[>] Charles Myers, a Cambridge psychologist: Shephard, War of Nerves, 1; Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 20; Friedman, Handbook of PTSD, 20–21. See also Jay Winter, “Shell-shock and the Cultural History of the Great War,” Journal of Contemporary History 35 (2000), 10.
[>] Qualified as a physician, Myers was an example: See Shephard, War of Nerves, 21–27.
[>] On one side of the debate were the army’s hardliners: Ibid., 25.
[>] During World War I, more than 2,200 British soldiers: Friedman, Handbook of PTSD, 21.
[>] According to one estimate, at least two hundred thousand British soldiers: See Kelly, Treating Young Veterans, 263. See also Shephard, War of Nerves, 109.
[>] A distinguished neurologist, F. W. Mott: Shephard, War of Nerves, 30.
[>] Freud’s ideas on hysteria: Ibid., 104.
[>] Some contemporary trauma workers: Interview with Bill Nash, 2012.
[>] This new policy, enacted by the Army Council in London: Shephard, War of Nerves, 32.
[>] Confusion about how to treat war neuroses: Ibid., 74–75. Also see Leed, No Man’s Land, 170–180.
[>] Unsurprisingly, the use of electricity on soldiers was controversial: See Winter, Great War. See also Laurent Tatu et al., “The ‘Torpillage’ Neurologists of World War I: Electric Therapy to Send Hysterics Back to the Front.” Historical Neurology 75 (2010): 279–283. Tatu describes in greater detail the controversy that followed the Deschamps case.
[>] One doctor who championed a more liberal approach: Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon, 160–164; Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 121–127; Shephard, War of Nerves, 83–90; Leed, No Man’s Land, 18–19.
[>] After the war, Rivers would conduct a study: Leed, No Man’s Land, 182.
[>] Rivers was fifty-one and serving as an army physician at Craiglockhart: Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 121. For more on Sassoon’s state of mind during this time, see Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon, 159–182.
[>] Whether or not Sassoon was technically suffering: Shephard, War of Nerves, 89–90; Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon, 174, 176, 401; See also Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 111, where he talks about Sassoon’s postwar nightmares.
[>] As Sassoon would later write in his heavily: Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress, 7.
[>] Rivers had been influenced by Freud: Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon, 161; Shephard, War of Nerves, 85.
[>] As Sassoon saw it, the place was divided into two spheres: Shephard, War of Nerves, 85.
[>] Also at Craiglockhart was another troubled infantry officer: Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon, 165–171; Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 124; Shephard, War of Nerves, 93–95.
[>] By May, Sassoon was back in France: See Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon, 203.
[>] The war was never far from his mind: Ferguson, Pity of War, 365; Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 86. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell wrote about Sassoon, “By the time of the Armistice he was exhausted and trembly, sleepless and overwrought, fit for no literary work. He found peace and quiet again in Kent, but nightmares kept intruding. By 1926, however, he had recovered sufficiently to begin work on the obsessive enterprise which occupied most of the rest of his life, the re-visiting of the war and the contrasting world before the war in a series of six volumes of artful memoirs. The writing took him from one war to another: he finished the job in 1945. Exactly half his life he had spent plowing and re-plowing the earlier half, motivated by what—dichotomizing to the end—he calls ‘my queer craving to revisit the past and give the modern world the slip’” (111–112).
[>] In Britain alone, there were twenty shell-shock hospitals: Shephard, War of Nerves, 110.
[>] Oddly, no veterans movement ever coalesced in Great Britain: See Jay Winter, “Shell-shock,” 8.
[>] The one exception to this vast amnesia: Shephard, War of Nerves, 154–157; Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 23–24.
[>] The book would be almost completely ignored: Shephard, War of Nerves, 396.
