". . . the military struggled to understand what was wrong. When Lance Corporal Javier Ortiz came home from a secret mission in Syria, the ghost of a dead girl appeared to him in his kitchen . . ."

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I would like to start by extensively quoting excerpts from a recent article in the New York Times, "A Secret War, Strange New Wounds, and Silence from the Pentagon." by Dave Phillips.

"Many U.S. troops who fired vast numbers of artillery rounds against the Islamic State developed mysterious, life-shattering mental and physical problems. . . . (Noted later in the article:) The cannon blasts were strong enough to hurl a 100-pound round 15 miles, and each unleashed a shock wave that shot through the crew members' bodies, vibrating bone, punching lungs and hearts, and whipping at cruise-missile speeds through the most delicate organ of all, the brain. . . .)

"But the military struggled to understand what was wrong.

"When Lance Corporal Javier Ortiz came home from a secret mission in Syria, the ghost of a dead girl appeared to him in his kitchen. She was pale and covered in chalky dust, as if hit by an explosion, and her eyes stared at him with a glare as dark and heavy as oil.

"The 21-year-old Marine was part of an artillery gun crew that fought against the Islamic State, and he knew that his unit's huge cannons had killed hundreds of enemy fighters. The ghost, he was sure, was their revenge.

"A shiver went through him. He backed into another room in his apartment near Camp Pendleton in California and flicked on the lights, certain that he was imagining things. She was still there.

"A few days later, in the barracks not far away, a 22-year-old Marine named Austin Powell pounded on his neighbor's door in tears and stammered: 'There's something in my room! I'm hearing something in my room!'

"His neighbor, Brady Zipoy, 20, searched the room but found nothing.'It's all right I've been having problems, too,' Lance Corporal Zipoy said, tapping his head. The day before, he bent down to tie his boots and was floored by a sudden avalanche of emotion so overwhelming and bizarre that he had no words for it. 'We'll go see the doc,' he told his friend. 'We'll get help.'

"All through their unit Alpha Battery, 1st Battalion, 11th Marines troops came home feeling cursed. And the same thing was happening in other Marine and Army artillery units.

"An investigation by The New York Times found that many of the troops sent to bombard the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017 returned to the United States plagued by nightmares, panic attacks, depression and, in a few cases, hallucinations. Once-reliable Marines turned unpredictable and strange. Some are now homeless.. A striking number eventually died by suicide, or tried to . .

"When Lance Corporal Ortiz started seeing a ghost a few days after returning from Syria in 2017, it didn't occur to him that he had been hurt by his own cannon. Instead, he was convinced that the enemy had put a hex on him.

"He tried to purify himself by lighting a fire on the beach near Camp Pendleton and burning his old combat gloves and journal from the deployment. But after the ashes cooled, the ghost was still there . . .

"One Friday night in October 2020, he was having visions that ghosts were trying to pull him into another dimension . . .

"He has two young children, and has struggled to hold a job. Bills have piled up. The headaches are crushing, he said, and he feels that his memory is becoming worse. When asked about the apparition of the dead girl, he started to cry and lowered his voice so his wife wouldn't hear. He admitted that he still saw the ghost. And other things.

"'I gave the Marine Corps everything,' he said. 'And they spit me out with nothing. Damaged, damaged, very damaged.' . . .

"There is currently no brain scan or blood test that can detect the minute injuries, Dr. Perl said; the damage can be seen only under microscopes once a service member has died. So there is no definitive way to tell whether a living person is injured. Even if there were, there is no therapy to fix it . . .

"In 2016, while the U.S. military was exposing gun crews in Iraq and Syria to repeated artillery blasts, a research team was doing something similar to lab mice at the University of Missouri . . . (exposing them to a comparably close-up massive concussive explosion.)

". . . Mice instinctively build nests, and researchers used the quality of their nests as a benchmark of well-being. The blasted mice built only ramshackle nests, often leaving them unfinished.

"In later experiments, blasted mice were put through mazes. They made more wrong turns than healthy mice, and sometimes froze, refusing to explore the mazes at all.

"The team then dissected the animals' brains. At first they found almost no damage.

"'Everything looked fine until we looked at a nano scale,' Dr. Gu said.Under an electron microscope, a ravaged neural landscape came into focus. Sheaths of myelin, vital for insulating the biological wiring of the brain, hung in tatters. In key parts of the brain that control emotion and executive function, large numbers of mitochondria the tiny powerhouses that provide energy for each cell were dead.

"'It was remarkable the damage was very widespread,' Dr. Gu said. 'And that was just from one explosion.' (my italics) . . ."

Going back to Javier Ortiz, if he had consulted a shaman he would have received a different diagnosis. One big difference would be, the word "hallucination" would not have come up. But the word "spirit" would have.

