Nobody comes home from war unscathed. Many suffer from the trauma that they experienced. War fighters have PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The worst sufferers seem to have experienced the worst trauma.
There are reports of what is now called PTSD as far back as 1300BC in Assyrian warriors. Vikings were not immune. And it is even described in literature.
Lady Percy’s soliloquy in the William Shakespeare play Henry IV, Part 1 (Act 2, Scene 3, Lines 40–62), written around 1597, represents an unusually accurate description of PTSD symptoms.
PTSD was made an official diagnosis in 1980. This was not anything new, it just had different names.
- Soldiers heart – Civil War
- Shell Shock – WWI
- Battle Fatigue – WWII
- Operational exhaustion – Korean War
- Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – Vietnam
- Who knows what it will be called in the future.
The tragedy of war is taking man’s best to do man’s worst.
“We who fight in a war, cannot forget the war. When it is quiet at night, we can still hear the screams,” from the movie We Were Soldiers. After a long deadly battle in Vietnam, reporters asked survivors to describe what happened. They just shook their heads. That is what my dad, Stewart, did. They really don’t want to talk about it. Words don’t come. How do you speak the unspeakable horrors of war?
Stewart never spoke of war. Occasionally, he would say or do something like…
Dad said that a hurt soldier would yell “Medic”. Rarely, did you hear them yell, “Chaplain”. That meant that the soldier knew that he was dying. It would be a hard conclusion. And the final call would be “Mama”!! I am just tearing up writing this. I can’t imagine hearing this on the battlefield.
My dad did not like fireworks. One time at a picnic, the fireworks had gone off and my dad disappeared. Mom looked under the table where he was hiding … and he wasn’t alone!! Whenever a soldier heard a “Screamin’ Mimi”, they went for cover. This action saved their lives!
Dad never did like the cold. During the coldest winter on record, the soldiers were cold without warm clothing. He experienced frostbite. He learned that men in his unit were getting financial compensation from the VA since the end of the war for their frostbite. Dad wrote the VA and was initially denied. He said, “I was in the same foxhole as these guys.”
Dad was always careful about throwing things into a bonfire. He would not allow it unless he had checked it first. After his first battlefield trip in 1988, Rob and I picked him up in New York City since we were living in Philly at the time. He started to cry and told us about a group of men who were gathered around a fire to get warm and someone mistakenly throw live ammo into the fire. He said that it cut people in half and body parts such as an arm were hung up in a barbed wire fence. He laid his head down and sobbed.
Stewart did not initially have PTSD. It came on later in life when he was in his 70’s. WWII soldiers came home and enjoyed the perks given by the GI Bill. He went to college, got married, became employed, purchased a home, had children, and became involved in his community. He was busy living!
(Sidenote: While in college, the President had a lot of “college boy” rules. The returning soldiers balked at curfews, etc. and let the president know that they were older and wiser and had experienced more than these other college boys. They would not be abiding by these rules. The president agreed. It didn’t hurt that Stewart was the Student Body President!!)
However, when all that stopped with retirement and children leaving the nest, Stewart started to deal with the WWII trauma that he experienced. It started with out of control anger mostly with those close to him. He was able to get help with medication (we called them Happy Pills) through the VA. Mom said that he would have a session with the psychiatrist and would come home exhausted and sleep for 24 hours.
The VA was able to give him a walker in his later years and even state of the art hearing aids. They didn’t have hearing protection when firing artillery shells. They were told to clench their teeth!
Dad was a jeep driver for his lieutenant. Dad would drive him to a high place such as a church steeple so he could see what is going on and communicate to the artillery. One time the troops were advancing so fast that when the artillery “pooped” a shell, it would hit their own men. The lieutenant would yell and cry out, “Crank her up.” This was very disturbing and brought tears to a hysterical forward observer.
As a jeep driver, there were only eight hours of daylight in the winter, AND there were obviously no streetlights or road markings to guide you. One time Stewart was driving the 1st Sergeant to Viviers to get the mail. It was at night. It was dark so he drove with black out slits. He saw red and white staffs along the side of the road that indicated that the road was out. Stewart saw it just in time and slammed on the brakes. They got out to look what was ahead and saw a cavern in the road as big as a school bus.
This could have been a non-battle casualty. Dad and his passenger would have died. We don’t often hear stories of death casualties of just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Dad told my mom that he was a sharpshooter and thought about the mothers’ hearing about their sons’ death.
Dad told of the time that they raided a lingerie factory. These men had not had a pair of clean underwear in quite some time. They all took and wore panties made for large German women. The young guys would laugh and stare at their sergeants with frilly lace panties. The unshaven Sargeant with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth would yell, “What are you looking at?”
As an accomplished trumpeter, Stewart played Taps at over 1,300 military funerals. He was often involved in Memorial Day and Veterans Day activities.
One year, he was Grand Marshall for the Veterans Day parade. He was still able to wear his uniform that he wore when he was 20. He apparently knew how to suck it in?!
After the parade, he and the other honorees and their wives went to the VFW for lunch. My dad took a tumble on the stairs and hit his head really hard. It made a big dent in his WWII helmet.
Leave a Reply