Stoic Warriors - Book Review

By Abbey-Robin Durkin, PhD

Stoic Warriors provides clinicians and service members alike with elegant and understandable links between today’s military cultural values and those of ancient philosophers, such as Aristotle and Philoctetes. The author of this book, Dr. Nancy Sherman, builds these links by weaving two important themes throughout the text. First, she depicts how stoicism can be used as a survival tool to psychologically survive years of confinement and torture. Second, she reveals how stoicism impacts the manner in which troops have been timelessly trained for battle but not for the aftermath.

Dr. Sherman adroitly selects relevant sources from the military’s cultural icons to describe the role that stoicism has played in some of the most challenging environments ever documented. For example, she juxtaposes the rich life of Admiral Stockdale, a former prisoner of war at the Hanoi Hilton for 7 years during Vietnam, with the life of everyday men and women in uniform, exemplifying how these ancient philosophies still guide war fighters today. This book illuminates how the modern warrior ethos--imbued by our military’s leadership--not only has its roots in ancient times, but also may have personal costs for the troops adhering to such potentially rigid values.

Identifying the origins of today’s military values is clinically relevant to the treatment of combat spectrum problems because it enables members of the armed forces to better understand the true history and potential future of combat reactions.

For members of the military behavioral health care system they may be better able to build the therapeutic alliance with military patients if they can appreciate the values held dear by the population they are treating. Ultimately this book can be very helpful to members of the military by de-stigmatizing the help seeking process, as its chapters are filled with stories from ancient and modern warriors overcoming herculean psychological reactions to military life all too familiar in the modern day.