SBAND Seminar Materials 2013 Free Ethics: Echoes of War The Combat Veteran

Like Homer’s Odyssey, twentieth century literature and cinema have also explored the connection between combat trauma and criminal behavior. After World War I, novels and plays such as What Price Glory?, They Put a Gun in My Hand, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Road Back described this link. Vietnam-?related literature and cinema, such as Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, First Blood, Platoon, and Born on the 4th of July have done the same. The Hurt Locker, Harsh Times, and Restrepo are modern films that face combat trauma and adjustment disorders head on in very stark, gritty terms. B. PTSD’s Many Names The affliction we now call PTSD has gone by many names over the centuries. The cluster of symptoms was first medically diagnosed in Europe. It was referred to as “nostalgia” among Swiss soldiers in 1678. German doctors during that period called the condition Heimweh, while the French called it maladie du pays—both meant “homesickness.” The Spanish called it estar roto, meaning “to be broken.”6 Civil War-?era Americans gave PTSD poetic names like “soldier’s heart” and “irritable heart.” Out of the horrors of World War I, came “shell shock.” World War II and Korea ushered in the more clinical term, “combat fatigue.”7 World War II correspondent and artist, Tom Lea, first coined the term “thousand yard stare” with his painting that was actually entitled “that 2,000 yard stare,” depicting a shell-?shocked Marine during fighting on Peleliu in the South Pacific. The term has become part of our cultural lexicon and is often used synonymously with PTSD:8 6 7 EDWARD TICK, WAR AND THE SOUL: HEALING OUR NATION’S VETERANS FROM POST-?TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER 99 (2005). Id. 8 Tom Lea, That 2,000 Yard Stare, Oil on Canvas, U.S. Army Center for Military History, Washington, D.C. (1944). 5

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