The Evil Hours (44 page)

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“slow-motion ethnic cleansing”:
I first heard this term from Damien Cave of the
New York Times
in August 2007.

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I'd just spent a month in Dora:
The unit I embedded with in Dora (sometimes spelled Doura) was 2-12 Infantry from Fort Carson, Colorado. 2-12 had recently been “reflagged,” meaning they had been changed from a paratrooper unit into a light infantry unit, a redesignation that no one in the unit liked. 2-12's saga is documented in David Philipps's book
Lethal Warriors: When the New Band of Brothers Came Home
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). After they'd returned to Fort Carson, 2-12 was found to have a PTSD rate more than three times that of an equivalent U.S. Army unit that had been deployed to a less deadly part of Iraq (Philipps, 238). The dangers they lived with for months are impossible to describe with any justice. One image that stays with me is the thing I saw when I walked into 2-12's command post for the first time: 16 framed photographs screwed onto a wall, one for each soldier killed in Dora.

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“All sorrows can be borne”:
Hannah Arendt,
The Human Condition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

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Sometimes, and particularly with respect to traumatic narratives:
Aries,
Hour of Our Death
, 5–7.

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To scientists, these sorts of ideas:
I first encountered the concept of apophenia in William Gibson's novel
Pattern Recognition
. The term was coined by German neurologist Klaus Conrad in a 1958 book about schizophrenia. With respect to the “face” photographed by the Viking I spacecraft, see Carl Sagan's
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
(New York: Random House, 1995).

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I felt like the German painter Otto Dix:
Annette Becker, “The Avant-garde, Madness and the Great War.”
Journal of Contemporary History
35 (2000): 72.

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Freud saw that sufferers of war neuroses:
Freud,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
, 32. Peter Gay, in
Freud
, writes that “Freud noticed one version of this monotonous, destructive replay of unpleasure in patients afflicted with a ‘fate neurosis,' sufferers whose destiny it is to go through the same calamity more than once . . . Freud noted, patients who display this compulsion do their utmost to dwell on misery and injuries, and to force an interruption to the analysis before it is completed. They contrive to find evidence that they are despised . . . It is as though they have never learned that all these compulsive repetitions bring no pleasure. There is something ‘demonic' about their activities. That word ‘demonic' leaves no doubt about Freud's strategy. He saw the compulsion to repeat as a most primitive mental activity, displaying an ‘instinctual' character ‘to a high degree'” (400–401).

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One can see this sort of obligation:
Fussell,
Great War and Modern Memory
, 411.

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This sense that the life-threatening experience:
Interview with Robert Stolorow. See Stolorow,
Trauma and Human Existence
, 17–22. On page 17, he writes that “the patient explained to me that with the retelling of each traumatic episode, a piece of herself broke off and relocated at the time and place of the original trauma. By the time she reached my office, she said, she was completely dispersed along the time dimension of her crushing life history. Upon hearing this, I spoke just three words: ‘Trauma destroys time.'”

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In
Slaughterhouse-Five
, Kurt Vonnegut's novel:
Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse- Five
, 23.

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“Our own death is indeed, unimaginable”:
Freud,
Collected Papers
, 304–305.

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“time dilates, as if I'm dreaming”:
Ralston,
Between a Rock
, 23.

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One study conducted by the U.S
.
Navy:
Dimoulas et al., “Dissociation during Intense Military Stress,” 66–73.

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Michael Herr, in
Dispatches
, his classic work:
Herr,
Dispatches
, 135.

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“the rapture of the deep”:
Ibid., 31, 250, 256.

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As the popular neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks:
Sacks,
Hallucinations
, 242.

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PTSD is often thought of as being a syndrome:
See Caruth,
Trauma.

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As Ben Helfgott, a concentration camp survivor:
Sacks,
Hallucinations
, 243.

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As John le Carré observed:
le Carré,
Little Drummer Girl
, 5.

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The year before, I'd interviewed a navy corpsman:
See my essay “The Big Suck: Notes from the Jarhead Underground” in the Winter 2007 issue of
Virginia Quarterly Review
, where I tell the corpsman's story in greater detail.

 

2. In Terror's Shadow

 

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Once it enters the body, it stays there forever:
Rachel Yehuda, in a 2002 article titled “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” in the
New England Journal of Medicine
, wrote that “studies of the biologic mechanisms of PTSD have delineated circumscribed alterations in brain regions, such as the amygdala and hippocampus, that are associated with fear and memory, as well as changes in the hormonal, neurochemical, and physiological systems involved in coordinating the body's response to stress” (113). Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in a September 2007 article titled “The Relevance of Epigenetics to PTSD” in the
Archives of General Psychiatry
(1040–1048), found that “offspring with parental PTSD displayed lower mean cortisol levels, reflected by the circadian mesor and reduced cortisol amplitude, compared with offspring without parental PTSD and children of nonexposed parents. This effect seemed to be specifically related to the presence of maternal PTSD.” While there is still some debate within the medical community about whether stress damages the brain (as Douglas Bremner of Emory University argued in his 2002 book), there is little doubt that major traumatic events change the human hormonal system and that these changes are passed along to the survivor's offspring. See also Anke Karl et al., “A Meta-analysis of Structural Brain Abnormalities in PTSD.”
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
30 (2006): 1004–1031. See also Rachel Yehuda et al., “Transgenerational Effects of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Babies of Mothers Exposed to the World Trade Center Attacks during Pregnancy.”
Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism
90 (2005): 4115; J. J. Silverman et al., “Psychological Distress and Symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Jewish Adolescents Following a Brief Exposure to Concentration Camps.”
Journal of Child and Family Studies
8 (1999): 71–89.
Much of the evidence for the claim that the offspring of trauma survivors are biologically different from those with untraumatized forebears has come from studying the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Scott Stossel writes, in
My Age of Anxiety
, that “researchers have found analogous evidence in the descendants of trauma victims: the children and even grandchildren of Holocaust survivors exhibit greater psychophysiological evidence of stress and anxious arousal—such as elevated levels of various stress hormones—than do ethnically similar children and grandchildren of cohorts who were not exposed to the Holocaust. When these grandchildren are shown stressful images having nothing to do with the Holocaust—for instance, of violence in Somalia—they display more extreme responses, both in behavior and physiology than do their peers. As John Livingstone, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating trauma victims, told me, ‘It's as though traumatic experiences get plastered into the tissues of the body and passed along to the next generation'” (255–256).