4. The Haunted Mind
[>] While people suffering post-traumatic symptoms: On the abnormal states of consciousness that sometimes result post-trauma, see Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 96. Describing certain aspects of Great War literature, Fussell argues, “The movement was towards myth, towards a revival of the cultic, the mystical, the sacrificial, the prophetic, the sacramental and the universally significant” (Great War and Modern Memory, 152). Annette Becker, in a 2000 article in the Journal of Contemporary History titled “The Avant-garde, Madness and the Great War,” argues that the madness of World War I was the catalyst for surrealism, an art movement fascinated with hallucination, the irrational, and the mysteries of the unconscious. “To psychiatrists, mental confusion and hallucinations were characteristic wartime syndromes, and the numerous case studies discussed seemed to the surrealists to be poems in prose suited just for them” (79). Becker quotes Surrealist poet André Breton: “I insist on the fact that surrealism cannot be understood historically without reference to war—I would say from 1918 to 1938—both the war it left behind and the one to which it returned” (71–72). Becker goes on to describe the art movement as one created by men haunted by the war: “In the 1920s and 1930s, many surrealist and expressionist artists and poets wrote that they were marked by war, trapped between beauty and violence, between despair and fascination. One case in point is the painter André Masson: ‘For me, violence is part of existence, and one must express it. That is why I returned from Switzerland to serve in the army, to be a common soldier, to see violence—not to inflict it, but to see it—but I was in it and had to be in it’” (72).
[>] The day before I hit an IED in Baghdad: For more on these sorts of compensatory rumors and hallucinations, see the “Myth, Ritual, and Romance” chapter in Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, specifically pages 148–149.
[>] Modern science tends to look on such episodes: Personal communication with Steve House.
[>] Perhaps, as Laurence Gonzales wrote: Gonzales, Surviving Survival. Gonzales wrote that “dreams can be thought of as conversations between two parts of the brain, the hippocampus . . . and the neo-cortex” (134).
[>] The year after she was raped in a tunnel: Sebold, Lucky, 216. See also ibid., 225–227. Personal communication with Alice Sebold, 2014.
[>] Ambrose Bierce, the most important American writer: Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 196, 199.
[>] Freud, a passionately secular man: Caruth, Trauma, 115.
[>] Seventy years later, Cathy Caruth, a writer: Ibid., 4–5.
[>] Beliefs about trauma’s connection to the spiritual realms: See Percy, Demon Camp. Personal communication with Jen Percy, 2014.
[>] Neuroscientists have long known that not all memories: McGaugh, Memory and Emotion, 83. Interview with James McGaugh, 2013.
[>] But the extraordinary flashback memories: See Chris Brewin and Steph J. Hellawell, “A Comparison of Flashbacks and Ordinary Autobiographical Memories of Trauma: Content and Language.” Behaviour Research and Therapy 42 (2004): 1–12.
[>] “Memories gone wild”: Interview with Clint Van Winkle, 2013.
[>] “In the past six years I’ve recoiled from remembering”: Deraniyagala, Wave, 165–166.
[>] By 2007, at the height of the surge: David H. Petraeus et al., FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency, 80, 121.
[>] This situation was not, needless to say, governed by a rational process: See Gonzales, Surviving Survival, 26.
[>] For this reason, cases of chronic PTSD: As Jonathan Shay put it on page 169 of Achilles in Vietnam: “PTSD can unfortunately mimic virtually any condition in psychiatry.” See also Nicosia, Home to War, 182; Sarah Haley, “When the Patient Reports Atrocities: Specific Treatment Considerations of the Vietnam Veteran.” Archives of General Psychiatry (1974).
[>] So powerful, so transporting, are these intrusive memories: Personal communication with Dewleen Baker, May 2012.
[>] One woman, who had been molested: Sacks, Hallucinations, 238.
&
nbsp; [>] Nearly all survivors report that certain: O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods, 79.
[>] Writing about it in an epilogue to his bestselling book: Simpson, Touching the Void, 210.
[>] Needless to say, Simpson, who considers: Personal communication with Joe Simpson, 2013.
[>] One study of 115 combat veterans with PTSD: Holmes and Tinnin, “Problem of Auditory Hallucinations,” 1–7.
[>] Douglas Bremner, a researcher at Emory University, makes the point: Bremner, Does Stress, 214.
[>] Post-traumatic hauntings require no such invitation: Dean, Shook over Hell, 104.
[>] Michael Ferrara, a veteran wilderness first responder: Sides, “The Man Who Saw Too Much,” 2011.
[>] As we saw in the previous chapter: Shephard, War of Nerves, 85.
