Page 261 - Total War on PTSD

dominant. Nevertheless, as I argue below, PTSD may fortify that identity regardless of whether service is mandatory or not.
Contributing to this sense of alienation is Veterans’ conviction that civilians would never really be able to understand and Veterans will never really be able to explain, not fully, not sufficiently. The experience of war is ineffable. After all, how does one explain the experience of taking cover in the face of incessant enemy fire, losing a friend, or deliberating whether to pull the trigger when confronted by a child carrying explosives, and doing so, or the uncertainty of the battlefield, or collecting mutilated bodies (friends’ as well as foes’), or myriad other experiences? Therefore, there is a loneliness of communicative isolation almost inherent to war. Samuel Hynes (2001), in his seminal book, The Soldier’s Tale, notes that “War cannot be comprehended at second-hand. . .it is not accessible to analogy or logic” (p.1). If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then soldiers inhabit their own world, and it is different from that of civilians. As a Canadian soldier fighting on the Italian front in the Second World War, writes to someone at home:
The damnable truth is we are in really different worlds, on totally different planes, and I don’t know you anymore, I only know the you that was. I wish I could explain the 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
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