#combat ptsd

Bayji, Iraq – 2008

PTSD is cunning and narcissistic, bellowing in the deepest caverns of your subconscious. The smells and colors of war outlined by a violent soundtrack of sadness and violence. We prey on ourselves in these unpredictable times, these fleeting moments of normalcy, clouded by thoughts of savages and delights in combat. We mourn our former selves , engulfed by this poisonous…

Yes, it’s very possible. Also be sure to check out acute stress disorder, which has a lot of the same symptoms as PTSD but for a shorter duration.

As an aside, I do get not wanting to “write it wrong”, but you’re already writing your character having the hallmark symptoms of the disorder. That, combined with your character being a combat veteran, means that people are going to stereotype your character as having PTSD anyways. 

It doesn’t matter if you refuse to label it; this trope is too strong to handwave away.

Just some food for thought.

OKAY, World War I Anon, here are some references and research sources I've been using as I work through the Vampire Chris story! Some of these are more tangentially related than anything, but it all helps to add context.

Have Read / Am Reading Now:

The Last of the Doughboys by Richard Rubin is my current WWI read, on hold at the moment (I'm on a break to read some fiction and poetry right now). In 2003, Rubin realized that we were rapidly losing the last of those American soldiers who had fought in WWI, located remaining survivors, and made it his goal and his mission to interview as many as possible, to allow them to tell their own stories. I have found this book invaluable because of the way it speaks about the enduring legacy of traumatic memory. Some of the men he speaks to will only barely touch on the rougher aspects of the war. Some of the men speak on it with vivid detail. Family members and descendants talk about what their relative would say and what he wouldn't say. It mirrored my own grandfather, who fought in WWII, in my mind - he served in the Pacific theater and i have absolutely on idea where he was or what he did, because he wouldn't talk to any of us about it at all. He kept the war locked up within himself, except that he would talk to my uncle about it, who was also sworn to secrecy.

So I found a lot of value in seeing these men who had "gone home and gotten back on with the business of living", despite the horrors they had tried as hard as they could to lock up within themselves.

Just a really excellent book, and Rubin is an engaging and fun writer.

All Quiet on the Western Front and The Road Back by Erich Maria Remarque are novels, but they were written by a man who directly experienced WWI and are widely considered the greatest novels ever written about the experience. In fact, the honesty in the books was so intense that the Nazi Party banned them during the Third Reich because it was felt they would lessen enthusiasm for war... by showing people what war was actually like, and the toll it took on the men and boys forced to fight it, even after they returned home.

Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror by W. Scott Poole is more about the rise of German, French, British, American etc horror cinema and how the experience of WWI affected even those who didn't directly fight, and how the expression of art and creation of artworks, including cinema, was affected and changed in the aftermath. This is more of a contextual work rather than something direct, but I found that it gave me a lot of good information on how culture and society might be affected by such a war experience.

They Called It Shell Shock by Stefanie Linden is a little dry and academic (it's an academic book, after all) but it also has a wealth of information on shellshock, how it differed from our modern understanding of PTSD, the ways in which they are similar and the ways in which they are not, and tons and tons of firsthand accounts thanks to Linden gaining access to a wealth of patient information at a British and German hospital that primarily worked with the men suffering from this new and little-understood ailment. If you wanted me to recommend just one nonfiction book to get a sense of the actual mental state of the war, it'd be this one.

A World Undone by G.J. Meyer is the most readable while also being thorough overall histories of the war I've read, and I highly recommend it. It sets up the circumstances that made the war inevitable once the snowball started rolling down the hill, how the avalanche could have been avoided at so many turns but in the end, became a force of nature no one could quite resist.

This is the best book I've read as far as walking you through it month by month, year by year. TONS of really really great information here! Probably my second recommendation after They Called It Shell Shock.

