Achilles in Vietnam Quotes

“Melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. [But we must face] the painful awareness that in all likelyhood one's own character would not have stood firm.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“As beasts are beneath human restraints, gods are above them... It would be foolish and untruthful to deny the appeal of exalted, godlike intoxication....We have seen the paradox that these godlike exalted moments often correspond to times when the men who have survived them say that they have acted like beasts....Above all, a sense of merely human virtue, a sense of being valued and of valuing anything seems to have fled their lives....However, all of our virtues come from not being gods. Generosity is meaningless to a god, who never suffers shortage or want. Courage is meaningless to a god, who is immortal and can never suffer permanent injury. The godlike berserk state can destroy the capacity for virtue. Whether the berserker is beneath humanity as an animal, above it as a god, or both, he is cut off from all human community when he is in this state.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“As products of a biblic culture, most veterans believed it is nobler to strive to be like God than to want to be human. However, all of our virtues come from not being gods: Generosity is meaningless to a god, who never suffers shortage or want; courage is meaningless to a god, who is immortal and can never suffer permanent injury; and so on. Our virtues and our dignity arise from our mortality, our humanity -- and not from any success in being God. The godlike berserk state can destroy the capacity for virtue.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Major recovery, however, requires that personal narrative be particular, not general. The friends who died in Vietnam were not friends in general but particular human beings. The survivors who lost them are also particular human beings, and they must be given permission by the community to speak without fear that their particularity will rupture the we-all-went-through-the-same-thing support that they have come to rely upon. In a fully realized personal narrative the survivor grips the herald's staff and speaks as himself.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Support on the home front for the soldier, regardless of ethical and political disagreements over the war itself. is essential. This is never easy in the emotionally polarized climate of a war. However, when facing individual soldiers, we must remember that all modern soldiers serve under constraint. The justice of overall war aims and of operational theories -- "strate-gic" bombing of civilians to weaken the industrial capacity to wage war is an example of such theory -- is not within the individual soldier's scope of moral choice, unless he or she is willing to face imprisonment or death by refusing to fight. I cannot hold soldiers to an ethical standard that requires martyrdom in order simply to be blameless. I am not arguing against the Nuremberg principles, which say that no person is absolved of responsibility for horrible acts by the fact that he or she was legally ordered to do them. I am speaking from the pain that I feel when I witness in our veterans the ruin of moral life by the overwhelming coercive social power of military institutions and of war itself.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Forgetting combat trauma is not a legitimate goal of treatment. Veterans find it morally degrading to forget the dead. To know why this is so, we need only recall what we have seen in the earliest chapters on the existential functions of guilt and rage. The task is to remember -- rather than relive and reenact -- and to grieve. For combat veterans this means grieving not only the dead but also their own lost innocence in both its meanings, as blamelessness and as unawareness of evil. Also, many prewar relationships with parents, friends, siblings, and spouses are now gone forever. A secure sense of the goodness of the social order is irretrievably lost and must be mourned. One veteran said,

You're afraid that once you start to cry you'll never stop. And once you do start, it seems like it will never stop. I cried for a whole year.

We must all strive to be a trustworthy audience for victims of abuse of power. I like to think that Aristotle had something like this in mind when he made tragedy the centerpiece of education for citizens in a democracy.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Democratic process embodies the apparent contradiction of safe struggle. Combat veterans with unhealed PTSD have the greatest difficulty conceiving of any struggle apart from killing and dying. Passionate struggle conducted within rules of safety and fairness simply doesn't make sense to them or seems a hollow charade. For them it is psychologically impossible to win a struggle without killing or to lose without dying, and they do not want to do either. Many veterans' response is to withdraw and not participate. Democracy embodies safe struggle over the shape and implementation of a future. An unhealed combat veteran cannot think in terms of a future. Democratic political activity presupposes that the future exists and that it is meaningful. Combat taught the survivor of prolonged combat not to imagine a future or to want anything. Prior to seeing the point of one's voluntary participation in a social process, one must feel that it is safe to want something.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Thoughts of suicide are common symptoms of combat PTSD. Paradoxically, they are also signs of life. If a person enters the zombielike state of indifference beyond despair, rage, suicidality, and fear, he or she simply dies. This is the testimony of concentration camp survivors and combat veterans. The ability to kill oneself is the bottom line of human freedom. Many combat veterans think daily of suicide. Knowledge that one has this freedom seems to be sustaining.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Alterations in time sense begin with the obliteration of the future but eventually progress to obliteration of the past.... [At first they] cultivate memories of their past lives in order to combat their isolation ... [and then they] lose the sense of continuity with their past. The past, like the future, becomes too painful to bear, for memory, like hope, brings back the yearning for all that has been lost. Thus prisoners are eventually reduced to living in an endless present.

