The Evil Hours (48 page)

[>]
“Trauma-related anxiety dreams appear”:
Peretz Lavie, “Sleep Disturbances in the Wake of Traumatic Events.”
New England Journal of Medicine
345 (2001): 1825–1832.

[>]
Numerous studies, dating back to the advent of the PTSD:
Herman,
Trauma and Recovery
, 36.

[>]
Interestingly, Richard Ross of the University of Pennsylvania:
Everly,
Psychotraumatology
, 176–177.

[>]
“The bad stuff never stops happening”:
O'Brien,
Things They Carried
, 32.

[>]
For this reason, and the fact that nightmares are difficult:
See Friedman,
Handbook of PTSD
.

[>]
The most cited studies on traumatic nightmares:
See, for example, Murray A. Raskind et al., “Reduction of Nightmares and Other PTSD Symptoms in Combat Veterans by Prazosin: A Placebo-Controlled Study.”
American Journal of Psychiatry
160 (2003): 371–373.

[>]
In a study conducted by therapists:
See Lansky,
Posttraumatic Nightmares
, 1995.

[>]
This theory helps explain how Caleb Daniels:
See Percy,
Demon Camp
, 2014.

[>]
One Iraq veteran I interviewed, who now runs:
Interview with Glenn C., 2013.

[>]
Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier:
Graham,
No Name
, 191.

[>]
“Something of the working-through process”:
Solomon,
Combat Stress Reaction
, 76.

[>]
“Forty-three years old, and the war occurred”:
O'Brien,
Things They Carried
, 38.

[>]
Perhaps no one has inhabited this shadowland of dream:
See Egremont,
Siegfried Sassoon
, 224, 519–524; Fussell,
Great War and Modern Memory
, 123–127; Ferguson,
Pity of War
, 365.

[>]
As a writer, Sassoon turned this backward-looking:
See Fussell,
Great War and Modern Memory
, 112.

[>]
These types of obsessions and revisitations all highlight:
See Leed,
No Man's Land
, 12–33.

[>]
Herein lies the problem: the liminal person:
See Karen Samuels, “PTSD as a State of Liminality.”
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
8, no. 3 (Spring 2006)
.

[>]
Having been unmade and remade by the war:
Leed,
No Man's Land
, 33.

[>]
In 1965, one such veteran wrote:
Ibid., 14.

[>]
“The figure of the veteran is a subcategory”:
Ibid., 194.

[>]
As every military spouse can attest:
Numbers 31:19.

[>]
“possessing a great secret which can never be communicated”:
Leed,
No Man's Land
, 12.

[>]
“As a man who had lived for years in No-Man's-Land”:
Ibid., 196.

[>]
One war-reporter friend of mine:
Elliott D. Woods, personal communication with the author.

[>]
She said
, “
I want those years back”:
Elise Colton, personal communication with the author.

[>]
A better, less venal world:
For an examination of the philosophy behind counterfactuals, see Niall Ferguson's provocative
Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals
(New York: Basic Books, 2000); Michael Chabon's 2007 novel
The Yiddish Policemen's Union;
and my short story “The Counterfactualist” in
War, Literature and the Arts
25 (2013): 76–97.

 

5. Modern Trauma

 

[>]
Within the history of psychological trauma:
This section was informed in part by Paul Fussell's August 1989 article in the
Atlantic
, “The Real War 1939–1945,” where he argued that “the real war was tragic and ironic beyond the power of any literary or philosophic analysis to suggest, but in unbombed America especially, the meaning of the war seemed inaccessible. Thus, as experience, the suffering was wasted.” See also Fussell,
Wartime
, along with my article in the Winter 2007
Virginia Quarterly Review
, “The Image as History: Clint Eastwood's Unmaking of an American Myth.”

[>]
Karl Shapiro, the poet laureate who served in the Pacific:
Fussell,
Wartime
, 134.

[>]
Included in this generation of silence:
See page 14 of Salinger's story “Last Day of the Last Furlough” as well as Slawenski,
J
. 
D. Salinger
, 139, 185. The Shields and Solerno oral history of Salinger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013) is provocative and entertaining, but the authors tend to attribute virtually all of Salinger's eccentricities to his purported PTSD. Salinger's story “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” is, nevertheless, a fine example of how war trauma was publicly handled by the World War II generation—it was alluded to and generally left off-stage. Interestingly, a number of writers of late have taken on the project of loking for PTSD in history's great actors, including T. E. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Alexander the Great, and Florence Nightingale. For more on this, see Phillip A. Mackowiak et al., “Post-Traumatic Stress Reactions before the Advent of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”
Military Medicine
173 (2009): 1158–1163.

[>]
In America, stories of veterans who came home:
See Bradley,
Flags of Our Fathers
, 4, where he says, “He had trained us, as children, to deflect the phone-call requests for media interviews that never diminished over the years . . . And this is how we Bradley children grew up: happily enough, deeply connected to our peaceful, tree-shaded town, but always with a sense of an unsolved mystery somewhere at the edges of the picture.”

[>]
“As long as they could function on a minimum level”:
Herman,
Trauma and Recovery
, 26.

[>]
Nearly sixty years after the Japanese surrendered:
Gladwell, “Getting Over It.” Ironically, Gladwell's article came out the day after the second battle of Fallujah began, the deadliest American battle since the Vietnam War.

[>]
Why can't we?:
Ibid.

[>]
(In 1945, when the U.S. Army learned of John Huston's plan):
See Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 271–278. Shephard's examination of Huston's film
Let There Be Light
, which was suppressed by the U.S. government for decades, is both revelatory and instructive.

[>]
At the end of the war, General Eisenhower:
Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 326.

