The Greatest Generation and PTSD

Posted on May 15, 2005 in PTSD War

Both the military and psychologists insist that the rate of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder following World War II was especially low. Soldiers and sailors in that great war, the reasoning goes, had time to decompress as their troop ships sauntered across the Atlantic and the Pacific. They talked about their adventures in the war and the things they had done, effectively giving them an group therapy. By the time they reached home, the reasoning went, they had exorcised their frustrations and their terrors.

I differ. I lived with a victim of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: my father. In a 1944 battle, he saw all but two other members of his company killed. For all I know, the other two soldiers died in later battles. His feet froze in the terrible cold of that Italian winter. They put him on a slow-moving hospital ship. Eventually he arrived in Redding, California, where he had all the time in the world to “decompress” with other survivors.

Once when I was about eight, I heard him drive up after work. I hid in the hallway. As he opened the door, I jumped out and said “boo!” First he charged forward, then slapped me about the head and the shoulders. He stopped, suddenly. “Don’t ever do that again. Don’t ever do that again,” he imprecated.

I have no doubt that, for a moment, he was on what he called “that damn hill” and that a German soldier had jumped up from a foxhole.

I do not believe that any war will fail to produce its mental victims. The publicity given to the programs designed to “help” Iraq War soldiers is just one more propaganda tool designed to make us believe that all is fine, all is fine.

Tell that to the sons and daughters of the Greatest Generation, the ones who became the punching bags for their fathers’ nightmares.