I'm afraid that this going into so much sort of scientific approach to my Vienna experience might come across as tedious and arcane to many people. But, really, it's hard to explain what it was like and what went on and using these articles as a sort of springboard, even as a kind of authentication of my experience to a certain extent, helps to convey some of what went on. Of course you could be learning at least as much about myself also. I make no apologies for this being my subjective experience and what I observed. I am just one person and there were some 60 of us (not including family of workers), and each would have their own version of their experiences with the mission.
But I'm also not just concerned with what happened in Vienna, although that would certainly have been quite enough, thank you, all by itself. But this is just one part, albeit a significant part of my life.
***
The other thing I want to say here, before going on with my comments on The Taming the of the Troops is that I don't have a lot of documentation regarding the time in Vienna. I reached a point where I was afraid to even write a journal, and I mention that in my journal of my first year after Vienna.
The Vienna experience was a head trip in a lot of ways, whereas my USSR/Russia experience involved certain tangible difficulties, like usually having problems getting them to sell me a plane ticket, that a Russian friend had to help me with more than once, even though all the Aeroflot people there knew me.
Those are really concrete tangible things that in a lot of ways are more documentable then what happened in Vienna. I have lots of journals and correspondence of problems with Russia, and none of these texts, because the problems weren't a head trip like in Vienna and I had to unravel and make sense of.
So for Vienna you get lots of textual commentary and for Russia you'll get a lot of real time journal entries and letters I wrote.
***
Before I start back into the text I just want to say one more thing that I've been thinking about, and that is this:
When I was involved with Soviet emigre work, and at that time they were largely Soviet Jews, one thing that the American Jews would say about us is, in their words:
"You try to kill Jewish souls, but the Nazis only killed our bodies."
If I may take the liberty to change that, my version would be:
"The Christian missions tried to kill my soul, but the Russians only tried to kill my body."
I didn't spend a year upon my return to the States from Russia in emotional agony like I did coming home from Vienna.
***
"The atmosphere of a sequestered society isolates the soldier from civilian influences - particularly those of his peers and family - which sometimes detract from the operation of military social control and solidarity. A soldier impressed with a sense of isolation from civilian society is made more dependent on the Army, and thus the Army's definition of the situation can be more total." (p. 72)
The other day when I found that new box of files one of the things in that box was a list of recipients of my prayer letter ... that 1989 list was glaringly absent of any of my international friends, including Christians. The mission had not only made me edit prayer letters but also cut out international recipients from the list. I won't even talk about the sugar-coated text of the letter here... we'll get to that later. I don't know that they did that (make them shorten prayer letter recipient lists) to anyone else. That's one concrete example of how they were trying to limit my outside contacts.
***
That's finally the end of that chapter, and I'm afraid to start a new one right now because that one took so long. So I'm going to take a break, but we'll continue with the book when I return.
~ Meg
