Treating the enemy within: Dr. Richard Blum honored for helping soldiers cope with horrors of war Treating the enemy within: Dr. Richard Blum honored for helping soldiers cope with horrors of war (February 23, 2005)

By Andrea Gemmet

Almanac Staff Writer

Dr. Richard Blum, who lives near Woodside, is a genial man with a shock of white hair and a scholarly mien who peppers his conversation with quotes from books both literary and instructional.

He is delighted and clearly somewhat bemused by the flurry of attention he's received since belatedly being awarded the Bronze Star for serving as one of the U.S. Army's first combat psychologists during the Korean War.

The paperwork lost or ignored for 53 years, his commanding officer's recommendation for the medal finally came to fruition after U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Atherton, got involved and pressed the Department of the Army to approve the honor. A recent medal-pinning ceremony in Ms. Eshoo's office drew national attention.

"This medal thing was so sweet and such an honor," says Dr. Blum, 77. "The nicest things were the calls and letters from the enlisted men who worked for me. Three of them went on and got their Ph.D.s."

And Dr. Blum, since his war service, has gone on to pursue many interests, including writing suspense novels based on his years with the CIA, and scholarly works on con men, women's health and early LSD users. He's now working on a historical novel set in ancient Rome.
Groundbreaking work

The recent Bronze Star presentation has focused the spotlight on a man who was doing secret work in a classified unit in 1952. In fact, the work was so secret that the members of the Army's 212th psychology detachment themselves didn't know that it was a secret, says Dr. Blum with a wry smile.

The Army was looking to avoid the huge loss of soldiers who suffered breakdowns and needed to be evacuated during World War II, he explains. His unit's mission was to help them recover from the traumas of the battlefield and return them to combat, and they were highly successful, he says.

For the most part, soldiers were offered rest, comfort and group psychotherapy -- "teaching men it's OK to cry," as Dr. Blum puts it.

"It was so rewarding," he says of the work. "You'd see guys get well in two weeks."

The idea was that everyone would be returned to his unit -- getting worse would not get you out -- although there were exceptions.

"For those who were truly psychotic, they'd start the drive to take them back to their units, but about halfway there they'd turn around and go the back way to the evacuation point," Dr. Blum says.

Men who returned to duty had a way of retaining their honor, he says.

"For these guys, seeing they could heal in the face of sheer terror -- for those who lived -- was confidence-building," says Dr. Blum.

Not that he downplays the horrors of war.

"I damn near crapped my pants my first day on the line," he says. "But you look like you're heroic because you don't run.

"Courage is just putting a good public face on cowardice."

The difference between combat fatigue and post-traumatic stress disorder, a term first used for veterans of the Vietnam War, probably should be the subject of a book, Dr. Blum says.

Combat fatigue was considered to be a transient condition, and was treated that way. Post-traumatic stress disorder is something from which you don't recover, he says.

"That diagnosis didn't exist until after Vietnam and it's in part a political diagnosis, I think," says Dr. Blum.
Life after war

Armed with a doctorate from Stanford University, Dr. Blum started his psychology career as an intern at San Quentin prison, evaluating violent criminals, safe-crackers and con men.

"It was the golden age of inmates," he says almost wistfully, recalling how incongruously polite and considerate they were to him. One who was perfectly charming had a penchant for slashing women's faces, and another was a school principal who murdered five of the six members of his school board, he recalls.

"They were perfectly nice, as long as they were inside (San Quentin)," Dr. Blum says.

His experiences at San Quentin led to a life-long fascination with crime, criminals and justice. Dr. Blum's post-Army career has varied wildly, and taken him all over the globe, as his 36-page curriculum vitae attests. His scholarly pursuits other than psychology include criminology, divinity, and obstetrics and gynecology.

He was a consulting professor at Stanford Medical School's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and has penned numerous articles and books, from "Nausea and Vomiting: Overview, Challenges, Practical Treatments and Perspectives" to "Deceivers and Deceived: Observations on Confidence Men and Their Victims."

He has also written poetry, an autobiography and fiction. Some of his suspense novels, he says, are based on his years of work for the CIA and as representative to the United Nations' narcotics commission. Dr. Blum attracted the CIA's attention, he says, with a sociological examination of LSD users he wrote in the early 1960s, and he later was involved in efforts to recruit Soviet intelligence officers.

Now that most of the hoopla surrounding the Bronze Star has subsided, he's back to his other pursuits, such as working on a book about Cornelius, the bishop of Rome in 128 A.D., who may be an ancestor of Dr. Blum's.

He's also working on the creation of a world equity court, where any nation's citizens can bring cases, through the World Jurist Association of the World Peace Through Law Center in Washington, D.C.

For a lifelong student of human nature, including its darker, more devious facets, Dr. Blum conveys an undercurrent of boyish enthusiasm about all his endeavors -- from the battlefields of Korea, through an unlikely variety of careers and, finally, as a decorated war hero.

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