In WWI, if a British officer became shell shocked he was evacuated to England to a special hospital. Enlisted men were shot for cowardice. Lawrence, trying to get his story filed from Hue, gets to an aid station where three Marines are just sitting on the floor, all of them with the thousand-yard-stare. I quote: "The Marine had lived in the line for days, his body embedded in the earth until it became part of it, moving on his stomach like a snake, falling asleep exhausted and waking up tired. His senses had absorbed fire and blast, cries of the wounded from no-man's-land, the silences. Most of the men around him had been hit but he had not. He had seen his friend's bodies pierced by flying steel, their blood draining away in the dirt, and so finally the fuses of his modest self-control snapped. Some internal regulator switched off his external senses from the unbearable reality of the Citadel, shut down his nervous system, located a quieter, safer place in the dreamy interiors of his mind, and left him alone. He was finished with the war. His mind had taken refuge in another reality. "Everyone who went through close combat in the war was like him to some degree: more or less isolated, cut off from reality, lost in other worlds, at least in the mind . . . Who's to say he was less sane than anyone else. . . My guess was that it had more to do with his tolerance for insanity."
"The Marine had lived in the line for days, his body embedded in the earth until it became part of it, moving on his stomach like a snake, falling asleep exhausted and waking up tired. His senses had absorbed fire and blast, cries of the wounded from no-man's-land, the silences. Most of the men around him had been hit but he had not. He had seen his friend's bodies pierced by flying steel, their blood draining away in the dirt, and so finally the fuses of his modest self-control snapped. Some internal regulator switched off his external senses from the unbearable reality of the Citadel, shut down his nervous system, located a quieter, safer place in the dreamy interiors of his mind, and left him alone. He was finished with the war. His mind had taken refuge in another reality.
"Everyone who went through close combat in the war was like him to some degree: more or less isolated, cut off from reality, lost in other worlds, at least in the mind . . . Who's to say he was less sane than anyone else. . . My guess was that it had more to do with his tolerance for insanity."