Quotes from Jonathan Shay

Combat with these weapons is face to face, hand to hand, personal. When face-to-face combatants share a common tongue, complex speech occurs between them. The American Civil War was the last time in our own history when both sides spoke the same language.

I have emphasized the religious roots of dishonoring the enemy and its toxic psychological results. However, any ideology that debases the enemy endangers the lives of soldiers while they fight.

Thoughts of suicide are common symptoms of combat PTSD. Paradoxically, they are also signs of life. If a person enters the zombielike state of indifference beyond despair, rage, suicidality, and fear, he or she simply dies. This is the testimony of concentration camp survivors and combat veterans. The ability to kill oneself is the bottom line of human freedom. Many combat veterans think daily of suicide. Knowledge that one has this freedom seems to be sustaining.

Learn the psychological damage that war does, and work to prevent war. There is no contradiction between hating war and honoring the soldier. Learn how war damages the mind and spirit, and work to change those things in military institutions and culture that needlessly create or worsen these injuries. We don't have to go on repeating the same mistakes.

To return to my blunder in group therapy, a veteran whose voice is often heard in this book turned black with anger and, glaring at me, said, "I won my war. It's you who fucking lost!" He got up and left the room to remove himself from the opportunity to physically hurt me. Toward the end of the group session he returned and said, "What we lost in Vietnam was some good fucking kids !

Here the veterans grapple with the question of moral luck: Can any workings of bad luck produce cruel or evil actions in a good person ?

After Patroklos's death, Achilles -- to use the words of our veterans -- "lost it." When a veteran says he "lost it," what did he lose? What did Achilles lose? I believe that the veterans and Homer shared similar views on this subject. I believe that the veterans' own words, they lost their humanity. Beast-god and god-beast replace human identity.

Whether the berserker is beneath humanity as an animal, above it as a god, or both, he is cut off from all human community when he is in this state. No living human has any claim on him, not even the claim of being noticed and remembered.

The berserker's manic obsession with revenge is not only destruction to gratify rage. At some deep cultural and psychological level, spilling enemy blood is an effort to bring the dead back to life. One veteran recalls the following interior chant to his dead friend at every kill: Every fucking one that died, I say, "____, here's one for you, baby. I'll take this motherfucker out and I'm going to cut his fucking heart out for you.

Achilles roars at his mother: "...Do not attempt to keep me from the fight, though you love me; you cannot make me listen.

Unlike the Greeks, we believe that the dead are beyond harm, so we need often overlook the toxic residue left behind by disrespectful treatment of enemy dead.

We had a profound time with the terrain and the weather. The terrain was -- I think the terrain equaled the NVA, it was so bad. It was so goddamn bad. By the time you got into a fire fight or something, you were so fucking tired I don't think you cared that much. Don't care. That's the way I see it.

According to Colonel David Hackworth, 15 to 20 percent of American deaths in Vietnam were due to "friendly fire.

Gang or individual rapes by soldiers -- whether or not these end in the woman's murder -- have never been counted as civilian war casualties. Psychological injuries to the surviving rape victims are often lifelong.