A Healing in Sharing War Experience
A Healing in Sharing War Experiences by Lieutenant General Bernard E. Trainor (USMC Ret.), Washington Post.
I was recently invited to be a panelist at a veterans’ symposium on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I sought to decline, saying that I never had PTSD and had no qualifications to talk about it. I was told that I represented an earlier generation of combat veterans and that my views and experience would be interesting. So I accepted.
Three other panelists had personal family experience with the traumatic aspects of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I restricted myself to the Korean War. As background for my views, I explained the generational context of my experience as follows:
I grew up in a working-class neighborhood of the Bronx during the Depression. Sympathy was not a hallmark of the time; stoicism was. Whenever I complained to my mother about a hurt, she told me to offer up my suffering to “the poor souls in Purgatory.” In short, facing life as it was characteristic of my generation. Just get on with it.
All of the neighborhood kids a year or more older than I went into the service during World War II, including my brother. Many were in direct combat. They were coming home just as I was going into the Marines as a 17-year-old. I envied their wartime experience.
To me, the returning neighborhood boys were normal, just as crazy as they were before they went to war. Very little was known of what was called “battle fatigue,” although it was widespread. Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of the war, suffered the rest of his life from what today is PTSD…