"A Scene of Surpassing Terror and Awful Grandeur":The Paradoxes of Military Service in the American Civil War

Abstract

In the years since the end of American involvement in the Vietnam War in 1973, American veterans of that conflict have commanded a great deal of public attention. Although a few dissenting opinions have been expressed on the matter, for the most part the American public has come to view the Vietnam veteran primarily as a victim, specifically a psychiatric victim, who suffers from symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).2 PTSD is a psychological syndrome marked by intrusive recollections (nightmares or flashbacks), psychic numbing (the withdrawal from ordinary social relationships and intercourse), hyperreactivity (startle reactions to smells, sounds, or sights which remind the veteran of horrific scenes from battle in Vietnam), and related symptoms such as depression or cognitive dysfunction (e.g. the inability to concentrate). To a certain extent, PTSD is simply a restatement of diagnostic categories such as shellshock, combat fatigue, or the traumatic neuroses of war, employed to describe psychiatric victims of warfare earlier in the twentieth century. The view of both psychology and popular culture is that victims of PTSD were damaged by and continue to fixate on