[>]
Subsequent studies into the traumatic experiences:
Hillenbrand,
Unbroken
, 346–351. See also Bernard M. Cohen and Maurice Z. Cooper,
A Follow-up Study of World War II Prisoners of War
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1955); Robert Ursano and James Rundell, “The Prisoner of War,” in
War Psychiatry
(Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, 1995), 431–456.

[>]
As Matthew Friedman, the first executive director:
Interview with Gerald Nicosia, November 12, 1988, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, Austin, Texas (BCAH). I relied heavily on the Nicosia papers, interview tapes, and transcripts stored at the Briscoe in the writing of this section.

[>]
A supremely talented soldier:
Graham,
No Name
, 70.

[>]
“I figured those gentlemen were going to run into trouble”:
Ibid., 75.

[>]
“
War robs you mentally and physically”:
Ibid., 124.

[>]
“
In combat, you see, your hearing gets so acute”:
Ibid., 304.

[>]
“They took Army dogs and rehabilitated them for civilian life”:
Ibid., 124.

[>]
Among the many things that Vietnam changed:
Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 355.

[>]
This revolution in thinking has even extended into the pas
t: See Winter,
Great War
.

[>]
But even beyond the “invention” of PTSD:
On page 57 of Rosen's anthology,
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
, Ben Shephard writes, “Will psychiatrists have the sense to realize that by medicalizing the human response to stressful situations, they have created a culture of trauma and thus undermined the general capacity to resist trauma? They could make a start by dismantling the unitary concept of trauma, an idea that has long outlived its purpose.”

[>]
Hence
, trauma: In the preface to
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
, historian Rick Perlstein repeatedly uses the word “trauma” to characterize the period of the 1970s, invoking it to describe Watergate, Nixon's exit from the White House, and the Vietnam War.

[>]
“The war itself was a mystery”:
O'Brien,
In the Lake of the Woods
, 76.

[>]
It is this sort of ongoing disagreement:
Nash, “Understanding and Treating Post-Deployment Violence.” Presentation, Navy Base San Diego, March 2006.

[>]
Despite the war's uncertain place in history:
As Patrick Bracken put it in a 2001 issue of
Social Science & Medicine
, “The fact that there was a political campaign which looked upon the war in Vietnam as a negative phenomenon meant that there was a political context in which psychiatry could take seriously the negative effects of wartime experiences” (734–735).

[>]
One of the great students of this climate:
Nicosia,
Home to War
, 158; Lifton,
Home from the War
, 16. See also Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 356–358.

[>]
A practitioner of an unorthodox academic field:
Lifton,
Home from the War
, 15.

[>]
“I was opposed to the Vietnam War”:
Robert Lifton interview with Gerald Nicosia, April 20, 1988, BCAH.

[>]
The change for Lifton came in November 1969:
Lifton,
Home from the War
, 16.

[>]
In November 1970, Lifton received a letter from Jan Barry:
Nicosia,
Home to War
, 158; Lifton,
Home from the War
, 75.

[>]
“there is no anti-war or even anti-establishment group”:
Thompson,
Fear and Loathing
, 369.

[>]
“the severe psychological problems of many”:
Lifton,
Home from the War
, 75.

[>]
Barry saw the politics of the war and the psychological problems:
Nicosia,
Home to War
, 161. See also ibid., 173; Lifton,
Home from the War
, 75.

[>]
Some VVAWers, like Joe Urgo, an air force veteran:
Nicosia,
Home to War
, 86–87; Scott,
Politics of Readjustment
, 17; Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 356–357.

[>]
They didn't belong anywhere:
Nicosia,
Home to War
, 164.

[>]
“I want to scream at friends and relatives”:
See Sarah Haley, “When the Patient Reports Atrocities: Specific Treatment Considerations of the Vietnam Veteran.”
Archives of General Psychiatry
30 (1974): 195. Haley's article is one of the most important documents in the history of PTSD as a formal diagnosis. For a deeper (if skeptical) discussion of Haley's legacy, see Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 369–375.

[>]
“Guys are hurting. They're opposed to the war”
: Robert Lifton interview (BCAH); Nicosia,
Home to War
, 161.

[>]
Along with Chaim Shatan, a New York University:
Lifton,
Home from the War
, 75–77; Nicosia,
Home to War
, 161.

[>]
In Shatan, Lifton had, by sheer accident:
Nicosia,
Home to War
, 160–161; Chaim Shatan interview, April 14, 1988 (BCAH).

[>]
The first “rap group” met on Saturday, December 12, 1970:
Nicosia,
Home to War
, 162. Nicosia's account of this time period is superlative.

[>]
“about twelve guys, most of them in fatigue shirts”:
Egendorf,
Healing from the War
, 90.

[>]
“The explosion of feeling that occurred”:
Nicosia,
Home to War
, 163; Lifton,
Home from the War
, 76.

[>]
Shatan recalled one early meeting:
Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 356.

[>]
Egendorf, who was an outlier in the group:
Nicosia,
Home to War
, 169.

[>]
For Egendorf, the rap groups represented:
Ibid., 165–169. See also Egendorf,
Healing from the War
, 84–85.

[>]
One night, atop his hotel in Saigon:
Egendorf,
Healing from the War
, 67. See also Nicosia,
Home to War
, 166.

[>]
Lifton's suggestion that they take place on the veterans':
Lifton,
Home from the War
, 76.

[>]
“The VVAW crew, like many of their Vietnam veteran”:
Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 362.

[>]
Part of this was due to the fact that in 1966:
Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 340; Nicosia,
Home to War
, 170, 175–176. Nicosia: “Lifton went on to denounce the Army's use of ‘ostensibly brilliant psychiatric statistics' as a form of ‘psychiatric technicism,' the professional equivalent of [a] ‘body count'” (177).