George Lewis Hughes
English 103: Accelerated Composition – Rough Draft and Outline
Daniel Richards
October 27, 2008
Visual Rhetoric Thesis Two: Shellshock as a Bridge between Nihilism and Society
In one of the greatest, classic American films of all time, Forrest Gump, there is a scene where the now war hero Forrest Gump is ushered to the great podium of protest against the Vietnam War, situated in the Washington D.C. Mall, just at the foot of the Washington Memorial green, where he is asked to give a word on his feelings about his combat experiences as a recently discharged Vietnam veteran. “There is only one thing I have to say about the war in Viet Nam.” Suddenly, before he even gets the chance to express himself, a saboteur cuts off the power to the loudspeakers, all in the name of media censorship regarding the truth about the war’s identity, such that all the audience is able to hear is his concluding sentence: “[a]nd that is all I have to say about that.” This part of the movie has always stood out in my memory as the most mind-boggling, enigmatic component of the entire story. As such, my question has always been, ever since I can remember, what did Forrest Gump actually “have to say about the war in Viet Nam[?]”
It is in the eyes; those glaring, lifeless eyes that have seen too much. Ever since the first victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome, also known as “shellshock,” were hysterically – or frozenly – pried from the soul-smashing trenches of the Great War, the medical field had devoted immense studies to the causes of such stunning, bizarre cases of mental malfunctioning. They needed to know – and still do today – how to avoid it, not necessarily because of its debilitating effects on the soldier himself, but rather because of the debilitating, demoralizing impacts it would have on the outlook on all wars thereafter.
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=shellshocked%20soldiers&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
Sometimes a result of extreme sleep deprivation, which particularly falls under the subcategory of battle fatigue, shellshock impairs the individual’s both physical and mental capabilities to a surprising extent. The worst outcome regarding the now so-termed “medical condition” is the life-lasting impact it can have not only upon that individual alone, but also upon his prior friends and family back home.
In these respects, shellshock can be legitimately regarded as a contagion. The mere facial expression resembling a hypnotized, even faceless, zombie can prove remarkably – but not so surprisingly on the order of humanity – dangerous to the sentiments of all his other brothers-in-arms caught up in the same combat situation. One man’s plummeting into that notorious “thousand-yard stare” could easily become another man’s cracking into a crazed state of hysteria, which can sometimes go as far as suicidal behavior.
Perhaps arguably the worst accompaniment of shellshock, hallucinations, can impose an enormous safety hazard on all the victim’s squad members, especially when he remains entrusted with a deadly weapon in hand. The grave detriment essentially presides in the victim’s eventual lack of notion for who is friend and who is foe. Several cases exist having recorded incidents in which soldiers have been killed by their own comrades – happening to be shell-shocked, of course – mistakably because of their lack of better judgment otherwise; this appalling concept additionally proves to be starkly problematic to the credibility of all further conductivity of modern warfare because it dangerously plays in to that nihilistic pacifist theory that ultimately, after having seen war for what it really is down to its core – pure Hell – the only enemy is one’s very own bleared and compassion-weary mind. The fine line between brother and enemy becomes even more obscured in this light.
In World War One especially, the smart ones – that is, the veterans – would quickly learn the true rudimentary practices behind this new-war-era philosophy: that the only victory was within their very own personal spheres, specifically in which the element of survival came first and foremost. Existentialism exploded out of the festering womb of the Great War’s scars on the Western world, those scars comprising its mutilated survivors, either physically or mentally – or both. Thanks to the new impact on the mindset of the war-weary combatant, that wrought by the plague of shellshock – in which the basest Social Darwinian instincts of animalistic, self-preservation-driven behaviors would simply drop all other human concerns, such as one’s further caring for the disposition of his fellow man – all wars today have been philosophically approached at the level of the individual, not the crucial team of hierarchical leadership, as it had once been such. Therefore, automatically, even though our country may come out of it all victoriously in the end, we will no longer dwell on team accomplishment, but on the individual trauma, regardless of military statistical consequences in dispute for either conflicting side.
