Mental Time Bombs

Four decades after the end of World War II an apparently rising number of cases of what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder are being noted among American veterans of that conflict. Perhaps, as one psychologist who has studied the problem suggests, the disorder has existed all along, though only now is its extent coming to be recognized.

Certainly the well-publicized difficulties experienced by some veterans of the Vietnam War have deepened awareness about the lasting effects that combat can have on those who participate in it. About 5% of the men who were in Vietnam are believed to have suffered a stress disorder. Presumably a similar proportion of veterans of other wars could sooner or later be expected to have similar problems.

It is hardly a revelation that the psychic pains of war can linger or be suddenly manifested long after the event by any of a number of triggering incidents. Americans who must actually take part in battle, a relatively small percentage of the total of those who serve in the armed forces, are called on to do things and witness things that others throughout their lives are spared. Americans who survived prisoner-of-war camps in the last three of this nation’s conflicts were forced to undergo a particularly terrible experience. Wounds heal, but memories--even those that are thought to have been suppressed--endure. What is not, what cannot be, forgotten may in time exact its toll.

The Vietnam War was obviously not unique in that respect. Vietnam simply gave a new name--post-traumatic stress--to a problem that was recognized and treated, but never extensively studied, in other of this century’s wars. Still unclear, and maybe unknowable, is how many of those who developed emotional or physical problems after their war experiences might have done so even if they had remained civilians all their lives and never seen war at first hand. Perhaps the best that can be said for now is that much of the anecdotal evidence tends to support a causal connection between the experience of war and subsequently noted stress disorders.

The horror of war, all war--the loss, the suffering, the cruelty, the waste--does not need to be underscored. What we are being reminded of now, 40 years after the end of World War II, is how lasting the pain of that horror may prove to be.