Soldiers, Psychiatrists, and Combat Trauma

Abstract

stricken Front Line, where the panic and stampede of some ghastly experience was re-enacted among the livid faces of the dead. Accounts of reenactment, to use Sassoon's wonderfully apt term, are to be found in the letters, diaries, memoirs, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction of many combat soldiers of many wars. Such episodes are represented as if they had been reexperienced, not remembered. Owen, for instance, does not merely remember a comrade's failure to get his gas mask on in time; he relives it: In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.' Reenactment can become a morbid condition, as Lessing suggests in an essay about her father, also a soldier during World War I: His childhood and young man's memory's kept fluid, were added to, grew, as living memories do. But his war memories were congealed in stories that he told again and again, with the same words and gestures, in stereotyped phrases. These stories, she goes on, comprised this dark region in him.2 The morbid realm of reenactment is perhaps the cruelest feature of the disorder variously labeled soldier's heart, shell shock, combat fatigue, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Each term marks the psychiatric casualties of a succession of modern wars-