The Great War in America: WWI and Its Aftermath by Garrett Peck is ONLY about the American experience. The leadup to our entry into WWI, our months spent fighting, and then the aftermath of the war and how its legacy affected the United States. I found this a necessity trying to understand what Chris would have experienced, how he would have understood the war. Americans had a different viewpoint, so far across the sea, and were largely isolationist right up until we just weren't any longer. Then the war machine swung into gear, and propaganda made us see ourselves as the necessary saviors of a Europe on the brink of total annihilation. It also walks you through how Woodrow Wilson's grand ambitions to create a League of Nations both succeeded and failed, but set up the concept of the United Nations. And if you want to understand postwar Germany and the rise of Nazis, I feel like reading up on the armistice and what happened during the negotiations that ended the war is very important.

But, yeah. This book is focused almost entirely on the American experience and legacy of WWI.

The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell is a little like Wasteland, but it focuses on the work of writers, primarily, who memorialized WWI in fiction and nonfiction. This book was originally a study published in 1970, so there are some dated phrasings and terminology, but go with it and it's a really, really valuable read with a wealth of information on how a generation had to contend with a horror beyond their prior imaginings and fit it into the modern world as they understood it.

Fussell's scholarship involves a lot of firsthand accounts (diaries, poetry, etc) some of which is easy to find, but some of which very much isn't. Oh gosh. It was such a good, useful book for me to get into the headspace of those who had survived the war, afterward, in how they constructed it in their memories.

The First World War by John Keegan is a full historical account, like A World Undone. Of the two, I'd recommend A World Undone, which I found more readable and easier to follow with. But it's still an excellent historical account from start to finish.

It's very dry, and could be difficult if you're a casual reader. Hell, it was difficult for me and I was explicitly looking for academic work. But it's still got a lot of really valuable information in it!

World War I: A Definitive Visual History by the Smithsonian is a huge coffee-table style book but it is absolutely jam-packed with information, both on the war and also on context. I found so much information on uniforms, and trench warfare, the Spanish flu and its effect on the soldiers fighting, the Armistice... all of it heavy with visual references, photographs, diagrams, maps, just anything you could want to see to better ground yourself in that place and time. Highly recommended. HIGHLY.

Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark is a specifically in-depth look at the step-by-step slow-motion disaster that took us from a man's assassination to a catastrophic world war whose scars are still visible in the battlefields of France. You can get a really good look at how individuals and governments both could have stopped it, but also couldn't, hamstrung by tradition and stubborn intransigence... and in the end, millions died because of it.

Really great book, highly recommend.

Dead Wake by Erik Larson, about the sinking of the Lusitania by the Germans in 1915, is nonfiction that reads like a novel. In effect, Germany decided nearly a year into the war to change the rules of the game. Prior to this, while cargo ships had been subjected to attack, ships carrying passengers were largely left alone, because the rules of war stated civilians should be left alone. While there had been a ramping-up of tensions, Germany's attack on the Lusitania, and the loss of 1,200 souls, was considered an atrocity beyond anything else done to civilians that far into the war.

It also, indirectly, is the reason that the United States would end up involving itself more directly in the war, and eventually fighting as well.

It's a really good book, lots of research, and while I don't recommend it to help you with historical details, you'll get a really good feel for the tension of war and the way people had to keep on living in the middle of one.

This site and this one both have lists of poetry written during and after the war by those who experienced it that I found really, really invaluable. Absolutely lovely and horrible and terribly sad and angry and bitter. Just. Please take some time to read it, even if you're not a poetry person.

Books I Haven't Read But They're On My List:

The First Code Talkers: Native American Communicators in World War I by William C. Meadows. I had no idea that tribal languages were used for encryption in WWI and I'm really interested to dig into this one when I finish my current run of reading mostly poetry.

The Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger is essentially a direct account lifted from the diaries of a man who started out a young, idealistic German soldier and became a battle-hardened officer. This is considered one of the best firsthand accounts of the war, but I have yet to read it. I'm told you should try to find the reprint of the original 1929 translation to English if possible (if you need it in English).

