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Text Box:   The Inevitability of PTSD Welcome Home, Hold Your Tongue By BRUCE PATTERSON The late comedian George Carlin did a bit about Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (back then it wasn’t called a Disorder). During WW1, Carlin reminded us, we called it “shell shock.” Now those two words pack some punch, don’t they? It’s shocking language, really. So during WW2 we started calling it “combat fatigue.” As if war makes a soldier sleepy and, after a nap, milk and cookies, he’s as good as new. During Vietnam we started calling it Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Has a nice ring, doesn’t it? You’re given a choice between “trauma” and “post-trauma” — which are you going to take? Experiencing “stress” is some­thing we can all sympathize with. Getting stuck in traffic is stressful. And who knows what a “Syndrome” is? Yet it’s a pretty word that rolls off the tongue… Carlin’s riff was a lot more elaborate and entertaining, but — if memory serves me right — that was the gist of it. Today PTS is a scientifically established Disorder. Still I intensely dislike the term and resent how it is used and abused. Nowadays getting your legs blown off by a landmine in some outrageously foreign, povertty-stricken place is like being a New York City supermodel, falling down in your bathtub and knocking your teeth out. War wounds have become every­day injuries and everyday injuries provide individuals with the opportunity to excel in the Special Olympics and star in a hometown parade. 2,600 years ago the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote, “Victory in war is a funeral procession.” As a young boy in Vietnam, I won my victory and I shuffled in the procession. Beginning in the spring of 1968 I spent three months in various military hospitals and during that time I saw a ghoul’s gallery of the hide­ously wounded. I saw the psychological impacts of physical mutilation and how phony the distinction is between the two. If you wish to experience not just “trauma” but real pain and suffering, whack your thumb with a roofer’s hammer. Smash you thumb and see how that affects your psychological well-being. Now imagine taking three machine gun rounds through the belly and surviving. Imagine getting your jaw and nose blown off and surviving. When you’re young and looking forward to a lifetime of pain, disability and poverty, wearing your battlefield Badges of Honor doesn’t feel like such a privilege. Almost inevitably, PTSD is the result. This isn’t to say that war doesn’t create plenty of purely psychological casualties. While I was in An Khe Field Hospital I saw a teenaged, round-eyed, GI nurse Breaking like a twig in a monsoon gale. The poor girl surren­dered to her pent-up agony and she ran wailing from the ward. Struck dumb, all of us bloody cot-covers felt deeply ashamed. Here we were on the wrong side of the world and we couldn’t even protect an American girl. In that instant the nurse became our mothers and sisters, neighbors, classmates, girlfriends and every­body else we’d willingly left behind. Now we couldn’t even return to them with all of our fingers and toes. I was just passing through the hospitals but GI nurses were forced to pull full tours. What must that have done to them? I’ll never forget the blackened midnight wards echoing with delirious, drug-induced moaning, raging and begging. And I’ll never forget that American girl. Is it possible she has forgotten? If so, at what cost? At whose cost? Read Further / Download this article (click here)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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