Compelling Memoir Explores a Soldier's Journey From War to Peace

Claude Anshin Thomas recounted the meditation retreat he attended in 1990, a gathering for Vietnam War veterans led by the renowned Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. It was a profound experience for the decorated combat vet. "When I first heard Thich Nhat Hanh speak about Buddhist practice and principles, it was clear that the Vietnamese were no longer my enemy," Thomas told BTW in a recent interview. "If I had still seen the Vietnamese as my enemy, then I was still an enemy to myself and separate from my own humanity. Without contact to my own humanity, there was no possibility for healing and transformation."

Thomas' compelling memoir, At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey From War to Peace (Shambhala), which is an October Book Sense "We Also Recommend" title, documents his process of emotional and spiritual transformation. The book recalls the horrors of his service in Vietnam, his subsequent emotional breakdown and addiction problems, and his journey to finding inner peace. Thomas is now a Zen monk and peace activist.

As a crew chief on assault helicopters during the Vietnam War, Thomas was directly responsible for the deaths of "many, many people," he writes. "The only experience I had with the Vietnamese was, they were my enemy. Every one of them: shopkeepers, farmers, women, children, babies." The retreat he would eventually attend was especially enlightening since he and his fellow soldiers had actually been attacked from behind by men who resembled -- with their shaved heads and saffron robes -- someone like Thich Nhat Hanh. "Of the seven of us, three were killed and two were wounded. Were they really monks? I don't know. So monks were our enemy, too." He relates another incident during which he and his gunship team destroyed an entire village. "The killing was complete madness," he writes.

A quintessential theme of the book is Thomas' belief that the roots of war and suffering are passed on from one generation to the next. When he refers to war, he not only means war between nations or between groups with contrasting beliefs, but the "personal war we're confronted with," he said in conversation. "It might be what happened to us in our family of origin." Yet his thoughts about what he calls "industrialized killing" are both revealing and chilling. "Killing at this level is simply the consequence of a fear-based philosophy that drives us to seek safety by attempting the impossible, to control everything and everyone around us," he writes.

While an adolescent, Thomas was encouraged by his father to enlist in the military. "He'd say things like 'You're too wild to go to college, and it would be better for you to go into the military,'" the author explained. Thomas would ultimately say to himself "all I could do was fight." He was also being conditioned for war, in a sense, by becoming a star athlete. (Around this time, however, Thomas was developing a drinking problem, too, and war became a way to escape the growing unmanageability in his life.) Thomas' name would appear in local papers, along with war-friendly statements like "if there were only 10 people to charge a hill, we'd want Claude Anshin Thomas to be one of them!" he said. But the young soldier soon discovered that the romantic version of war simply wasn't the authentic version. "I grew up around a lot of men who served in World War II [who told] those stories, and the stories weren't the truth," he continued.

It's not surprising, then, that Thomas' life was in such upheaval when he returned to the U.S. in 1967. For one thing, he spent nine months in a Fort Knox, Kentucky, hospital with a serious shoulder injury received during a helicopter crash. And subsequently, his life wasn't making "any" sense. "I struggled. I became more and more meshed in dependence on alcohol and drugs," Thomas said. "I couldn't get work. But I did manage to complete my college education and became certified to teach English."

During the 1980s, Thomas' began to see a psychiatrist, as anger and violence was hurting his life. The psychiatrist insisted that Thomas stop using alcohol and drugs or the therapy wouldn't work, although he secretly continued to use. Eventually, he entered rehab and cleaned up. In 1990, he came in contact with Buddhist practice -- which led to his participation in the retreat and his zealous interest in what he calls "mindful" meditation practice. "This mindfulness allows individuals to realize how they're conditioned and how they can work with that conditioning differently," he explained. "So they can begin a process of healing and transformation -- which is not the absence of confusion, and pain, but learning to live in a different relationship with it." In the book, he writes, "From my study of the Buddhist teachings, I would learn that true and lasting security can come only from learning to live in harmony with our suffering." Thomas accepts that he was a solider who killed, but now has a healthier relationship with that reality. "For the longest time, I lived in a perpetual state of victimhood. I blamed everyone," he said.

For a long time after returning from Vietnam, Thomas was also unable to make "any sense out of the war. I couldn't make any sense out of what I had done. I would say, 'War just doesn't make any sense.'" What he later discovered was that war actually does make sense. "War is crime," he insisted. "There is a great illusion in thinking you fight war with rules. There are soldiers in Iraq who killed civilians, who gunned people down. It makes sense. It's what happens in war."

Thomas currently makes pilgrimages to promote peace, nonviolence, and other Buddhist-favored principles in war-scarred locales, domestically and abroad. He's done this work in places such as Auschwitz (where he was ordained a Zen monk), Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. When he spoke to BTW, Thomas was on a pilgrimage in the northeastern U.S. Thomas writes in At Hell's Gate that "I cannot think myself into a new way of living, I have to live myself into a new way of thinking." During our talk, he added, "If I go to the bathroom in the morning and brush my teeth, I clean the sink up. That's about my relationship with that which serves me -- to be consciously aware and not take anything for granted in my life. And to really engage in this process of thankfulness even when I'm not thankful. Because I don't know if I have another moment ahead of this one." --Jeff Perlah