As a World-War history buff, specifically from the Annalesian take of the common soldier, the phenomenon of shellshock particularly intrigues me concerning the setbacks of the synthesis between humanity and combat, primarily because of its close affiliations with many other sciences besides the overarching military science to the byproduct at hand. For instance, it incorporates an exploration of the complexities of the human mind, how and where it can go wrong within a given set of circumstances, in which it implicitly ranges from the discipline of psychology to military medicine. These studies especially captivate me because of my own psychological troubles I had encountered in high school and because of the fact that my father, an emergency physician, had begun his own medical career as a Vietnam-era medic who for years had dealt with the intensive trends regarding the focal points of military medicine, respectively.
“Shellshock,” formally referred to as post-traumatic stress syndrome, became the leading psychological reason for the inhumanity to all war in the modern sense, beginning with its first victims during the First World War. Even today is it seen, enough to question the further viability of the world’s governments to take authority over how its human components to the military are exploited and expended to the benefit of the economically satisfactory mechanics behind the dichotomy of man versus machine in the dynamic of modern to postmodern combat. Combat has evolved to such a state of intensity since the dawn of the last century such that a serious percentage of its human components have eventually malfunctioned – and will eventually malfunction – till the point of their total inactivity and essential neutralization from the dichotomy of the situation, so as to spurn the imminent failure of the entire functioning war machine if given enough time to do so for one side of the firing range. Although the concept may at first seem too drastically radical and dramatic considering how the horrendous reception of human technology’s worst possible volleys of destruction has never necessarily liquidated the army’s ability to continue computing its next moves in full swing, it may be worth noting that the resultant percentage of returning troops from deployment recorded suffering from legitimate cases of this “bug-eyed” syndrome has steadily increased over the statistical timeline covering all other major wars previous which have been both categorized under the distinction of “modern” wars and documented at length. Therefore, with the increasing potential for devastation of the staple, modern weapons used in relatively recent epochs of extensive combat, there exists a sufficiently parallel increase in reported cases of post-traumatic stress syndrome, specifically as a statistical percentage with respect to the size of the coalition deployed thereof.
I finally and definitively stumbled across a hauntingly compelling photograph which best symbolically exemplified the stance I was wishing to take on the matter, that the gaze in the eyes of the shellshock victim is the gaze of a resounding end to mankind’s old faith in the fortunes of war. I have for some time now already decided on the nature of my primary source – or rather, my introductory invocation of a conceptual, mental picture, thereby to the goal of rattling off the topic and, eventually, the thesis statement of my rhetorical analysis – which manifests the pictorial medium of an actual photograph of historic precedence and emotional character – simply enough, the harshly frontal image of a somewhat symmetrically posed, crouching, armed American soldier from the Vietnam-War era, who legitimately typifies the psychological entity of post-traumatic stress syndrome, more casually referred to as “shellshock.” As such, since the more pathetic and the other more humanitarian appeals of my paper intrinsically characterize my primary source, the photograph at hand, I will be more interested in focusing on secondary sources that take on the more professionally authoritative essence of scientific and clinical undertones to the prospective, congealed product of textual integrity that will become my polished thesis.
The visual aid in question features a photograph of one of these soldiers currently suffering from PTSD, but here, he is actually captured in the midst of the fighting, as well as in the midst of a forgotten time, the Vietnam War. How does this image juxtapose and rather contradict the contemporary convention that PTSD does not set in until after one’s discharge from the front lines? Namely, it challenges the trendiness and consistency behind one’s pinpointed definition of when the diagnosis for PTSD is rightfully made. Obviously enough, PTSD as witnessed through the lens of shellshock was just as prevalently encountered in the very trenches of the First World War as in its countless psychiatric wards behind the front lines dotting the face of Europe. As such, this soldier in the photograph was most likely captured in a spell of shellshock. He is registered here as having passed what psychiatrists would call his breaking point, such that in this light, regardless of his current status of either soldier or civilian, he is no longer capable of functioning outright as a result of the total expense of his mental capacity for thought and his physical capacity for action, at that. In other words, everyone, regardless of the fact that he is still immersed in the heat of combat, will break down if he has continued on for days at a time, running on pure adrenaline without a moment’s respite or adequate rest in between time, which proves so crucial to the performance of any and all human beings, who are always restrained in their capabilities by the increments of time reserved for rest; and if the human body cannot seek that form of desperately needed rest, it will eventually take it at will, whether the individual can spare it or not. I myself can attest to such conditions, referring to my own dues paid to trench life – figuratively speaking – during the hell of high school. I would have my own experiences of hallucinations and spacing out and nearly even fainting after having gone thirty-six hours on my feet without sleep, after having pulled one of the many all-too-familiar all-nighters I have unavoidably encountered since my high school career. I, regrettably, can conceptualize what it is like to be unable to think coherently, because, frankly, I have already had to put up with that shit. My neuron capacity most assuredly has a performance limit. Therefore, shellshock can apparently fall into two diagnosable categories, in which the first implies extreme cases of sleep deprivation, whereas the second delineates an overwhelming experience of the instantaneous escape of all the dammed up stress from one’s prior deployment upon the instant of one’s immersion into an opportunity for personal reflection, a rarity that is almost never possible to allot for oneself when tied to the intensive obligations of military servitude, whether in the barracks or in the bunker.
