Max Cleland, secretary of American Battle Monuments Commission, arrives with President Barack Obama at the D-Day anniversary ceremonies at Normandy American Cemetery in June 2009. (Courtesy Stetson Univ.)

"I have come to the end of the light, and I have stepped out into the darkness of the unknown many times."

MAX CLELAND suffered severe wounds in Vietnam in 1968, losing both legs and one arm. He spent years recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the VA Medical Center in Washington, then returned to his home state of Georgia and won election to the state Senate in 1970. He was appointed in 1977, at age 34, to head the Veterans Administration by President Jimmy Carter. Upon returning to Georgia in 1981, he was elected secretary of state, and then went on to win election to the U.S. Senate in 1998. He lost his reelection bid in 2002 after a bitter campaign in which his patriotism was challenged by his opponent. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama appointed Cleland secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission. His new book, Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove, has just been released. Max Cleland spoke with journalist Marc Leepson in Washington, D.C.

Writing to Heal

Q. Was there any particular motivation for you to come out with your new book, Heart of a Patriot, now?

A. It’s part of my own therapy, my own healing. Those of us who suffer need to talk about it and write about it. I didn’t really have a connection to the suffering of those who have what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder—I call it “post-war stress”—in which you never quite get over what’s happened to you, but you move on. But after I lost the Senate race in 2002, my life collapsed. I went down in every way you can go down. I lost my life as I knew it.

It took me right back to Vietnam, right back to the battlefield, right back to the wounding. And I had to work through all that stuff. It took me years of counseling and years on medication, and it’s been several years of just writing. I had to make sense of it all, and I tried to.

You speak a lot about faith in your book.

In many ways, life itself is an act of faith. The Army’s trying to spend $50 million to find out the causes of suicides. If you suffer in a war that has some meaning and purpose, you are much more able to conclude that all the suffering you went through is worth it. However, if you serve in what I call in the book misguided wars—Vietnam, Iraq—in which our leaders have not learned lessons, then it’s a hell of a lot harder to suffer and then find meaning and purpose in it.

Stepping into Darkness

Your view on faith is a bit unorthodox.

What I concluded is that for all of us, just being alive is an act of faith. Crossing a street and trusting a car is not going to run over you is an act of faith. We often interpret faith in terms of religion, but the best definition of faith I’ve ever come across was a quote in Lt. Gen. Hal Moore’s marvelous book about healing after war and after the loss of his wife: When we come to the end of all the light, we have to step into the darkness of the unknown, and we must believe that there is something solid to stand on, or else we will be taught to fly.

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