For combat soldiers, the temporal horizon shrinks as much as the moral and social horizon. Only getting through now has any existence. With this loss of a meaningful personal narrative that links past, present, and future comes a shrinkage of volition.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“I recall canoeing with veterans along tranquil meanders of the Saco River in Maine, when one of them, who had served on riverboats in the Mekong Delta, pointed out the tan mudbank on the outside of a curve. He said that such an innocent riverbank would be riddled with tunnels and invisible machine-gun and rock-propelled-grenade positions. The cumulative effect of prolonged attacks on mental function is to undermine the soldier's trust in his own perceptions. Another veteran said:

Nothing is what it seems. That mountain there--maybe it wasn't there yesterday, and won't be there tomorrow. You get to the point where you're not even sure it is a mountain.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“The overwhelming majority of combat veterans whom I have known are painfully aware of the absence of intimacy, tenderness, light playfulness, or easy mutuality in their sex lives. For many, sex is a trigger of intrusive recollection and emotion from Vietnam as the sound of explosions or the smell of a corpse. Sex and anger are intertwined that they often cannot conceive of tender, uncoerced sex that is free of rage. When successful treatment reduces their rage, they sometimes report that they have to completely relearn (or learn for the first time) the pleasures of sex with intimacy and playfulness.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“I have emphasized the religious roots of dishonoring the enemy and its toxic psychological results. However, any ideology that debases the enemy endangers the lives of soldiers while they fight.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Combat with these weapons is face to face, hand to hand, personal. When face-to-face combatants share a common tongue, complex speech occurs between them. The American Civil War was the last time in our own history when both sides spoke the same language.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“The enemy must in some way be dehumanized, degraded to less than full human status. Collectively, the population [and soldiers] of the other country must become "gooks," "Nips," "Japs," "Krauts," or "Huns." One must first hide from the full humanity of the opponent before [one] is able to kill him.

-- Rev William Mahedy”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Parallels between the veteran's words and Achilles' are inescapable. During berserk rage, the friend is constantly alive; letting go of the rage lets him die.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Here the veterans grapple with the question of moral luck: Can any workings of bad luck produce cruel or evil actions in a good person?”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“To return to my blunder in group therapy, a veteran whose voice is often heard in this book turned black with anger and, glaring at me, said, "I won my war. It's you who fucking lost!" He got up and left the room to remove himself from the opportunity to physically hurt me. Toward the end of the group session he returned and said, "What we lost in Vietnam was some good fucking kids!”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Learn the psychological damage that war does, and work to prevent war. There is no contradiction between hating war and honoring the soldier. Learn how war damages the mind and spirit, and work to change those things in military institutions and culture that needlessly create or worsen these injuries. We don't have to go on repeating the same mistakes.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“If a soldier survives the berserk state, it imparts emotional deadness and vulnerability to explosive rage to his psychology and permanent hyperarousal to his physiology — hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder in combat veterans.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“For humans the most danger power-- and the power most able to confer heart-swelling beneficence -- has always been other human beings acting together in a social institution.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Zeus, we might say, was the original REMF.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Veterans call it "pissing contests" when one veteran denies the validity of another veteran's war trauma. Different survivor groups early start these competitions as well, each claiming that their experience is the only significant one. An intern in our program approached a battered women's shelter for further training opportunities; when she spoke of her experience with combat veterans, the person at the shelter scoffed and said, "That was twenty years ago. This is now!" Holocaust scholars have disparaged the writings of incest survivors as merely "confessional." These pissing contests only serve the interests of perpetrators, all perpetrators. It gives me great pain whenever I hear such disparagement among veterans or among survivor groups. No person's suffering is commensurable with any other.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Fighting spirit, a ringing term that broadly refers to a soldier's readiness to move in on any enemy rather than flee or freeze, is essential for survival in combat...however, the folk culture of the American military, especially during the Vietnam War, merged fighting spirit with being berserk. Leadership beliefs encouraged the conversion of grief into berserk rage as a militarily desirable consequence.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“What a returning soldier needs most when leaving war is not a mental health professional but a living community to whom his experience matters. There is usually such a community close at hand: his or her surviving comrades. Men and women returning from combat should "debrief" as units, not as isolated individuals. Unit rotation [in my understanding, the lack of it] is the most important measure for secondary prevention of combat PTSD.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“As much as I love what I do and consider it worthwhile, I cannot escape the suspicion that what we do as mental health professionals is not as good as the healing that in other cultures has been rooted in the native soil of the returning soldier's community. Our culture has been notably deficient in providing for reception of the Furies of war into community. For better or for worse, the health care system has been given this role -- along with the prisons, where a disproportionate number of men incarcerated since the Vietnam War have been veterans.