This guy in the photograph could be literally described as the “living dead.” He is totally spaced out beyond even the remotest comprehension of anything that is currently occurring in the world around him, be it a bird chirping in a far-off tree or an Italian landmine going off right next to his ear. He obviously does not see the camera man squatting right square in front of his face, zoning his lens in right on his eyes; he is staring through and beyond him, and beyond the beyond. I would not even be surprised if he was legitimately at all conscious at the moment his likeness was arrested, suspended in time. His lifeless fingers fumble clumsily over the barrel of his stereotypically positioned M-16 assault rifle, clutching it like it is the sole, partisan, lasting remain of his very own life force, like a security blanket from the juvenile perspective. The rifle represented here is a part of his being; it might have saved his life so many times that he is now self-deemed worthy of permanent attachment to it as officially a new body part, and nothing – not even God Himself – will manage to pry it away, because it idolizes for him and makes possible for him the ability to cheat death in a chaotic environment where death is not the freak, but life. The ultimate question which unexceptionally comes to mind hones in hypnotically on the eyes, which unavoidably slurp the onlooker into an inexorable state of trance, and even the chills of sheer horror; for it is the very question and pure wonder of what those lifeless eyes have seen that makes the all unknowing viewer afraid of him, afraid of the truth. The audience comprising only those shy of combat experience can only imagine by pure speculation what the historical message imbedded deep within the recesses of those eyes can translate to be as a form of eventful reality, a war story.
War is Hell, basically; but the inherent problem, however, resides in the detail that this phrase is almost always overlooked regarding the full value of its poignancy for malice. In other words, the majority of Americans – which specifically comprises the naïve coalition of pampered, sheltered civilians – fails to acknowledge the degree of accuracy to this saying; for it is, indeed, fact. The optimists will say that war is a grand opportunity for the nation to pull itself back on its feet, economically speaking. For instance, without the technological innovation the Vietnam War had reaped of its fodder, the state of economic welfare in the United States as most middle-class American citizens know and take it for granted today would be nowhere near as close to par as it is in reality, thanks – of course – all to the fruits of late-twentieth-century carnage. Meanwhile, the veterans of such dark times lurk in the shadows during these more frequent synapses of peaceful respite and blind splendor, forever wracked by the ceaseless torments of their very own sub-consciences: memories – of the heat of combat – is what ails them so. Thus, it should soon come to surface the due justice of the question surrounding the ultimate value of combative engagements, “Where the metal meets the meat,” as Vietnam-era Colonel Hal Moore would say. Should we sacrifice the sanity of our bravest, most patriotic heroes – who oftentimes happen to be the so-called “best and the brightest” – for the sake of the greater, less conceptually acute good? Should its full force of bravado and gung-ho on the level of the human element continue to make its mark on the method of conducting aggressive foreign policy, regardless of the technological advancements? For is it not the overwhelmingly psychological, neurological trauma of jacked-up weaponry that most effectively plunges the soldier into a conducive state of posttraumatic stress disorder, more casually referred to as shellshock? If so, then the reported cases – as well as their frequency – should only sensibly escalate as rapidly and as exponentially as the very rate in itself by which the American nation’s technology makes its inexorable climb toward military supremacy. Shellshock – as a contagious pandemic that spreads dangerously not only amongst the veterans coming home, but also amongst their civilian affiliates – will eventually outstrip the common sentiment in favor of the United States’ imperialistic role in the world for the sake of economic pragmatism.
