Appel insisted that there was no such thing as “ ‘getting used to combat.’ Each moment of it imposes a strain so great that men will break in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure. Thus psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gun shot wounds in warfare.” In the infantry, this breakdown usually occurred after about a hundred days of exposure to combat. By that time, the body’s fight-or-flight mechanism—designed by nature for sudden emergencies—became dangerously overextended.
