Shook over hell: post-traumatic stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War

Abstract

over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and Civil War. Eric T. Dean, Jr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. At a time when political, public, and popular debate have become preoccupied with trauma and, particularly, with intersection of public events and private experience, a revisionist historical work like Eric Dean's Shook over Hell is more than timely. With meticulous attention to his primary sources (which include committal records of a sample of sorely tried Indiana Civil War veterans), Dean tests popular wisdom about figure of traumatized Vietnam vet. Dean's argument is challenging in a whole set of ways. Some of these challenges are overt, and some understated. By refuting popular notion that conflict in Vietnam was distinctive in both numbers of traumatized veterans it produced and quality and depth (the complex etiology) of their symptoms, Dean-almost despite himself-is putting a spotlight on what Mark Seltzer has called Wound Culture of contemporary United States. And not just a spotlight on rightly criticized therapy culture in which confession increasingly becomes either a pay-by-the-half-hour private affair, or 3 to 15 minutes of fame in talk-show ritual release. Dean's critique of privileged status of Vietnam veteran asks particularly pointed questions about inequitable distribution of welfare and medical services in a time of increasingly complex demographics of poverty. Dean also puts some hard methodological questions to military historians who, in line with lively resurgence of various forms of revisionist social history, have turned from study of great strategists and warriors, and dissection of military campaigns, to a careful examination of lived experience of both combatants and implicated non-combatants. This concentration on stories of soldiers has produced, post-Vietnam, an unprecedented popular awareness of personal, social, and, of course, political penalties of that (and, perhaps, of in general). Dean concludes, in fact, that figure of betrayed Vietnam veteran has become so persuasive, so heroically pitiful, that public (and, indeed, Pentagon) will no longer tolerate excessive (defined as anything over several hundred) American casualties in any future war (216). Dean's work, however, is designed to excavate historical forms of a concept of casualty that embraces not just dead but also those psychically and physically demolished by war. Of course, century separating Civil War and Vietnam produced profoundly different cultural contexts and psychological models within which various traumatic ailments of veterans would be weighed. Colloquial and therapeutic languages both changed, as did cultures that produced them. The traumatized Civil War veteran was described by fellows and family as played out, homesick, rattled, much depressed, having the blues, half crazy, mean, or having spells; by those in Government Hospital for Insane in Washington, these words bubbled descriptively beneath popular diagnostic typologies for nineteenth-century mental disorders: mania, melancholia, and dementia. …