Thanks for your more-than-comment!

As is so often the case, good fiction offers a much better understanding of essential human dilemmas than the British Medical Journal, quoted in the Blog, or endless other medical and psychiatric efforts to explain PTSD and what to do about it. If you want to understand “military psychiatry,” read Pat Barker’s astonishing and heartbreaking trilogy of novels about World War I. The main job of military psychiatry is to return partially broken men to senseless wars, and to release completely broken men back into society, where they fester in misery for decades, no longer able to have any approximation of healthy relationships, unable to work, unable to heal their dreadful wounds.

As anyone who has ever been subjected to the indignities and absurdities of what is called, pathetically, “Basic Training,” knows full well, the only real purpose of the military is to kill people–those who are identified as “the enemy.” Training soldiers consists of two things: first, learning how to kill other human beings and second, always obeying the orders of those in command, no matter what.

Tara says in her post of June 20 that war is “sometimes indeed justified…” Depending on who is doing the rationalizing about war, “sometimes” ultimately means “always.” World War II is often referred to as the “just war,” or even the “good war.” Tell that to the 50 million people, combatants and non-combatants, who died between 1939 and 1945, with the last hurrah of this wretched slaughter being Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

World War II was a completely unnecessary war, and therefore neither “just” nor “good.” We romanticize the great coming together of the Allies and the defeat of Hitler and the Japanese. As any student of history knows, the seeds of World War II were planted by the turkey-brained “leaders” who wrote the Treaty of Versailles, and who turned a blind eye–again and again–to the rise of fascism in Germany and Japan, until it was too late–and thus we had the “just” war. War is never justified. Never, ever.

All manner of experiences can cause PTSD–rape,murder, disasters like Katrina, but exposure to combat is overwhelmingly the primary cause of this acute and often untreatable disorder. (“Disorder” itself is an odd euphemism, I think.)

Notwithstanding the bogus precision of the DSM and its list of PTSD symptoms, I would argue that combat-induced PTSD remains both poorly understood and under-diagnosed. No one has a clue about the actual incidence of PTSD in either of the two world wars, partly because it was not yet a bonafide psychiatric diagnosis, and partly for the same reason it remains woefully under-diagnosed to this day: that is, if the scrofulous old men who cause wars and declare wars allowed the citizenry to fully comprehend what actually happens–psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually–to the legions of young men they send off to fight their unjust wars, there might be a true anti-war movement, based not on politics but on horror and revulsion against war.

From Turgenev’s 1861 novel, Father’s and Sons, a line which is lamentably appropriate to the whole PTSD tragedy:

“The true horror, gentleman, is that there is no horror.”

Indeed.

In the end, if we must engage in war, then at least we should take much much better care of soldiers – for their sake as well as society’s. Maybe, someday, humans will abandon this seeming need for blood.