“Most American psychiatrists,” said Arthur Blank, a psychiatrist who worked with Sarah Haley at the Boston clinic, “based their encounters with Vietnam veterans on the official view that no such thing as PTSD existed.”
Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery, writes that people who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a “highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy.” Recognizing the truth leads to recovery, but if secrecy prevails, then the story of the traumatic event won’t exist as a verbal narrative, she argues, but as a symptom. It’s Herman’s theory that despite a great deal of literature on the subject, there’s still an ongoing debate about whether PTSD is a real phenomenon. Because to study trauma, Herman says, is to encounter the human capacity for evil.
It’s no wonder that PTSD has had more than eighty different names in the last hundred years: neurasthenia, hysteria, war hysteria, irritable heart, soldier’s heart, disorderly conduct of the heart, combat exhaustion, combat fatigue, neurocirculatory asthenia, shell shock, war neurosis, fright neurosis, trauma neurosis, combat stress reaction, stress response syndrome, acute stress disorder, concentration camp syndrome, Vietnam syndrome, war sailor syndrome. French physicians of the Napoleonic Wars simply called it nostalgia.
It’s a condition constantly refusing definition. It’s as if the illness itself were enacting its own symptoms.
When the DSM-II was published in 1968, there was no specific listing for the trauma produced by war. So in 1969, when American troop involvement escalated in Vietnam, there was still no term available to psychiatrists. They were required to use the language of civilian disease.
Historically hysteria was considered a distinctly female problem. Elaine Showalter writes in The Female Malady about such gender expectations of soldiers during World War I: “When all signs of physical fear were judged as weakness and where alternative to combat—pacifism, conscientious objection, desertion, even suicide—were viewed as unmanly, men were silenced and immobilized and forced, like women, to express their conflicts through the body.”
Hippocrates might be to blame, insisting that an errant womb triggered madness—a womb loose in the body, floating ghostlike among other organs, disrupting nerves, seeking the brain. In the dialogues of Timaeus, Plato wrote that the womb delighted in sweet smells but fled from fetid smells, ordaining the womb with the qualities of a conscious being, an “animal within an animal.” In early Christianity, evil spirits were thought to ascend from beneath the female, move up her genitals and reside in her womb, filling her with madness. Male soldiers, wombless, had no such concern.
But eight thousand men emerged from the trenches of World War I suffering hysteric symptoms. Doctors used the term shell shock and maintained that hysterical symptoms of men were not psychological in origin but a result of physical damage to the brain and central nervous system. Military doctors believed the physical impact of an exploding shell caused damage to the brain and nervous system. No one wanted to imagine a world in which male soldiers were vulnerable to hysteria. Finally it became clear that many hysteric soldiers had never been in the proximity of a shell explosion. These soldiers were considered moral invalids. Military doctors then decided on two categories: shell shock commotion and shell shock emotion. Those who suffered from shell shock emotion received no honors or care.
The denial continued. In fact, the history of PTSD could easily be characterized by this word—our denial, specifically, of the reality of war and its effect on the human psyche. In 1944 Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall blamed what we now call PTSD on America’s educational system. Army psychiatrist William Menninger blamed PTSD on American society, which was at “the immature stage of development, characterized by, ‘I want what I want when I want it, and the hell with the rest of the world.’ ” Philip Wylie, in his 1942 book Generation of Vipers, blamed PTSD on “moms.” He called PTSD momism, or “the problem of domineering mothers nurturing weak and immature sons.” At the back of the book, Wylie included a quiz: “Are You a Mom?”
War, Showalter believes, is the only time in history when men have occupied a central position in the history of madness.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book features men and women who have been through traumatic experiences. I am grateful to these individuals for sharing their stories. I’ve changed certain names and biographical details.
I’d like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts for giving me the time and financial means to write this book. Thank you also to the Iowa Arts Council and the Truman Capote Literary Trust. Thank you to all the wonderful people at Scribner who believed in this book. My deepest thanks to my brilliant, tireless editor, Paul Whitlatch, who made this book better for his insight and talent. Thank you, Alexis Gargagliano, for your warmth and exuberance and for believing in this book from the beginning. My amazing agent, PJ Mark, and his team at Janklow & Nesbit.
I’m so grateful to have had the support of so many friends. Thank you especially to Zaina Arafat, Dini Parayitam, Tom Quach, Van Choojitarom, Nina Feng, Benjamin Shattuck, Daniel Cesca, David Busis, Joseph Tiefenthaler, Liz Weiss, Emilie Trice, Mike Scalise, Ossian Foley, Micah Stack, Dylan Nice, Rachel Yoder, Amy Butcher, Danny Khalastchi, Tommy Wisdom, Kristen Radtke, Benjamin Nugent, Leslie Jamison, Jennifer Kim, Anita Wickramasinghe, Casey Walker, Karen Thompson Walker, Ngwah-Mbo Nana Nkweti, Sidhartha Rao, Tim Denevi, Cutter Wood, and Andre Perry. And thank you to Mallika Rao for being one of the first to encourage me to write. I’d like to thank Benjamin Busch, Doug Stanton, and David Morris for help with fact-checking.
Thank you to my incredible teachers throughout the years: David Bain, Susan Lohafer, Bonnie Sunstein, Patricia Foster, John D’Agata, Robin Hemley, Michelle Hunevan, David Hamilton, Andrew Sean Greer, Ethan Canin, Samantha Chang. Thank you to Connie Brothers, Deb West, and Jan Zenisek.
Thank you to Dina Nayari for your encouragement during hard times. One day I will get ice cream with you. Thank you to my reader Kerry Howley, who is brilliant beyond words and can take a razor blade to a manuscript like no one else. Most of all, I’m indebted to my friend and reader Kyle Minor not only for his wisdom and contagious love of the written word but because he made it possible to go on when it no longer seemed possible.
Thank you to the best brother I could ever ask for, Benjamin Percy, whose love and support sustain me. And to my amazing sister-in-law, Lisa. I’m so grateful for your wisdom and strength. And to my parents, who have never once doubted a single dream of mine.
While researching this book, I consulted the following works: In the Devil’s Snare by Mary Beth Norton; Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell; Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman; The Female Malady by Elaine Showalter; “PTSD in DSM-III: A Case in the Politics of Diagnosis and Disease” by C. J. Wilbur; Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History by Cathy Caruth; Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud; The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jayne; Victory Point by Ed Darack; Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming and Achilles in Vietnam by Jonathan Shay; On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman; “Memories of Iraq haunted soldier until suicide” by Halimah Abdullah, McClatchy Report, May 25, 2008; “Healing for Peace: Traditional Healers and Post-War Reconstruction in Southern Mozambique” by Alcinda Manuel, Journal of Peace Psychology, 1997; Spirit Possession and Exorcism: History, Psychology, and Neurobiology by Patrick McNamara, Ph.D.
Thank you to Captain Brady, who shared with me his story of Operation Red Wings. I’m grateful to everyone who gave hours of their time to be interviewed for this book.
© MICHAEL KREISER
JENNIFER PERCY is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received a Truman Capote Fellowship in fiction. She also received an Iowa Arts Fellowship from Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Winner of a Pushcart Prize and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, her wo
rk has appeared in a number of magazines, including Harper’s, The New Republic, and The Oxford American. She teaches writing at New York University.
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