A broad range of archival evidence from various news media presumes crucial to the research topic at hand, considering that they have delved before into the discussion on the impact of the current recorded cases of post-traumatic stress syndrome, granted that the news characteristically seems to take on such topics from the humanitarian, sentimentalist approach quite often and regularly; these particular resources best reinforce the thesis from the angle of its blatant importance concerning its attention from the civilian mainframe of governmental society. Books along with other scholarly sources, however, also prove endemic to the more credibility side of the thesis, whether from the analytical standpoint of the psychologist or the Army Red Cross.
The most intractable vein of this exploration is likely having to find the right news articles on the topic at hand, let alone having to decipher and interpret the professional jargon that are inevitably encountered through the declared, various pours over hard documentation, all on the order of what most researchers would generally consider to be “dense” material. This more scholarly attempt at backing, however, proves entirely necessary since the topic’s clinical attributes are just as critical to the credibility of the argument which will be expounding upon – and most importantly defending – my thesis.
Less than a month ago, I encountered the fortuitous opportunity to speak with a veteran of the Afghan War, as well as the Iraq War, an American Marine named Wylie Hughes, who is currently studying to be a minister at Columbia Seminary. He served as a Sergeant in his platoon and was also the Company Translator, one who could speak Arabic. From him I learned that all of his buddies coming home had suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder upon the instant of their tour dismissals. Wylie said he would just maroon himself in his old bedroom from when he was a kid for upwards of three months straight, without ever leaving, so as to cut himself off from any interaction with the civilized world in which he might lose his own self-control: “[i]t was like at the beginning of Apocalypse Now; that was me.” Ultimately, there was no exception in his entire unit: everybody lost it after their all-too-brief debriefing sessions. After all the killing they were trained to do, they were simply exploited like dogs and then kicked to the curb when the government was through with them, without any consideration as to their now questionable compatibility with the subtleties of peaceful environments. All their stress would just simply pile on, and then get buried deep within the recesses of their minds. The bottling up would only see its end upon the unhooking of their burdensome leashes from soldiery, only to which end it would finally all spill out within the strange matrix of normalcy. He said, “You don’t have time at all to think about what is really going on. You see, I was there, but I wasn’t really there; because you’re jacked up on so much adrenaline that everything around you feels so otherworldly – it’s like you’re playing a video game. I watched myself fight the whole battle of Fallujah, without actually being there as a physical being.”
His most telling story about how combat stress can be potentially a severe detriment to the human psyche relates to an event when he and his squad were sitting in an armored transport en route to their deployment post: “And then there was this big boom, and the car jolted, and we were rocking back and forth in our seats as mortars were hitting all around us, right next to us. Then our CO in the driver’s seat turns around and looks at us and says, ‘Get out.’ And we, of course, say, ‘Naw!’ He said, ‘Get out,’ and he was smiling. ‘No way, man! Hell no! We ain’t goin’ out there; forget it.’ ‘Get out!’ And he drops the door down. So we all run out, and bullets start coming in like on Saving Private Ryan, and we all get tore up; man, my men got chewed up out there. We had to rescue one of our guys from a burning tank who was covered in third-degree burns; and there were still RPG’s coming in on that damn thing, like it hadn’t taken enough hits already. The guy was already dead by the time we got to him. And then one of my guys gets hit and blows up all over the place, and before I can even come to grips with what’s goin’ on, we’re having to run around picking up his remains under fire and tossing them into the truck to cover up the scene for the news to come through. Later that day, when I finally got the chance to sit down and rest and drink in what had happened, I see a whole bunch of body bags goin’ by. And I realized right then and there that those were my own men. I mean, man, it’s…it’s a terrible feeling – naw, naw, it’s…weird; you feel weird.”
