Page 309 - Total War on PTSD_FINAL

desperate sense of isolation, of not belonging to my own past, of being adrift in some kind of alien space. (Hynes, 2001, p. 9, italics in the original)
Such alienation carries on to the home front. Alfred Schuetz (1945) underscores that the challenge is even greater, as each Veteran’s experience is unique. Thus, while Veterans wish to feel a sense of commonality in their experiences, they may also sometimes wish that their experiences not be reduced to a title and thus lose their uniqueness. As Schuetz notes:
...whatever occurs to him [the homecoming Veteran] under these particular circumstances [of war] is his individual, personal, unique experience which he never will allow to be typified. When the soldier returns and starts to speak — if he starts to speak at all — he is bewildered to see that his listeners, even the sympathetic ones, do not understand the uniqueness of these individual experiences which have rendered him another man. They try to find familiar traits in what he reports by subsuming it under their preformed types of the soldier's life at the front. To them there are only small details in which his recital deviates from what every home-comer has told and what they have read in magazines and seen in the movies. So it may happen that many acts which seem to the people at home the highest expression of courage are to the soldier in battle merely the struggle for survival or the fulfillment of a duty, whereas many instances of real endurance, sacrifice, and heroism remain unnoticed or unappreciated by people at home. (p. 374)
And then there is the matter of gaining an attuned and empathic audience. Veterans may get the impression, often justified, that people just do not want to hear their stories. Dan Bar-On, who studied Holocaust trauma, has made the distinction between the
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