We must create our own new models of healing which emphasize communalization of the trauma. Combat veterans and American citizenry should meet together face to face in daylight, and listen, and watch, and weep, just as citizen-soldiers of ancient Athens did in the theater at the foot of the Acropolis. We need a modern equivalent of Athenian tragedy. Tragedy brings us to cherish our mortality, to savor and embrace it. Tragedy inclines us to prefer attachment to fragile mortals whom we love, like Odysseus return from war to his aging wife, Penelope, and to refuse promised immortality.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“The character damage of a trauma survivor can be understood as a reflection both of his or her radical aloneness and of the continued presence of the perpetrator in the victim's inner life.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Veterans speak of losing their innocence and longing to regain it. They ask: "Why can't I just go back to the way I was?"

I was eighteen years old. And i was like your typical young American boy. A virgin. I had strong religious beliefs.... My religious upbringing was, God was good. Everything good was--it was like obeying your mother and father, y'know. Everything was good was that God wanted. Y'know evil was the Devil's way...but evil didn't enter it till Vietnam. I mean real evil. I wasn't, prepared for it at all.... It was all evil. All evil. Where before, I wasn't. I look back, I look back today, and I'm horrified at what I turned into. What I was. What I did. I just look at it like it was somebody else. I really do. It was somebody else.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“A shared narrative future -- as expressed in such statements as "Yes, I'll come to the picnic next Friday" -- defines socially shared predictability of behavior. Prolonged contact with the enemy teaches that predictability is fatal. Being unpredictable is a basic survival skill in combat, where the enemy is ever observant. Many of the veterans in our program take different routes to the clinic every time they come.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“At the deepest level, survival in war trains or selects men for the skills to ignore, deflect, pervert, or circumvent orders, rules, and standard operating procedures. The reason for this lies in the nature of war against a human enemy -- who is diligently stealing and studying training manuals, directives, standing orders, procedures, etc. The enemy's power of intelligent observation and thought give rise to what Georgetown University military historian Edward Luttwak calls the "paradoxical logic of war." No matter how sound the rules and procedures in "the book," the enemy will very shortly know "the book" better than you will turn "doing it by the book" into a dead trap.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Like we changed our [radio] call signs in the middle of fucking things. Like we changed our [radio] call signs in the middle of fucking things. The Gooks some way or another got the roster of our shit. The fucking yo-yos in the back used to have all these fucking Indigenous Personnel working for them. So we were in the field and we were called, like, Robin Hood, Robin Hood One, Robin Hood Six, Broken Arrow. And they started to get our fucking call signs. And [the enemy] started talking to us on the fucking radios.... So when we went to the field, the six teams going had already talked.

And we said, if this shit hits like it again, we'll all use something that we use back home. So like all of a sudden we became Batman and Robin, Snoopy and Pigpen. Y'know, "Snoopy, have you seen Pigpen?" "He's with Schroeder." Right? So we knew where everybody was.

You fucking got the radio, and you're saying, "I'm in a deep fucking trouble? You people fucking serious?" Y'know? "What the fucking you doing to do? Send me to jail? Do me a fucking favor." I'm out there getting fucking murdered, and they're telling me I'm in fucking trouble.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character