Another, highly probable cause of his men’s one-hundred-percent susceptibility to PTSD refers to his overall, more general interpretation of how their superiors were treating them on the battlefield, and even elsewhere. That is, from the broader standpoint besides his intense and tear-jerking anecdote aforementioned, the trend of soldier abuse and sheer human negligence continued in essentially all other media of service. “As long as you’re an enlisted man, you’re just sheep for the slaughter. Nothing’s changed.” The lack of care for the soldiers is further reflected in the government’s rather despicably deplorable measurement of their individual value as an investment of military gear: “They got all this advanced gear out there nowadays, like on that Future Weapons show on the Discovery Channel. But the government doesn’t want to use it on our guys because they figure our lives aren’t worth that much money. I mean, now they’ve got this lightweight armor stuff out there that you can get, but it costs like…ten thousand dollars a pop, so instead we’re out there in the hot desert carrying around a hundred pounds of steel plates…You’re a grunt. If you haven’t been through officer’s training, you’re just a grunt. I mean, all the stuff they give you is just crap; it’s all old, bulky, heavy…junk.” Even their very own, bare instruments for survival – their weapons – would not perform without leaving scars on their sense of trust in everything human: “Yeah, man, I had a SAW; and that damn thing was so unreliable, ‘cause it would jam all the time; I mean it was belt-fed, you know. It wasn’t encased in no magazine, so your ammo would just get caught on everything when you were trying to move around in close quarters. ‘Cause it’s not like you’re just sitting in one spot shooting the whole time; you’re always running on the balls of your feet.”
It is also obvious that the government is not a big fan of a one-hundred-percent priority of reported cases for PTSD, by the way they have been seemingly attempting to cover up the abominable, intolerable statistic. Namely, according to Sgt. Hughes, the bill that had been ushered several years back for the reimbursement of the draft had been based off of the strategic method for ridding the public of its suspicions about the harsh burden the war in Iraq had been inflicting on its servicemen, specifically by simply covering it up with more greenhorns who would be destined never to see any action. As such, rather than actually attending to the serious crisis of morale at hand, the government typically prefers to approach the issue rather passively – by merely concealing the wound – than actually contriving a reprehensive plan of action and thus sufficient treatment of this psychological, neurotic epidemic.
In this light, the question arises regarding the self-evident ambiguity concerning the staunchly advocated implementation of an official, mandatory debriefing program for all the recently discharged combat veterans, as a stage of their final transition from the world of service to the alien world of civilization and peace.
What could ever be a feasible solution to this critical problem? The answer that Sgt. Hughes provides concerns an enforced, standardized military debriefing program, whose criteria ensues the facilitation of combatant accessibility to psychologists and combat psychiatrists, one that does not include a rough, bureaucratic process of engaging in piles of paperwork in order to request clinical help: “Man, I really had to go out of my way in order to see a shrink; but I didn’t want to because it makes you look weak around your buddies.”
Works Cited
Ambrose, Stephen E. Citizen Soldiers. New York, NY: Ambrose-Tubbs, Inc., 1998.
Bourne, Peter G. The Psychology and Physiology of Stress: With Reference to Special Studies of the Viet Nam War. New York: Academic Press, Inc., 1969.
Brown, Paul, and Graafland, Mariëtte, and van der Hart, Onno. Psychiatric History: Trauma- induced Dissociative Amnesia in World War I Combat Soldiers. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 1999; 33: 37-46 <http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi- bin/fulltext/120139366/ PDFSTART>.
Copp, Terry, and McAndrew, Bill. Battle Exhaustion: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Canadian Army, 1939-1945. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990.
Dobson, Matthew, and Marshall, Richard P., et al. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Comorbidity in Australian Vietnam Veterans: Risk Factors, Chronicity and Combat. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 1998; 32: 32-42 <http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/120142027/ PDFSTART>.
Hughes, Wylie, Sgt. Interview: 4 October, 2008.
McLeroy, Carrie. Army Releases Fifth Mental Health Study. 07 Mar 2008 <http://www.army.mil/-news/2008/03/07/7821-army-releases-fifth-mental-health- study/http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=shellshocked+soldiers&btnG= Search+Images&gbv=2>.
Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1958.
Zemecks, Robert. Forrest Gump. Film: Universal Studios, 1995.