Remote killing (whether by firing massive artillery shells at human beings 15 miles away or guided missiles), could actually affect our emotional health more violently than close-up killing, and it is a wonder to me that that wasn't considered during examination of those distraught, haunted young men. Not everyone was visited by a ghost. Another marine saw a black demon standing by his bed.

". . . In case after case, the military treated the crews' combat injuries as routine psychiatric disorders, if they treated them at all. Troops were told they had attention deficit disorder or depression. Many were given potent psychotropic drugs that made it hard to function and failed to provide much relief . . ."

Who in our military would be qualified to consider that Ortiz was seeing a ghost and who in the military would be qualified to guide him through a healing . . . to see what the ghost / spirit wanted and respond in some fashion that would allow it / her to return to wherever she heralded from - the bardo? Does the Pentagon hire any shamans ? No allopathic doctor in his right mind would tread there. This kind of work is what shamans do!

When I returned from 12 days in the Peruvian rainforest in 2016, from an intensive retreat working with ayahuasca, I was not quite the same person that went down there. For one thing, I knew that my identity, that is to say, the person I identified with, "Gary Lindorff", was only a small part of who I was. And the other thing I learned was, spirits are real.

I am planning on publishing my journal of my time in the rainforest, due for release in the Spring. That field journal tells the whole story of how my understanding of the nature of reality was permanently altered. It was like my brain was rewired. It's a good story. A lot of healing happened for me.

I came back with more / new neuroconnections.

The brain is plastic. (Plastic = originally from the Greek word, "plastikos", meaning to grow or form, was first used as an adjective meaning "formative.)

Up until 10 years ago it was thought that the brain begins to start losing neural connections after around age 25, and we do lose neurons as we age, but now we know that the adult brain can create new neural connections and even new neurons from neuronal stem cells. "In addition to these gray matter (neuronal) changes, there can be change(s) in our white matter, the pathways between neurons and myelin that allows neurons to communicate efficiently."

click here

Neuroplasticity . . . "is the process that involves adaptive structural and functional changes to the brain. (It is the ) ability of the nervous system to change its activity in response to intrinsic or extrinsic stimuli or reorganizing its structure, functions or connections after injuries, . . . such as trauma or brain injury."

.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK557811/

Not everyone sees ghosts, but those who do may not be crazy, they may be special; their brains may be more plastic or adaptive. A shaman might have been able to help Ortiz to find out why the ghost showed up. All good healers are in some way themselves wounded. Did Lance Corporal Ortiz have it in him to become a healer? We will never know.

A synchronicity: A few days before I read this article I posted a poem "For spirit's children", the last lines of which I will quote as a last word:

. . . Many children are dead

Many more will die

They are spirit's children now

No hardened room

In which to shelter

People

Are abandoning the land

Listen That is the sound of grief

They are saying

This very moment

No more wall of hands

Dynamite the dam

Watch the babies cry

First chance

Second chance

Third chance

They're doing it again

Take this medicine bag

Be a doctor

For spirit's children

Beyond Anger Grief Fear

They are watching

They are watching

................................

I want to document a brief exchange between me and my brother, Dave Lindorff, after he read the above piece:

Dave's comment: I hope you are correct that a shaman could help a person like Corp. Ortiz, but I doubt it. If his brain was that damaged that the myelin sheaths of his brain's neurons were hanging off in tatters, he was beyond help, much like the guys who were exposed to the smoke from military burn pits in fhe two Iraq wars who are now suffering from such connective tissue diseases as ALS, Parkinson's Disease and MS. There are therapies that can stop the progression of these kinds of diseases, but not that can reverse them. The best hope is a study that has developed, with the new mNRA technology for developing targeted vaccines for diseases like Covid. The scientists on this research have developed an mNRA vaccine that can be used to attack the specific proteins that attack the body's nerve tissues causing those debilitating and ultimately fatal auto-immune diseases. They've learned how to tweak the vaccine to attack specific antibodies, fo example for arthritis, or parkinsons and can actually cure them. There is thus hope for cures for neuropathy, sarcoidosis, Graves Disease, MS, ALS etc. It's working on mammals like mice and rates. Humans can't be far behind.

My response to my brother: Your point about the damage to the nerves being irreversible is compelling, but working with a shaman and with plant-spirit-medicines like peyote and ayahuasca can and has resulted in some impossible-to explain results. This is where reading the literature helps. and also, (hard for many), you have to trust other's experience. Every time someone works with a master shaman, in their element, like I did, the results are unique. So you can't say, "this, this and this worked for this percentage of patients with such and such a condition." The healing relationship is between the patient, the shaman and the medicine.

(Article changed on Nov 07, 2023 at 12:36 PM EST)

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(Article changed on Nov 08, 2023 at 7:39 AM EST)

(Article changed on Nov 08, 2023 at 12:09 PM EST)

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.