Counseling in Moscow : U.S., Soviet Vets Share Grief of War

Until he met Shad Meshad, Alexander Kalandarishvili thought nobody would ever understand the horror of what he had gone through as a Soviet soldier in Afghanistan.

Friends had been killed before his eyes. Ambushes, land mines and rocket bombardments made fear of his own death constant. There was always the terror of being taken prisoner, of a death that Soviet soldiers were told would be slow and full of torture at the hands of Afghanistan’s Muslim rebels, the moujahedeen.

“You feel you have stepped into a room where the only way out is death, and you don’t want that,” Kalandarishvili said. “So, somehow you survive--you fight, you hide, you yourself kill, and you survive.

‘It Changes Your Soul’

“But it changes you, it changes your soul, and afterward you are not the same, never what you were before, never what you might have been, never what people still expect you to be.”

Perhaps the worst of it all, Kalandarishvili said, was that when he and other Afghantsi came home, no one seemed to understand this.

But Shad Meshad, a former U.S. Marine who counsels other American veterans of the Vietnam War, understood immediately and with greater compassion than Kalandarishvili and other Afghantsi had encountered here.

“We did understand immediately because we had been there,” Meshad said. “Ours was a different war, in a different country, in different circumstances politically, but what it did to us and what Afghanistan did to these men was the same.

Impact Nearly Identical

“The same anger is there, in us and in them. The same residue from the stress of combat is there. They have the same difficulties--though they are just beginning to see them--in adjusting to civilian life. Similarities I expected, but the psychological impact was very nearly identical.

“And this means that, with our experience with the Vietnam vets, we can probably help the Soviet Afghantsi get through what is bound to be a very difficult period for them and for society as a whole.”

Meshad, executive director of the Vietnam Veterans Aid Foundation in El Segundo, Calif., was one of 19 U.S. specialists on psychological counseling and physical rehabilitation who came to the Soviet Union for two weeks of intensive consultations. They met with Soviet physicians, psychiatrists, other civilian and military officials and the Afghantsi themselves, who are trying to develop programs for veterans of the nine-year war in Afghanistan.

Speaking “soul to soul,” as Russians describe deeply personal conversations, the Vietnam veterans spent night after night, sometimes going until dawn, in emotional rap sessions with dozens of Afghan veterans they met in Moscow and Leningrad.

“These are our brothers,” Alexander Lavrov, who served in western Afghanistan from 1984 to 1986, said of the American visitors.

‘We Knew They Are Brothers’

“They have been where we have been, seen what we have seen, felt what we have felt,” Lavrov said. “Almost as soon as we started to speak, they knew and identified with us. Language did not matter, different cultures did not matter, different social background did not matter. . . . We knew they are brothers.”

For the first time, many of the Afghan veterans said, they felt someone understood the anxieties that still haunt them.

“We are back in the Soviet Union, but often our hearts and our heads are not,” Lavrov said.

“When we sleep, we often see Afghanistan. We see our dead friends, we see the mountains and battlefields there, we see our soldiers’ lives. . . . But when we tell people this, they don’t want to hear, and some even become frightened and almost run away from us.”

The Americans, who came prepared to see more differences than similarities and who had intended to take a calm, measured, almost cool approach to the talks, were drawn into conversations that quickly transcended the camaraderie of old soldiers to become the intense, talk-it-out rap sessions that Meshad and others have used to promote the healing process among veterans of the Vietnam War.

Need for Trust

“All warriors have to regain trust, we told them, because as a soldier you learn to trust yourself and your weapon,” Meshad said. “First, you have to develop a trust bond outside yourself.

“Then they need to trust enough to share. And once you tell your darkest moment, you come out of the dark. . . . This was the process we tried . . . to take a few of the Afghantsi through so that they could see how it is done, how they can help one another and what kind of help works.”

Much of the American experience in counseling appeared to the U.S. specialists to be broadly applicable to the Soviet veterans.

“Afghan veterans appear to have an identical set of problems to our Vietnam vets,” said the Rev. William Mahedy, an Episcopal priest who served as a military chaplain in Vietnam and now is a campus chaplain at both UC San Diego and San Diego State. “We established an immediate bond of brotherhood.

“They see themselves in us, and we see ourselves in them. . . . We want to help here all that we can.”