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman used to be considered THE definitive account of the war, but it's dated and there are some questions about its accuracy and Tuchman's conclusions at this point. But I'm told there is still a hugely valuable wealth of information in the book and intend to add it to my research library. There is also a famous story about how JFK cited this book as part of the reason he resisted the call of his generals to fire during the 1962 missile crisis.

No Man's Land by Wendy Moore, about two women who started a battlefield hospital in France during a time when female doctors were allowed only to treat other women or children. This is definitely on my list! And I imagine will contain a really great amount of detail on how these hospitals operated and the difficulties they faced.

Other Resources: Visual and Audio

Also, when writing Barrage, I listened to this youtube video of what an artillery barrage would have sounded like, at a volume just below active physical discomfort. This video was also helpful for that!

This youtube compilation of a series of songs from WWI was a really good writing soundtrack, too.

This video includes colorized video and images of soldiers during WWI and oh man, sometimes you realize just how young some of those poor men were, and it hits you all over again watching them do what they could to find some fun and joy in such a hellscape.

This video of shellshocked war survivors, with tremors, terror responses, and more is sobering and really good viewing for a sense of what shellshock LOOKED like, because modern combat PTSD tends to present significantly differently (likely due primarily to the difference in artillery barrages vs. modern warfare)

This look at WWI's reconstructive surgery (which frankly was a huge, HUGE leap forward from surgery prior to the war) and how it took wounded men and attempted to reconstruct their faces so they could live comfortably out in the world is just amazing. Here's another set of photographs I recommend looking at as well as information on how plastic surgery was more or less invented because of WWI. It also gives you a good visual for the absolute atrocity of the war.

This site has incredible photographic evidence, but be warned that it is DEEPLY graphic and does not spare you the reality of what those "broken faces" looked like. Borders on gore.

Also I recommend following @hiddenwwi, a tumblr account that posts photos of the ruins left over from the war, including the underground ‘cities’, scars in the landscape, and other incredible visuals. 

People may not have had words for PTSD back then, but the disorder itself has been described as far back as 440 BCE, by Herodotus.  

Epizelus, the son of Cuphagoras, an Athenian, was in the thick of the fray and behaving himself as a brave man should, when suddenly he was stricken with blindness, without blow of sword or dart; and this blindness continued thenceforth during the whole of his afterlife. The following is the account which he himself, as I have heard, gave of the matter: he said that a gigantic warrior, with a huge beard, which shaded all his shield, stood over against him; but the ghostly semblance passed him by, and slew the man at his side. Such, as I understand, was the tale which Epizelus told.

Lucretius wrote in 50 BCE:

The minds of mortals… often in sleep will do and dare the same… Kings take the towns by storm, succumb to capture, battle on the field, raise a wild cry as if their throats were cut even then and there. And many wrestle on and groan with pains, and fill all regions round with mighty cries and wild, as if then gnawed by fangs of panther or of lion fierce.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181586/

WHICH IS JUST TOO GODDAMN COOL, Y’ALL.  Sorry, had to share that. :)

The problem with the rest of your question, however, is that people with PTSD are not a monolith.  There’s no exact right way to help someone.

I’ve listed two general things characters could do, and beneath each one listed a way it could backfire or be done poorly.  It’s up to you to decide how your character would react.

Be supportive, and open to listening to the character’s problems

Force the character to talk even if they’re not ready to

Help identify triggers, and shield the character from encountering them

Excessively protecting the character from everything that could be conceived as triggering them.  Patronizing or ‘babying’ the character.

Followers with PTSD, in your experience, what have friends said or done that helped? What made things worse?

Witnessing someone else threatened with death (especially violently) is sufficient to count as a traumatic event under the DSM-5 criteria. So the character doesn’t even have to believe the other person has died - it would still fulfill that criteria.