[>] An Indiana physician who treated Newell Gleason: Dean, Shook over Hell, 151–153.
[>] The dead seem most likely to visit us at night: Herr, Dispatches, 244.
[>] In fact, it was the modern war nightmare: Gay, Freud, 400–401; Sacks, Hallucinations, 241. Cathy Caruth, on page 24 of Trauma: Explorations in Memory, says, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle indeed opens with Freud’s perplexed observation of a psychic disorder that appears to reflect the unavoidable and overwhelming imposition of violent events on the psyche. Faced with the striking occurrence of what were called war neuroses in the wake of World War I, Freud is startled by the emergence of a pathological condition—the repetitive experience of nightmares and relivings of battlefield events . . . the returning traumatic dream startles Freud because it cannot be understood in terms of any wish or unconscious meaning, but is, purely and inexplicably, the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits.”
[>] “Trauma-related anxiety dreams appear”: Peretz Lavie, “Sleep Disturbances in the Wake of Traumatic Events.” New England Journal of Medicine 345 (2001): 1825–1832.
[>] Numerous studies, dating back to the advent of the PTSD: Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 36.
[>] Interestingly, Richard Ross of the University of Pennsylvania: Everly, Psychotraumatology, 176–177.
[>] “The bad stuff never stops happening”: O’Brien, Things They Carried, 32.
[>] For this reason, and the fact that nightmares are difficult: See Friedman, Handbook of PTSD.
[>] The most cited studies on traumatic nightmares: See, for example, Murray A. Raskind et al., “Reduction of Nightmares and Other PTSD Symptoms in Combat Veterans by Prazosin: A Placebo-Controlled Study.” American Journal of Psychiatry 160 (2003): 371–373.
[>] In a study conducted by therapists: See Lansky, Posttraumatic Nightmares, 1995.
[>] This theory helps explain how Caleb Daniels: See Percy, Demon Camp, 2014.
[>] One Iraq veteran I interviewed, who now runs: Interview with Glenn C., 2013.
[>] Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier: Graham, No Name, 191.
[>] “Something of the working-through process”: Solomon, Combat Stress Reaction, 76.
[>] “Forty-three years old, and the war occurred”: O’Brien, Things They Carried, 38.
[>] Perhaps no one has inhabited this shadowland of dream: See Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon, 224, 519–524; Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 123–127; Ferguson, Pity of War, 365.
[>] As a writer, Sassoon turned this backward-looking: See Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 112.
[>] These types of obsessions and revisitations all highlight: See Leed, No Man’s Land, 12–33.
[>] Herein lies the problem: the liminal person: See Karen Samuels, “PTSD as a State of Liminality.” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 8, no. 3 (Spring 2006).
[>] Having been unmade and remade by the war: Leed, No Man’s Land, 33.
[>] In 1965, one such veteran wrote: Ibid., 14.
[>] “The figure of the veteran is a subcategory”: Ibid., 194.
[>] As every military spouse can attest: Numbers 31:19.
[>] “possessing a great secret which can never be communicated”: Leed, No Man’s Land, 12.
[>] “As a man who had lived for years in No-Man’s-Land”: Ibid., 196.
[>] One war-reporter friend of mine: Elliott D. Woods, personal communication with the author.
[>] She said, “I want those years back”: Elise Colton, personal communication with the author.
[>] A better, less venal world: For an examination of the philosophy behind counterfactuals, see Niall Ferguson’s provocative Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union; and my short story “The Counterfactualist” in War, Literature and the Arts 25 (2013): 76–97.
5. Modern Trauma
[>] Within the history of psychological trauma: This section was informed in part by Paul Fussell’s August 1989 article in the Atlantic, “The Real War 1939–1945,” where he argued that “the real war was tragic and ironic beyond the power of any literary or philosophic analysis to suggest, but in unbombed America especially, the meaning of the war seemed inaccessible. Thus, as experience, the suffering was wasted.” See also Fussell, Wartime, along with my article in the Winter 2007 Virginia Quarterly Review, “The Image as History: Clint Eastwood’s Unmaking of an American Myth.”
[>] Karl Shapiro, the poet laureate who served in the Pacific: Fussell, Wartime, 134.
