In Waves and War (2024) w/ Ryan Miller | Ep. 76

Ryan Miller, the next on the show’s fellow veteran lineup, was a Marine in Okinawa from 1998 to 2002, spent years in About Face: Veterans Against the War, helped Oakland decriminalize plant medicines in 2019, and now works as a therapist in psychedelic integration. He joins us to discuss Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk’s film documenting three special operators from SEAL training through Afghanistan to Iraq to a clinic in Mexico, where ibogaine and toad venom do what sixty pills a day could not.

For Lyle the film’s real subject is a trauma apparatus built to repair faulty equipment rather than heal people (one SEAL is sent to the military’s brain-injury center, patched up, and returned for four more deployments). As the scholar Nadia Abu El-Haj has argued in Combat Trauma, PTSD was popularized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in rap groups that turned pain into politics. As the decades followed, this promising origin story nonetheless raced toward an endpoint constituted—in Ryan’s words—by psychedelic-assisted stormtroopers. Van invokes Fanon’s French torturer, begging his psychiatrist for a way to sleep at night and keep his job.

Then there is the narration itself, where the enemy appears only as bad guys, terra nullius in uniform. No Afghans, no Iraqis, not even Mexicans in a film set half in Mexico. The one line that breaks the frame, a SEAL wondering whether we’d have a military at all if we didn’t abuse children, lasts no more than a second.

Further Reading and Listening

Ryan Miller’s therapist profile

Combat Trauma by Nadia Abu El-Haj

“Can we heal wartime trauma without confronting the real causes of war?” by Lyle

Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks

“Colonial War and Mental Disorders” from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

Bang-Bang’s Netflix’s Marines episode w/ Sam Carliner

Bang-Bang’s Combat Obscura episode

Teaser from the Episode

In Waves and War Trailer

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