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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Saved in my grandfather's attic.
It's a fascinating look at the end of a strikingly different war. The magazine is filled from beginning to end with positive public sentiment about the troops, about "our boys" coming home, and about the job they did. Everything from the vacuum cleaner ads to the chilling article about atomic bomb tests in New Mexico. The cover showed a boyish looking Jimmy Stewart coming home.
That war didn't have nearly the public questioning that this one has. The public, to an almost universal extent, seemed to believe in the usefulness of what they were doing. It didn't make the war any less brutal (see Saving Private Ryan), but the homecoming and its aftermath must have been far, far different.
This article helps to explain why perhaps the soldiers of that generation didn't have as many problems with PTSD. They believed in their mission, the whole country believed in their mission, the whole country rationed everything and planted gardens and helped in any way they could. They had a hero's welcome home, memorials built to the fallen, and a trip to college on the GI bill to look forward to.
What a difference. I wish I could believe in this war the way my parents believed in WWII, if only to ease the way home for the soldiers. But I don't, and neither does anyone else.
This article helps to explain why perhaps the soldiers of that generation didn't have as many problems with PTSD.
PTSD wasn't even named before Vietnam veterans came looking for treatment.
So how could you POSSIBLY know that PTSD wasn't a problem for the people who served in WWII?
When the WWII generation drank to excess and beat their wives, it was covered up by publications like Life Magazine. All of their angry and rage and family dysfunction was shoved in the background and made to seem somehow NORMAL.
It wasn't until the feminists in the seventies came around poking into the topics of rape trauma and recovery that PTSD among war veterans became a matter visible to public discourse in the mass media.
Prior to the seevnties, all the problems that typically are exhibited in disturbed veterans were just chalked up to normal masculinity or normal alcoholic acting out.
You can see this clearly in the war movies of the period.
It's fantasy that WWII didn't cause the same amount of trauma as other wars.
The social repression of the fifties was partly a conspiracy to keep that fantasy alive.
if our soldiers are disillusioned it is the fault of the liberal elites, who are continually telling us that the war is worthless, that it is only for oil, that Bush brought down the towers, that the soldiers are stupid, that america is not worth fighting for, that there is no threat, and alot of other nonsense. we are at war and powell travels around saying the army is "broken", this from a soldier. He and his ilk are the ones breaking it. and this article is a pretense of caring about our military. the real attitude is like that expressed by the liberal professor at columbia, that there should be a million mogadishus. there is something wrong with all of you that you can't support your country in a time of war.
But there is one thing you liberals will not be able to repeat from the vietnam war. we will not turn on the soldiers as they come home. that is why there have not been massive demonstrations. we are not going to put them down and insult them.
Orwell wrote that we (that includes you liberals) all sleep at night because there are strong men with guns keeping us safe.
First they grew up in the Depression, which involved mountains and mountains of traumatic dislocation and loss.
Then Hitler and Hirohito showed up to inflict yet more traumatic dislocation and loss.
Looking back on my own father with what I know now, I see someone who was so traumatized, all he could do was drink and rage.
The trauma of the Depression and WWII left terrible marks on the parents of the boomers that ended up leaving marks on the boomers, too.
We in the boomer generation had to grow up under the shadow cast by our parents' post traumatic outlook towards the world.
This post-traumatic outlook held by the WWII generation in America, Europe and the USSR had a lot to do with enabling and giving power to the paranoid excesses of the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
That was the generation, after all, that thought Mutually Assured Destruction was an acceptable way to live.
I wondered how long it would take somebody like Fenella to show up in this thread. I figured someone would eventually start saying that if a sense of futility in the mission was a root cause of PTSD, then those among us calling the war in Iraq futile were wholly to blame for any PTSD our troops suffer.
Fenella, your talking points are old and tired, and even most two-time Bush voters don’t fall for them anymore. This wasn’t a defensive war, and nobody but you and yours are saying that “America isn’t worth fighting for.” You better believe that if America were invaded, I would be out there defending my country and my fellow citizens, not greeting foreign troops as liberators. And I strongly suspect that this is true for most of my fellow liberals here on this site decrying the damage this administration has done to our nation and its military.
Stop trying to paint all those who disagree with the Bush/Cheney administration as traitors, terrorists, or crimethinkers. If you feel that strongly, get thee to Basic Training and go see for yourself what it’s like to spread freedom and democracy at the end of a gun.
Perhaps in the actual fighting of this war, few have sacrificed. There's been no rationing, no victory gardens, etc. But take my word, we will all sacrifice down the road. There is no way to spend billions every week on the nation's credit card and not have a day of reckoning in the economy. It happened after Vietnam and it will happen after Iraq (not to mention Bush's taxcuts, earmarks and other expensive madness).
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
Salon headlines in your mailbox
