PTSD? Bull! it’s soldier’s heart!

by Sandy Cook

What is the reality of war, and what is the reality of those who return from war? During the Civil War they called the residual mental damage from the stress of war “soldier’s heart”, and that may be the least euphemistic name for it, even after 145 years.     PTSD? Bull! it’s soldier’s heart!
by Sandy Cook

The late George Carlin did not like the phrase "post-traumatic stress disorder." He said, ‘ I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation.”

He went on to describe the devolution of the term from “shell shock” to “battle fatigue” to operational exhaustion”, and finally to “post traumatic stress disorder.” He posited that the more syllables we add, the greater the euphemistic quality of the expression.

The central point is, as Carlin said, “Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality.”

What is the reality of war, and what is the reality of those who return from war? During the Civil War they called the residual mental damage from the stress of war “soldier’s heart”, and that may be the least euphemistic name for it, even after 145 years.

For one thing, the possessive – “soldier’s” – tells you that it belongs only to a certain defined class of persons – those who have served their country. Secondly, “heart” tells you that it is at the core of that soldier’s being.

It is not, however, a medical “disorder”. That is, it is not an illness – something you catch and which generally can be “cured”. It is very definitely an imposed condition – something real that the  soldier has experienced and from which recovery is never complete, no matter how hard they and we try. Those who claim that they came back from combat unaffected are either psychopathic or lying to you and themselves.

But, by calling it a disorder – an illness – we can then point out that it doesn’t seem to affect everyone, therefore it must affect only those with an underlying weakness, or perhaps “they weren’t brought up to be tough”. Worst of all, we dismiss them from service under the cover of a “preexisting condition”. The soldier who knows that he or she was just fine when leaving home and joining the service, now is told that he or she was really always just spoiled goods.

By calling it a disorder we can turn the focus to the relative post-war weaknesses of the individual, and turn it away from the un-faceable fact that ordinary human beings suffer from this condition because of what we have done to them, not through some fault of their own.

We are the cause, because we sent them to war. It doesn’t even matter if the war was a “good” one (isn’t that an oxymoron?) or not – it just matters that we can blame the soldier and exonerate ourselves. Of course, the less “good” the war is, the harder it is on them, and the more we are inspired to lay the blame directly on their shoulders.

It is we who have caused their injury, and you can’t deal with an injury if you truncate the discussion and make elements of it off-limits. The “disorder” in PTSD is ours. They suffer from our disorder – our mess – our chaos – our confusion – our disarray.

Unfortunately we carry this attitude right over into our feeble attempts to deal with those who have “soldier’s heart”. Whether families, friends, or professionals, we are afraid to discuss the tough stuff, all in the interest of “protecting the soldier from bad memories”.  All of the unpleasant stuff is off-limits, but it is just that stuff that causes the deepest injuries.

The causes of “soldier’s heart” are myriad but they always include the individual’s wrestling with precisely the morality of his or her actions. They deal with the rightness of what they have done; so must we.

 We raise them to be good citizens, non-abusive, considerate of others, and contributing members of a just and democratic society.

Then we train them to kill, send them in to destroy a society, deny them the satisfaction of rebuilding what they have destroyed, and feed them full of the mythology of battle and of our own place in it. We tell them that they are spreading democracy when they know that they are not – not if it involves bullying innocents, summary arrest and detention, and near-free-fire rules of engagement. We pump them up with jingoistic crap about America always being right, regardless of what we do, and that all others are somehow less human, and less deserving of consideration and respect than we are.

We teach them, directly or indirectly, that the main reason for punishing others is that they are failing to obey us – they fail to act as we wish them to. How dare they? Let’s kick ass and take some names. We teach them that, “The only good (enter your enemy’s name here) is a dead (repeat)!” Lately, in order to build up their “warrior instinct’, Marine DIs have been reported to be telling today’s soldiers to be real warriors, and not to be like those whining, no-good Vietnam vets: denigrating those who have gone before, and did it without contractor support and body armor, just to make some kind of Oorah! point.

And they wonder. How does this tally with what I grew up with? How is this right if it would be wrong at home? Why am I doing what I was taught not to do? Why is my country saying one thing and doing another? And, am I the only one that sees this?

And then when they come home we say, “Let’s not talk about the bad stuff” when it is the “bad stuff” that has them tied in knots. What we are really doing when we leave part of the discussion off-limits is we are protecting ourselves from even contemplating our culpability in their pain.

We say that if we talk about the dark parts of a soldier’s history we are just increasing their pain. The truth is, if you can’t deal with the morality and ethics of a particular war, and if you can’t contemplate the dark stuff, you can’t deal with at least half of most soldier’s pain.

We sit self-satisfied that we didn’t want this war, therefore we are innocent of wrong-doing and we won’t talk about it, “because it was war-by-choice thus immoral and unethical and we are ever-so-righteous so we just won’t discuss it, thank you very much.”

We say that we can’t talk truth about war because if we do and have to say that it is immoral, many soldiers’ families will immediately respond that we are disdaining their loved one’s service, their injuries, and their deaths. In fact, it is only when we are open to discussing the total issue – not just the fact of war, but its reality, its morality and its ethics, and most especially its personal aftermath  – that we sanctify their service, which was given patriotically, freely, and selflessly, and deserves all the honor we can muster.

It is only when we face the entire issue of war – all of it including the horrible parts – that we exonerate them for doing our nasty work for us while we sit at home and plot to eliminate them from our conscience, and often to eliminate them from their benefits. Even their employer, the DoD now wants them to pay more for their medical benefits, get less for their GI Bill, and still go back again next year. The VA, of course, denies that most of them are sick or injured at all.

So we citizens must face the death, the wounding, the dismemberment. We must face the loss of someone’s child – American, Iraqi, Afghani. We must face the destruction. We must face the lost opportunities for the soldiers, their families, their communities, our nation, and even of their opponents.

And most of all we must face the fact that when they come home – our brave and often forgotten soldiers – they need for us to step up. We will never undo what we have done to them, but we can listen, understand, and not judge them by some standard of “normal”. They left us as normal, but we took their normality away from them. We can’t give it back, but at least we can ‘fess up to what we have done.

So there is no PTS disorder when it comes to our soldiers. We must call it what it is. There is wounding – visible or not – and it needs to be understood and accommodated, because we cannot heal soldiers’ heart, no matter how hard we try – but we must try.

Only then will they truly be home.

    "War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press … have
     turned war into a vast video arcade game. It’s very essence – death – is hidden from
     public view."