According to Lt. Col. Grossman, the intensity, trauma and guilt soldiers suffer post-combat “inevitably result in a web of forgetfulness, deception and lies.” This traumatic personal matrix reflects cultural and institutional practices of forgetting inconvenient truths and is exacerbated by the eventual understanding that history is written by victors. This combined with the soldiers’ simultaneous yet “unconscious cover-up” of the reality of their own combat actions, results in a larger socio-cultural “conspiracy of silence” about the realities of war.
