POSTWAR TRAUMA: SYSTEM OVERLOAD

William Tecumseh Sherman, the Civil War Union general famous for burning Atlanta during his “march to the sea” in 1864, first spoke those infamous words in 1879. Since that day, 618,582 U.S. soldiers have met their maker on the bloody battlefields of war. And that’s only half the story. The hell that lives on in the heads of those who make it out of war alive can be comparable to the conflict itself.

In the final analysis, it seems that if you’re going to make it through war, you have to survive on two fronts: one, the physical battle of combat itself, and two, battling the memories and mental anguish that follow.

We’re not here to tell you how to survive a war if, God forbid, we should have another one. That’s a job for the drill sergeants and medics. We’re here to give you the experts’ advice on how to survive after a war (or for that matter, any long-term life-threatening trauma) and how to live with the memories that can torment for decades after the last bomb has dropped.

Even if you’ve made it home safe and seemingly sound, you may find yourself waging a whole new war- only this time the enemy is you. As one anonymous Vietnam vet puts it, “My marriage is falling apart…. I really don’t have any friends….

I usually feel depressed…. Crowds bother me, so I stay out of malls. And I can’t go to the movies either…. Loud noises irritate me, and sudden movements or noises make me jump and reach for a weapon…. Most of the time I feel like a walking time bomb just looking for a place where I can go off. What the f*** is wrong with me?”

The answer, says Jack Weber, team leader and readjustment counselor at the Vet Center in Evansville, Indiana, is nothing. “That is a perfectly natural response to an absolutely unnatural situation,” he says. “It’s what we used to call shell shock during World War I and battle fatigue during World War II. Today, we know it as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it’s a problem that lingers years, often decades, after a soldier comes home.

What happens is that you go through something so horrible and stressful that you disassociate from it, as though it were happening to someone else, says Sylvia Mendel, a trauma consultant in private practice in New York City.

“That’s why war victims sound like they’re reading from a script when they talk about combat,” adds Weber. “Combat also brings your physical stress response to the point of fatigue. You lose your stress response like you would an arm or a leg, and you just can’t tolerate stress anymore,” Weber says.

As a result, when you return to “normal” conditions, you can’t adjust. “Most often, you can no longer get close to people,” says Weber. “It’s like if you took all of your friends, and each day you lost one. You’d stop having friends. That’s what they do.”

Veterans often respond suddenly, and often extremely, to what are called triggers-sights, sounds, or smells that remind them of the war. “It could be something obvious like the sound of a plane or a helicopter, or something subtle like the smell of gasoline,” says Mendel.