Since men learned to make war, there was PTSD. It was little-understood and often called the masculinity and character in question, in general, of veterans returning from war.
A great many people today believe it’s a recent “thing”, but it is far from it. It’s old, and it is hardly limited to war veterans.
Look through history: everything is bloody, battles, conquests, raids, military persecution, whatever you wish. You will not read of PTSD. But it’s always what’s left. In the Peloponnesian War, to use one example, which was started by Athens on the orders of Pericles, it turned into more of a nightmare for Athenian civilians than the short-sighted leaders ever stopped to consider. While superior to Sparta on the seas, Athens could not withstand field battles. Eventually the citizens of Attica, farmers, craftsmen and more, were forced to retreat within the walls of Athens.
What followed was hellish. Sparta burned their crops, committed savage war crimes, and soon food ran low, and supplies cane to the city by ship only. On the seas of the Aegean, Sparta sought help from an old enemy, Persia. This would have been enough to finish Athens, but the Ionians got some extra help: the Plague of Athens, which today is still an unidentified disease. It caused high fever, explosive diarrhea and killed by the numbers. At the end of it all, survivors, both military and civilian, would never be as they once were. The siege of Athens, and the war itself, left those who survived with serious, lifelong PTSD.
After the most destructive war in history, US soldiers, Marines and sailors returned home on overcrowded decks of ships. Flat tops had their aircraft dumped or stored below while flight decks were invisible beneath their human cargo. Public service films were shown in theaters warning family that their returning sons and husbands were “different”.
And indeed, they were. Many could not adjust to civilian life after three years of harrowing battle after battle in France, Holland, Belgium and Germany, Italy and North Africa. When the war against Nazi Germany ended, there was still savage fighting in the Pacific against the Empire of Japan.
While Allied soldiers were still dealing with Nazi concentration camps, other Allies were pinned down in volcanic rocks, bleeding and worrying about an invasion of mainland Japan. Upwards of a million soldiers could be expected casualties. By VJ day, every island touched by war, every soldier, pilot or sailor left standing, every civilian involved, were damaged. They would live their lives forever unable to escape the memories, nightmares, flashbacks and physical complications that went with it all: migraine headaches, digestive disorders like IBSD, “the shakes”, substance abuse, nausea and panic attacks that nearly shut down the body, and more.
There is no way that a normal and functional life can follow.
And history is loaded with people who so suffered.
Not until the late 1970s did we get the psychiatric term “PTSD” and yet, there are, all these decades later, people who deny its validity and those who deny that they have it.
And this does not apply to grunts who fear ridicule: so many civilians are not forced into denial, but choose it. And this has a high price. Missed time at work, workplace accidents, lost productivity in industrial jobs, medical care for physical symptoms only, not mentally related, abuse of spouses, violence in general…these hurt our country in ways we still can’t understand.
Since I’m shaking just thinking about all of this, I’ll have to continue tomorrow. Sometimes the subject itself triggers me. I apologize.
Memoirs of an American Christian 