Shell shock was a term only associated with World War one due to the major impact it had throughout the war. It was specifically used in Britain to express a psychological breakdown for a soldier from stress and trauma and fear from battles and fighting. It was hard to cure them as people and doctors considered them to be cowards therefore refused to offer help. Some men only received help depending on their high class or rank in the community, while others were even put on trial and even executed for being ‘cowards’. Shell shock caused a lot of problems and casualties for the country and for the war.
When a soldier is suffering from PTSD he may experience rage, depression, flashbacks, emotional numbness, and hyper vigilance. They can experience the inability to stop believing that they are in battle during everyday life. Effects like these can seriously jeopardize their family life. As one former soldier has said in the article, “It’s almost like your family has its own form of PTSD just from being around you every
Like, Nguyen Van Khien, he had his leg blown off during the war. He felt “sad and wanted to cry” because now he has only one leg (Adams). Many other soldiers in the north must have experienced injuries like him as well. Even with a severe injury though, the soldiers believe that “life is still good” because at least they made it out alive (Adams). The three things that affected North Vietnamese, hating Americans, living in harsh conditions and receiving severe injuries were all things they had to deal with during and after the war.
He and his fellow soldiers encounter many physical and mental problems while transitioning back from combat into our environment. Our soldiers have not been receiving the medical attention they deserve and need to cure PTSD. Due to the lack of knowledge that care is available to members serving, the numbers of military related suicides are rising. Through care groups, self-seeking advancements and psychological analysis studies soldiers can overcome PTSD or avoid it completely. PTSD is medically defined as an anxiety disorder that can occur after going through a traumatic event.
It is hard for him to deal with throughout the story because it causes him to think of many different things, not only about what he did, but about the man he killed. No matter what it may be, death was a huge part of the war and one of the hardest things to face and deal with. Whether they spent a day or a year in Vietnam, it changed the soldiers in some way, either physically, mentally or both. Even the men who were very mentally stable found it hard to deal with all the aspects of the war. It was very difficult
7. The effect of the collapsing time in the final paragraph is that it had really emphasized his terror of remembering the war because even though the war was a huge impact part of his life O’Brien fears the memories of it. The rhetorical effect of this irony is that he spent so much thought over going or not going to war that the memories of the war was given no details whatsoever. It was almost not considered as important as the decision. 8.
It was then that Paul realized the true agonies of war—surviving the agony of war forces one to learn to disconnect oneself from emotions like grief, sympathy, and fear. All of these conditions combined greatly affected the mental and physical health of the soldiers in World War
Nevertheless, he is not as fine as Lyman thought. Even though his brother did his best to help him, Henry could not accept the new awful things he was going trough, therefore he took his own life. Watching someone you love suffering is heart wrenching, especially when nothing can be done to help the situation. Erdrich looks at the trauma of a soldier returning home from war and how their family must cope with his emotional change. The effects of war not only affect the soldier, but also cause an effect on families and loved ones.
In All Quiet on the Western Front the protagonist is Paul Baumer because we experience the story from his point of view and thus we sympathize with him. Paul’s situation is troubling because his life and the lives of other soldiers his age “have become a wasteland” (20). War has changed them and the world so much that they don’t really know what they are going to do once the war finishes. They don’t know any trades; all they know is war. The value of their lives was also changed by war.
Coping With Guilt at War In the novel The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, the soldiers take responsibility for the deaths of friends, and have to find ways to cope with their severe guilt. The Vietnam War puts a heavy burden on O’Brien and his fellow soldiers, especially since they are reluctantly drafted by the U.S. government. The soldiers are being forced to be in a war in which most of them do not believe, thus also being forced to take on these mental and physical responsibilities. The whole plat oon feels extreme guilt for for these seemingly unreasonable deaths of their fellow troops. Finding ways to cope with this guilt is remarkably difficult, particularly in such an intense war fought in a completely foreign country.