No Hope

“Eight months later he hanged himself. In August of 1978 his mother sent me a brief note explaining what had happened…He used a jump rope; his friends found him hanging from a water pipe. There was no suicide note, no message of any kind. ‘Norman was a quiet boy,’ his mother wrote, ‘and I don’t suppose he wanted to bother anybody.’ ”

-The Things They Carried, p 154

It is a terrible tragedy that those who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are only now receiving substantial attention and diagnosis. For hundreds, even thousands, of years, soldiers would return home from war and be expected to move on from the bloodletting with grace and ease. If men were affected by the war, they were simply labeled cowards and were shunned, punished, and often even killed for their cowardice. Human emotion and normal response to senseless bloodshed, it seemed, were crimes punishable by death.

Even in recent times, the prevalent expectation of soldiers when they return home is to keep discussion of the war at a minimum and simply return to normal life as if they had never experienced the brutality of war. It has only been recently that soldiers are being examined for symptoms of PTSD, and even those who are medically diagnosed with the disorder often are forced to engage in legal battle with the military and government in order to receive pension for disabilities. Yet if PTSD is terrible enough to cause depression, violence, and even suicide, then why is the military not in the forefront of those researching and treating this disorder? If people really want soldiers to return home comfortably, the government must either further research PTSD or cease to send soldiers into such traumatic circumstances.