Advice on Outreach Programs

Mahedy, Meshad and two other American specialists in counseling agreed to advise Soviet authorities on establishing outreach programs to assist the Afghantsi in adjusting, and they promised to assist the Soviet veterans to develop self-help groups.

“We have told the vets here that they have to do it themselves,” Mahedy said. “They already knew that they could not look to their government for much, but we have tried to explain the value of doing it themselves, of working out these problems themselves as part of the therapeutic process.”

Charles Figley, a psychology professor at Purdue University and an authority on the post-traumatic stress syndrome, said that Soviet officials are only becoming aware of the anger, hostility and alienation felt by many of the Afghan veterans, who are believed to number more than 500,000.

“The emotional problems of these men and women have only been seen up to now when they reach a serious, acute, even critical stage,” Figley said. “Many other predictable problems, such as alcohol and chemical dependency, get little attention, and personally I am very concerned about suicides among the Afghantsi, such as we have seen among our Vietnam vets.”

Although Soviet authorities are moving belatedly to establish special rehabilitation and recuperation programs for the Afghan veterans, particularly the physically disabled, the Afghantsi themselves complain that their deeper needs are not understood and that they encounter ignorance or indifference when they seek psychological counseling.

‘Just So Much Cannon Fodder’

“We say, ‘Afghantsi,’ and people still pretend to respect us,” one of the Soviet veterans told the Americans. “But we do not get half the care that (World War II) veterans get, and that makes it clear that we were really just so much cannon fodder in Afghanistan, that it was an adventurist war.”

Mahedy, the author of “Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets,” said that in the rap sessions, which ran almost every night, he found a profound degree of alienation among the Afghan veterans and a search for a spiritual meaning for their lives.

“Vietnam vets came back to a country deeply divided over the war, but the Afghan vets come back to a country that almost succeeded in ignoring their war,” he said. “This realization compounds the psychological impact of the war. They not only think about what they have been through, but they feel that almost nobody cares.”

Igor Medvedev, one of the Afghan veterans who met with the Americans, said that some government assistance in obtaining better housing, employment and education would give the veterans the feeling that, regardless of the merits of the war, they had served their country and that their country appreciated their sacrifices.

“Somehow we are being held guilty by the people for being there,” Medvedev said, “and we are starting to feel that they are guilty for letting the government send us there and not protesting about the war they now say they didn’t want. . . . Our alienation from society is growing, not shrinking.”

Not Geared to Help Veterans

Figley said that the Soviet health care system is not yet geared to provide much psychiatric help to the veterans. “We were disappointed that there had not been much of a scientific or clinical attempt to deal with the emotional problems of these men and women,” he said. “Psychiatry is very oriented to the physiology and biochemistry . . . and psychology focuses more on observable behavior than on psychotherapy.”

To give Soviet psychiatrists an idea of their counseling techniques, the Americans took a group of Afghan veterans into rap session at a research institute here. “It was a bit of a guerrilla attack, catching them by surprise and almost occupying the place,” Figley said. “But we wanted to make sure our discussions did not remain theoretical. It worked. Rap sessions are very powerful, to watch as well as participate in.”

In organizational terms, the Soviet health care system has almost no concept of outreach, Meshad added, “and that means that those Afghantsi who are angry and hostile to the government will not get the help they need simply because they will never go to a hospital or a clinic.”

Soviet authorities, alarmed by recent violence by Afghan veterans, expressed interest in establishing here the kind of centers that Figley, Mahedy and Meshad helped the Veterans Administration start for Vietnam veterans in the United States. The three Americans and Jack Smith, director of the Center for Stress Recovery in Cleveland, agreed to advise this country on that kind of program.

Help From American Experts

Other American specialists said they would advise on orthopedic surgery, artificial limbs, computers to assist invalids and mobility for the disabled. Their trip here was organized by Earth Stewards Network, a Seattle-based group promoting international exchanges. A second group of Vietnam veterans is due here next month.

“People-to-people diplomacy makes a lot of sense in this case,” Mahedy said at the end of his trip here.

“Bringing the veterans of Vietnam and Afghanistan together may help wake up the American and Soviet people to what is going on in the world, in each other’s country. . . . I hope this helps our countries see one another in a new light. American soldiers in Vietnam were fighting Soviet soldiers in surrogate, and the Soviets in Afghanistan were, in some ways, fighting American surrogates. What these Afghan veterans told us was that they want peace, no more wars, and we agree.”