Page 262 - Total War on PTSD

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 “indescribable” and the “undiscussable” (Bar-On, 1999); the former connoting the notion that there are things that can never be adequately described due to the ineptitude of language, while the latter regards the notion there are topics that there is just no place wherein they can be discussed. This is the bedrock of a conspiracy of silence, and while Veterans are both conspirators and victims of that acquiesced pact of mutism, society shares a great part in the conspiracy. American historian and Veteran of World War II, Paul Fussell, addresses this issue very poignantly in his attempt to shatter the romantic view of the war:
One of the cruxes of the war, of course, is the collision between events and the language available — or thought appropriate — to describe them. To out it more accurately, the collision was one between events and the public language used for over a century to celebrate the idea of progress. Logically there is no reason why the English language could not perfectly well render the actuality of trench warfare: it is rich in terms like blood, terror, agony, madness, shit, cruelty, murder, sell-out, pain and hoax, as well as phrases like legs blown off, intestines gushing out over his hands, screaming all night, bleeding to death from the rectum, and the like. Logically, one supposes, there’s no reason why a language devised by man
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