relives the Rome airport attack every morning. Jeanne Murry, whose husband was held hostage on Flight 847, is fighting to bring her life back to normal. So is Rene White, who was strolling by Harrods department store in London when it was bombed in 1983.

Saw House in Flames

And Robert Seifried, a 23-year-old rock band drummer from Bay Shore, Long Island, is another such victim. He was injured in a recent bombing that the FBI is investigating as a terrorist incident. Early last Sept. 6, Seifried was returning from a performance when he saw a house in flames.

Seifried awakened the man and woman inside, but as he left, tripped a bomb that police postulate was meant for Elmars Sprogis, an alleged Nazi war criminal who lived there. Seifried lost his right leg below the knee, and almost lost his left arm and leg. Sprogis and his wife were unhurt.

The emotional ailments also have hurt Seifried.

“I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since I lost my leg,” Seifried said. “I can’t play the drums now. . . . I’m paranoid of fire now. A couple times, I stayed awake all night because I thought there was going to be a fire in my house, and I didn’t want to be there.

“For a while I wouldn’t leave places first,” he said. “I’d stop and look at the stoop (for a bomb). Now I just glance. I guess it’s going away. . . . I have so many things in my mind about this accident that are eating me up.”

Although the symptoms were described as early as the Civil War, post-traumatic stress disorder was not studied in earnest until Vietnam veterans began to return home. It was not named by the American Psychiatric Assn. until 1980.

Today, experts say the disorder can be triggered by all kinds of trauma--natural disasters, rape, kidnaping, the witnessing by a child of a parent’s murder.

The symptoms include nightmares, flashbacks, emotional numbness, impaired memory, difficulty concentrating, depression, hyper-alertness, sleeping problems.

Rona Fields, a psychologist and sociologist who has studied the effects of terrorism and war on children in Northern Ireland, Israel, Lebanon and Africa, said terrorism fundamentally alters its witnesses.

And she contends that terrorism has a different effect on its victims and witnesses than more common crimes.

“It has to do with the way the individual relates to the politics of the event,” she said. “If you commit a crime, you get punished. However, (terrorism) throws every basic belief into question.”

Two years have passed since Rene White, a 35-year-old Delta Airlines flight attendant from Atlanta, was injured in the Harrods bombing, which killed five and injured 90. Members of the Irish Republican Army took responsibility for the blast.

White spent a month in a London hospital with wounds more common to battle zones than wealthy English neighborhoods: burst eardrums, a perforated windpipe, a broken hipbone, a shattered pelvis, a cracked kneecap, 17 shrapnel wounds, an exploded eyeball and a detached retina.

Most of the physical injuries have healed but the emotional scars are still raw.

White took anti-depressants for a year. She said she feels “like a policeman”--always on guard. And she will no longer work on European flights.

“When I’m standing in the airport parking lot, putting my suitcase in or out of my car and a jet flies over, so close ‘cause it’s just taking off or just landing, the power of the engines somehow brings back . . . that feeling of when it (the bomb) went off,” White said. “And I just shudder and drop my suitcase.”

White said she feels she has “been given a second chance to finish out my life in this world,” but, “unfortunately, I don’t know what to do with that.”

While surviving the Harrods bombing made White more aware of life’s value, it had the opposite effect on the man she was dating at the time.

“He decided life wasn’t worth living after my accident, because life didn’t mean anything when he saw how easily it could be taken away,” she said. “He decided he was going to kill himself. He never did it . . . but this really caused a lot of problems.”

Not surprisingly, terrorism’s bystanders usually will not suffer as long-lasting effects as combat veterans and prisoners of war.

Still, psychiatrists and psychologists believe that terrorism can inflict serious emotional wounds on those who witness it. And it is the randomness of such events that can hurt the most.

People make assumptions about the world around them to help them cope with everyday life: The ceiling will not fall in. The office is safe. The car will not explode when the ignition key is turned. “And the more assumptions that are shattered, the more the likelihood of a severe reaction,” said John Russell Smith, director of the Center for Stress Recovery at the national Veterans Administration Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Cleveland. “Therefore bystanders, victims of random events, may be more troubled.”

Charles and Jeanne Shinn, residents of Englewood, Colo., had safely visited 99 countries when they stood in line at the El Al Air Israel terminal in Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport last December, awaiting a flight to Israel.

“There was nothing but a beautiful Roman day, and I was just standing there looking out the window, and all of a sudden all heck broke loose, and there we were in the middle of it,” Jeanne, 66, recalled.

A grenade exploded 10 feet away, spraying Charles, 69, with shrapnel from head to toe and cutting an artery in his right arm. Jeanne suffered a broken right arm, a burst eardrum and nerve damage that causes her to speak with a lisp.

