JERUSALEM—Describing the terrifying yet valiant experience to his fellow battalion members, Israel Defense Forces soldier Yossi Saadon recounted Tuesday his harrowing, heroic war story of killing an 8-month-old Palestinian child during a violent attack against protesters. “It was a heart-pounding experience—there was…
I get that this comment is hyperbole, but it’s not entirely true. The trauma experienced by U.S. military personnel, and processed through movies, is primarily moral injury, knowing that they went to war and did terrible things unjustly, unnecessarily, based on lies. (Contrast this with the trauma experienced by the protagonists in The Best Years of Our LIves, veterans of what is seen as a just, necessary war. They struggle with life after war, not guilt about what they did in it.) There are movies from other countries which process the same sort of trauma, such as the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir, made by a former IDF soldier processing his role in the 1982 Lebanon War.
Point is, 'merica doesn’t have mentally-weak, or entitled, soldiers compared to other nations, it just gets into a lot of morally-indefensible wars. (And Israel causes moral injury to many of its people with its morally-indefensible wars, too.)
James Jones’ Whistle (the third book in his sort-of trilogy which includes From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line) is also about the post-battle trauma experienced by WWII combat veterans. It is remarkably like all the Vietnam books and movies - perhaps the moral aspect of whether the war was just or not is less important than the fact that war is a very fucked up experience.
Ooh, thanks for the comment! I was only familiar with From Here to Eternity, and looked up the other two. If I may try to expand and clarify my comment, absolutely, the trauma experienced in war can destroy the people, and it damages everybody. My grandfather, for example, served in the infantry in Italy, and, that’s all we know. He never talked about it to anybody that I know of. I’m talking about a particular kind of trauma and the way that people process it, which honestly, I can’t quite define, except to say that it’s the result of moral injury, and it’s part of the joke about Americans returning to the former war zone to make movies about how much killing people there traumatized them.
The summary of Whistle reinforces this, saying it’s about four wounded veterans and their struggles to adjust to life at home. A good example of the type of story that I’m talking about from WWII is Slaughterhouse Five, and the way that the destruction of Dresden affected Vonnegut so profoundly. I guess a undercurrent of guilt would be one of the defining elements.
All quiet on the western front is another non American book about essentially this same thing, too.