[>] Included in this generation of silence: See page 14 of Salinger’s story “Last Day of the Last Furlough” as well as Slawenski, J. D. Salinger, 139, 185. The Shields and Solerno oral history of Salinger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013) is provocative and entertaining, but the authors tend to attribute virtually all of Salinger’s eccentricities to his purported PTSD. Salinger’s story “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” is, nevertheless, a fine example of how war trauma was publicly handled by the World War II generation—it was alluded to and generally left off-stage. Interestingly, a number of writers of late have taken on the project of loking for PTSD in history’s great actors, including T. E. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Alexander the Great, and Florence Nightingale. For more on this, see Phillip A. Mackowiak et al., “Post-Traumatic Stress Reactions before the Advent of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” Military Medicine 173 (2009): 1158–1163.
[>] In America, stories of veterans who came home: See Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers, 4, where he says, “He had trained us, as children, to deflect the phone-call requests for media interviews that never diminished over the years . . . And this is how we Bradley children grew up: happily enough, deeply connected to our peaceful, tree-shaded town, but always with a sense of an unsolved mystery somewhere at the edges of the picture.”
[>] “As long as they could function on a minimum level”: Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 26.
[>] Nearly sixty years after the Japanese surrendered: Gladwell, “Getting Over It.” Ironically, Gladwell’s article came out the day after the second battle of Fallujah began, the deadliest American battle since the Vietnam War.
[>] Why can’t we?: Ibid.
[>] (In 1945, when the U.S. Army learned of John Huston’s plan): See Shephard, War of Nerves, 271–278. Shephard’s examination of Huston’s film Let There Be Light, which was suppressed by the U.S. government for decades, is both revelatory and instructive.
[>] At the end of the war, General Eisenhower: Shephard, War of Nerves, 326.
[>] Subsequent studies into the traumatic experiences: Hillenbrand, Unbroken, 346–351. See also Bernard M. Cohen and Maurice Z. Cooper, A Follow-up Study of World War II Prisoners of War (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1955); Robert Ursano and James Rundell, “The Prisoner of War,” in War Psychiatry (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, 1995), 431–456.
[>] As Matthew Friedman, the first executive director: Interview with Gerald Nicosia, November 12, 1988, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, Austin, Texas (BCAH). I relied heavily on the Nicosia papers, interview tapes, and transcripts stored at the Briscoe in the writing
of this section.
[>] A supremely talented soldier: Graham, No Name, 70.
[>] “I figured those gentlemen were going to run into trouble”: Ibid., 75.
[>] “War robs you mentally and physically”: Ibid., 124.
[>] “In combat, you see, your hearing gets so acute”: Ibid., 304.
[>] “They took Army dogs and rehabilitated them for civilian life”: Ibid., 124.
[>] Among the many things that Vietnam changed: Shephard, War of Nerves, 355.
[>] This revolution in thinking has even extended into the past: See Winter, Great War.
[>] But even beyond the “invention” of PTSD: On page 57 of Rosen’s anthology, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Ben Shephard writes, “Will psychiatrists have the sense to realize that by medicalizing the human response to stressful situations, they have created a culture of trauma and thus undermined the general capacity to resist trauma? They could make a start by dismantling the unitary concept of trauma, an idea that has long outlived its purpose.”
[>] Hence, trauma: In the preface to The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, historian Rick Perlstein repeatedly uses the word “trauma” to characterize the period of the 1970s, invoking it to describe Watergate, Nixon’s exit from the White House, and the Vietnam War.
[>] “The war itself was a mystery”: O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods, 76.
[>] It is this sort of ongoing disagreement: Nash, “Understanding and Treating Post-Deployment Violence.” Presentation, Navy Base San Diego, March 2006.
[>] Despite the war’s uncertain place in history: As Patrick Bracken put it in a 2001 issue of Social Science & Medicine, “The fact that there was a political campaign which looked upon the war in Vietnam as a negative phenomenon meant that there was a political context in which psychiatry could take seriously the negative effects of wartime experiences” (734–735).
[>] One of the great students of this climate: Nicosia, Home to War, 158; Lifton, Home from the War, 16. See also Shephard, War of Nerves, 356–358.
The Evil Hours Page 36