The Shinns are housebound until their wounds heal, but for Jeanne, that’s only part of the problem.

“You have inside scars as well as outside scars, and sometimes the inside ones are worse,” she said. “I know when I get up in the morning and the newsreel starts, still. I get it over with, and I’ve talked about it a lot--a whole lot, it seems like--and I think that that helps, too.

“But you just never forget a scene like that,” she said. “It’s probably the most important day of a person’s life to go through a day like that, whether you’re hurt or not.”

So far, recovery has been easier for Jeanne’s husband, who says his combat history--35 bomber missions over Germany in World War II--inured him to the type of emotional torment that plagues his wife.

“Every time you took off, (you wondered whether) you were coming back or not,” he said. “Maybe I’ve gone through this type of thing 35 times before. This is the 36th time, and maybe it affects me a little different than it would Jeanne or other people.”

Psychiatrists and psychologists are fascinated by bystanders to terrorism such as Charles Shinn-- the few who appear emotionally unscathed by such events.

Despite his shrapnel wounds, Charles Shinn appears to have put the Rome episode behind him. Laura Sickles, who sat in the same office as Joie Phillips in the Alex Odeh bombing, has done the same.

Sickles, a 28-year-old Norwalk resident, is still recovering from her injuries. “I got cracked ribs, a concussion, a whiplash,” she said. “My hair was burned, and they took tissue samples from my scalp because there was some nerve damage. I lost fillings in my teeth.

“Physically, no, I haven’t gotten over it,” Sickles said. “But emotionally, it didn’t really bother me.”

Sickles says the bombing paled beside two other recent traumas--her 5-year-old daughter’s open-heart surgery and her father’s death.

“In a strange, ironic way it might be that those who are living among serious stresses don’t see this enormous, shocking stress as that much more stressful” than other problems, said Dr. Lenore Terr, a psychiatrist who studied and treated the children in the 1976 Chowchilla school bus kidnaping.

For some, terrorism leaves a deeper scar because other human beings--not natural forces--have caused the violence and pain.

“If you are going to suffer frightening or dangerous or life-threatening trauma at the hands of others, this is more threatening than acts of God or accidents that are your own fault, or disease, or injury by pure chance,” said L. J. West, professor and chairman of the department of psychiatry and bio-behavioral sciences at UCLA.

Carol Kline agrees. She is a secretary in an Everett, Wash., law office, located one floor above the Feminist Women’s Health Center, a facility that performed abortions. Between December, 1983, and April, 1984, the health center was severely damaged by arson three times and ultimately closed its doors.

“I was quite uneasy after the first one,” Kline, 44, said. “The first thing I thought about when I heard about the fire was the loss of the paper work. But after I found out it was a definite bombing and planned. . . , it was really frightening. . . . I like to work late, and it gets dark early. Now, when everyone else leaves, I leave.”

Proximity also plays a role in how a bystander reacts to terrorism. “The people who are the closest in proximity to the horrible disaster are usually the most affected,” psychiatrist Terr said. “Proximity, viewing, seeing, feeling, touching or having blood run on you, being right in the thick of it would make it harder on a bystander than being miles away and hearing about it.”

The lack of proximity helped Jeanne Murry, 57, cope when her husband, Thomas, was taken hostage while on a business trip last summer. Thomas was on TWA Flight 847 from Athens to Rome when it was hijacked by Shia Muslim gunmen June 14. Although the terrorists released many of the 153 passengers and crew members, Murry and many others were held hostage for 17 days. One American was shot to death.

“We were very well-insulated right here in this house,” said Jeanne Murry, a resident of the Ventura County community of Newbury Park. “All we had to do was keep the door closed and really not talk to anybody or do anything. Except that it was my husband that was over there.”

Jeanne Murry ate to ease the anxiety of her husband’s plight--she’s still working off 10 pounds gained during the crisis--and leaned heavily on her family and best friend of 22 years, Sue Curley. The stress also affected Murry’s ability to concentrate. She forgot names and had trouble handling small problems.

Now that her husband is safe, Murry works to keep her mind off of the hijacking. She left her job as a teacher when the crisis occurred and has since decided to retire. Murry has given the incident a name--”Hostage.” She tells people that “Hostage isn’t our life. It’s a very important part of our life, but it’s not our life.”

Although she wasn’t a hostage herself, Curley, 53, says she was deeply affected by her connection to the incident. She no longer feels safe. She will not travel. “And every once in a while when I think about it, I get all choked up and get tears in my eyes from just thinking about it and how emotionally and deeply it affects us,” she said.

For Joie Phillips, too, the trauma of terrorism will linger for a long time.

“When I go out of the house, I look out of the peephole first before opening the door,” she said. “I always leave something by my car to see if somebody was near and moved it. When am I going to come down? Never.”