Page 303 - Total War on PTSD

aspect of the soldier's isolation is, therefore, their severance from family life. American sociologist of the military and World War I Veteran, Willard Waller, notes that “Sometimes even the most sophisticated soldier is shocked when he suddenly recognizes the gulf that has arisen between himself and his loved ones” (Waller, 1944, p. 30). As one World War I soldier wrote in a letter to his young wife:
“All the time I was with you, I had the most curious feeling that I was waiting to go back to go "home" to Camp X. Now I realize why. I'm really home now, hard as it is to say this. But that's what happens, it seems, when you join the Army. You don't feel that you belong anywhere else you can't, when you're in a uniform. The Army seemed strange when I first got into it, but now everything else but the army seems strange." (p. 31)
Being a warrior is an identity that one can hardly shake off (Hoge, 2010; R. T. Smith & True, 2014), and rarely wishes to do so (see footnote 1 below). However, it becomes challenging and alienating after repatriation. This sense of estrangement resurfaces in accounts of British and American Veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan (Ahern et al., 2015; Brewin, Garnett, & Andrews, 2011; Orazem et al., 2017) as it has been for Veterans of the World Wars (Schuetz, 1945; Waller, 1944), the Vietnam War (Figley & Leventman, 1980; Shatan, 1973; Shay, 2002), and Israeli Veterans of multiple conflicts (Stein & Tuval-Mashiach, 2015a). Veterans’ sense of belonging often shifts dramatically from the family to the military, thus rendering them alien in their own homes. In their investigation of the challenges of Afghanistan and Iraq Veterans’ transition from military to civilian life, for instance, Ahern et al. (2015) identified three dominant themes in American Veterans’ accounts: a) the military environment as a “family” that took care of them and provided structure; b) the notion that normal is now
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