You are not the same person anymore!

Hello everyone!
We have had several reading on the war on terror and trauma. Each readings had some new perspective about trauma and a different approach of understanding and expressing it. But the most interesting reading that actually made me think about how complex the effect of trauma can be on a person is “Redeployment” by Klay Phil. After reading several readings in ASTU about trauma, I was generally left with opinions and understanding of what the author’s opinion on trauma are but Redeployment left me with questions-“What if I was in that situation?”, “Would I have felt so distant from my own family and the people I loved? “, “Would I have just become an all new person, a person I never want to become? “ .While thinking about these questions, I remembered the ‘assimilation’ of the first nations people we discussed and researched about in our Sociology course. The process of ‘Redeployment’ is like assimilating someone by ‘causing’ a person or group to become part of a different society by completely transforming him emotionally, mentally and physically. This happened to Klay when he went for the war and spent months in the violent circumstances of the war. He was made to think in a certain way to the extent that even after coming back he would think and associate colors with the situations, like he was taught in the war. The very first line of the story starts with “ We shot Dogs”. Not by accident. We did it on purpose………..I’ m a dog person, so I thought about that a lot” shows the impact left on a ‘dog lover’ like him who ‘had’ to kill dogs keeping his ‘emotions’ aside even though he didn’t want to kill them in the first place and this might be the reason that he was able to gather the strength to kill his own dog after coming back because ‘emotions’ did not really have any place in the circumstances of war he came back from. After coming from the war he just seemed detached to every emotion and people he shared an ‘emotional’ connection with whether it be his wife or his dog. This story shows how being present in the war and those circumstances completely ‘assimilated’ Klay into a complete different person, he became emotionally detached, mentally cautious and physically strong just like he was expected to be for the war. But the question is did he lose himself forever?