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as war correspondent Michael Herr testifies in
Dispatches: Herr,
Dispatches
, 35.

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“Trauma is democratic”:
Winter, “Shell-shock,” 11.

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the historian Will Durant calculated:
Hedges,
War Is a Force
, 10.

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The numbers are staggering: a 2010 study: The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 Summary Report
. Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011. “Nearly one in five women (18.3%) and 1 in 71 men (1.4%) have been raped at some point in their lives.” In Yehuda's 2002 article on PTSD in the
New England Journal of Medicine
, she says, “PTSD developed in 55 percent of persons who reported being raped” (109).

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The most cited research study:
R. C. Kessler et al., “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the National Comorbidity Survey.”
Archives of General Psychiatry
52 (1995): 1048–1060.

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Alice Sebold, when asked why she chose to write:
This quote comes from a 2002 interview with Terry Gross that was included in a reading group guide at the back of the paperback edition of
Lucky
.

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Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Cormac McCarthy:
The
Yuma Daily Sun
article reads, “Clark, who led last year's expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier showed evidence of having been scalped.”

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Trauma defies description:
In “Whereof We Can Speak, Thereof We Must Not Be Silent: Trauma, Political Solipsism and War,”
Review of International Studies
30.4 (2004), 472, political scientist Karin Fierke defines trauma as “a ‘dislocation' accompanied by an inability to mourn or speak of the trauma.” Interestingly, while trauma is thought to be nearly inexpressible by many scholars, it is thought to be more readily
representable
in the visual arts, which might help explain PTSD's deep connection to film and television.

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the “dose-response curve”:
Herman,
Trauma and Recovery
, 57. Author interview with Matthew Friedman, 2013. Friedman, the longest-serving executive director of the National Center for PTSD, said, “One of the most interesting findings in all PTSD work is the dose-response curve. The greater the exposure to the trauma, the greater the likelihood of PTSD.” Friedman went on to say that researchers have observed the dose-response curve in a number of non-Western cultures.

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Was she extroverted?:
I. V. E. Carlier et al., “Risk Factors for Posttraumatic Stress Symptomatology in Police Officers.”
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
, August 1997, 498–506. See also A. C. McFarlane et al., “The Etiology of Posttraumatic Morbidity: Predisposing, Precipitating, and Perpetuating Factors.”
British Journal of Psychiatry
154: 221–228.

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Was she someone who was easily hypnotized?:
Herman,
Trauma and Recovery
, 124. Moreover, a 1995 study by Daniel Weiss et al. titled “Predicting Symptomatic Distress in Emergency Services Personnel” and published in the
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
showed dissociative tendencies to be strongly predictive of PTSD symptoms in emergency response workers.

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How did she go about:
Shay,
Achilles in Vietnam
, 191. See also Herman,
Trauma and Recovery
, 7–32.

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According to the
Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry: H. I. Kaplan, ed.,
Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry
. 4th ed. (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 2009), 918–924.

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In the face of terror:
See, for instance, van der Kolk et al., “Pierre Janet on Post-Traumatic Stress.”
Journal of Traumatic Stress
2, no. 4 (1989): 365–378. See also Gray,
The Warriors
, 29. Gray writes, “War as a spectacle, as something to see, ought never to be underestimated . . . The eye is lustful because it requires the novel, the unusual, the spectacular.”

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It is almost as if certain types of events:
See, for instance, LeDoux,
Emotional Brain
, 256. See also McGaugh,
Memory and Emotion
.

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“PTSD is a disease of time”:
Young,
Harmony of Illusions
, 7
.

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so-called acts of God:
See Sacks,
Hallucinations
, 240. See also Yehuda's January 2002 article, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” in the
New England Journal of Medicine
, which includes a very helpful table depicting PTSD prevalence rates on page 110.

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Sonali Deraniyagala, writing about the 2004 tsunami:
On page 77 of
Wave
, Deraniyagala writes, “My journeys to Yala became less frequent after I began to harass the Dutch family. By that December, as the first anniversary of the wave approached, I had this new fixation. Strangers had moved into our home in Colombo. A Dutch family. When I was first told the house had been rented to them, I raged at Rajiv for doing it. I was desperate. I screamed. I explained: the house, it anchors me to my children. It tells me they were real. I need to curl up inside it, now and again.”

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Returning home from Iraq in October 2007:
The fire in question, known as the Witch Creek Fire, was the second largest in California history and is described in “California Fire Siege 2007: An Overview,” a pamphlet produced by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.