Quotes from Jonathan Shay

Homer suggest that if you forget your pain, you forget your homeland-you 'lose your hope of home.'-pg.39

God's love for humankind is one of our present culture's allpervasive, invisible, unquestioned, and thus unconscious assumptions. When war shattered this assumption, American soldiers in Vietnam lost a sustaining idea.

Here I did three fucking combat tours serving my country and I feel like a fucking fugitive.

We have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty.

A shared narrative future -- as expressed in such statements as Yes, I'll come to the picnic next Friday -- defines socially shared predictability of behavior. Prolonged contact with the enemy teaches that predictability is fatal . Being unpredictable is a basic survival skill in combat, where the enemy is ever observant. Many of the veterans in our program take different routes to the clinic every time they come.

In the modern world, the meaning of the dead to the defeated is a bitter, unhealed wound, where defeat rarely means obliteration of the people and the civilization. As we recently witnessed in the Persian Gulf War, defeat may not even bring the fall of the opposing government. At the level of grand strategy in Vietnam, the United States had been defeated, and yet American soldiers had won every battle. For the veterans, the unanchored dead continue to hover.

The vast and distant military and civilian structure that provides a modern soldier with his orders, arms, ammunition, food, water, information, training, and fire support is ultimately a moral structure, a fiduciary, a trustee holding the life and safety of that soldier. The need for an intact moral world increases with every added coil of a soldier's mortal dependency on others. The vulnerability of the soldier's moral world has vastly increased in three millennia.

The character damage of a trauma survivor can be understood as a reflection both of his or her radical aloneness and of the continued presence of the perpetrator in the victim's inner life.

Rage is properly the title of Homer's poem, and his audience may have known it by that name, not Iliad .

Homer uses the word menis for Achilles only in connection with the wrong done to him by Agamemnon, and never in connection with his berserk rage at Hektor for killing his friend Patroklos. I prefer indignant rage as a translation of menis , because I can hear the word dignity hidden in the world indignant . It is the kind of rage arising from social betrayal that impairs a person's dignity through violation of what's right.

The moral strength of an army is impaired by every injustice, whether it personally touches an individual soldier or not. When Agamemnon wrongly seizes Achilles' prize of honor, he inflicts an injury not on just this one man but on this whole army.

All who hear should understand that no person's suffering can be measured against another person's suffering. It can be extremely damaging if anyone makes comparisons. Combat veterans frequently doubt that they are worthy of treatment, knowing other vets who are worse off now or went through worse than they did. Many survivors of trauma obstruct their own healing by placing themselves in "hierarchies of suffering", usually to their own disadvantage.

What a returning soldier needs most when leaving war is not a mental health professional but a living community to whom his experience matters. There is usually such a community close at hand: his or her surviving comrades. Men and women returning from combat should debrief as units, not as isolated individuals. Unit rotation [in my understanding, the lack of it] is the most important measure for secondary prevention of combat PTSD.

Combat trauma destroys the capacity for social trust, accounting for the paranoid state of being that blights the lives of most severely traumatized combat veterans.

Fighting spirit, a ringing term that broadly refers to a soldier's readiness to move in on any enemy rather than flee or freeze, is essential for survival in combat...however, the folk culture of the American military, especially during the Vietnam War, merged fighting spirit with being berserk. Leadership beliefs encouraged the conversion of grief into berserk rage as a militarily desirable consequence.

Our images of the bitter fighting among the hedgerows of Normandy do not include booby-trapped wine bottles or French babies sitting on the road atop command-detonated mines. Only 3 to 4 percent of American casualties in World War II and Korea were from booby traps, while 11 percent of the deaths and 17 percent of the injuries in Vietnam were those from these lowest-echelon attacks of surprise and deception. American soldiers literally felt tortured by their Vietnamese enemy.

Men become mothers to one another in combat. The grief and rage that they experience when the special comrade is killed appears virtually identical to that of a child suddenly orphaned, and they feel that the mother within them has died with the friend.

the emergence of rage out of intense grief is a biological universal and that long-term obstruction of grief and failure to communalize grief and can lock a person in chronic rage.

In Vietnam, American troops were exposed to attacks twenty-four hours a day but were most often attacked at night. There was no safe time to mourn . Allowing one's attention to turn inward to grief could result in one's own death and the deaths of others. Night warfare reflects a change in the customs of war since Homer's time.

I count eight separate deaths to which soldiers in the Iliad responded with tears, Several of these are quoted in the course of this chapter and need not to be repeated. The general answer to the question of who is wept is: everyone . American military culture in Vietnam regarded tears as dangerous but above all as demeaning, the sigh of a weakling, a loser. To weep was to lose one's dignity among American soldiers in Vietnam.

This is a paradox: The opportunity to see and care for the dead body of a loved person reduces trauma to the bereaved, while seeing and handling the dead bodies of strangers is often traumatic in itself.

Melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. [But we must face] the painful awareness that in all likelyhood one's own character would not have stood firm.

Parallels between the veteran's words and Achilles' are inescapable. During berserk rage, the friend is constantly alive; letting go of the rage lets him die.

The enemy must in some way be dehumanized, degraded to less than full human status. Collectively, the population [and soldiers] of the other country must become "gooks," "Nips," "Japs," "Krauts," or "Huns." One must first hide from the full humanity of the opponent before [one] is able to kill him. -- Rev William Mahedy