Watch first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnEnhmrOHwk
Okay, so I’m guessing I’m not the only one in this class who has stumbled upon videos like this, and have been brought to tears by these videos which show reunion and “happy ending” of soldiers coming home from Afghanistan. Until reading some of Klay’s stories from his novel, Redeployment in ASTU, I had this naive notion that all homecomings and reunions between soldiers and their families resembled these idyllic, fairytale, happy endings as portrayed in so many of these videos. However, we learn in Klay’s first story about Sgt. Price, that this portrayal is not always reality.
Klay’s stories show us how complicated, troubling and confusing it can be to transition from the hyper attentiveness of war: “code orange” to “code white,” oblivion and senselessness that most of Western Society eternally lives in. We see in the first story “We Shot Dogs,” how much Sgt. Price struggles with this transition between war and ‘home,’ and questions whether he will ever be able to live in “code white” again. He has a difficult time communicating his trauma to his wife and the reader gets the sense that Sgt. Price seems disconnected with the society he once grew up in.
While looking for more examples that show the reality and harshness of the trauma faced while coming out of war, I came across an interview with Sebastian Junger, who shared his own experience of coming back from war and the trauma associated with it in his recent article in Vanity Fair: “How PTSD Became a Problem Far Beyond the Battlefield.” Junger argues that although we commonly think of men coming back from war having PTSD, there are many soldiers who “were not traumatized, but do come back from war into an alienated society.” He explains that “weirdly, it’s coming home that’s actually the trauma.” He tells his personal experience with a panic attack, when at a Subway Station about two months after he had returned home: “I felt out of control and besieged by chaotic forces,” Junger says. “There were too many people, everything was too loud. The train was going too fast. I somehow thought the train was going to jump the rails and kill me. It was completely irrational and I knew it was irrational.” Junger argues that it’s not just the memories of war which trigger this trauma, but lacking the “vocabulary to describe the difficulties of readjusting to civilian life.” He explains about ex-combatants: “Even though they’re safe in their bedroom in their suburb, they actually feel more in danger than they did in Afghanistan,” he says, “because in Afghanistan they were sleeping in a big group of heavily armed men and that actually felt safer.”
Both Klay’s work in Redeployment and Junger’s article “How PTSD Became a Problem Far Beyond the Battlefield” both make advancements in rewriting the dominant tropes of the way we think of trauma concerning war and PTSD. We can see in both works, that it is not just the trauma witnessed, but the inability to communicate it which leads to a feeling of alienation. Are we causing more harm to soldiers by expecting a “happy ending” with their return? Or is the trauma just starting for them?
To listen to Jungers Interview:
