IN BITTER SAFETY I AWAKE

THE FIRST TIME I REALIZED I HAD A PROBLEM, I WAS in a subway station in New York City. It was almost a year before the attacks of 9/11 and I’d just come back from two months in Afghanistan with Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance. I had no appreciation for how that experience would affect me psychologically, and so I was completely unprepared for the aftermath. Massoud was fighting a desperate action to open up supply lines across the Amu Darya River before winter set in, and he was blocked by Taliban positions on a prominent ridge overlooking the Tajik border. Hundreds of Taliban troops were dug in with tanks and artillery and protected by a few MiG jets that were based at Taloqan. Al Qaeda’s infamous 055 commando brigade was up there, as well as volunteers from Uzbekistan and Chechnya, and Pakistani commanders who shouted over the radio in Urdu and berated the locals for not fighting hard enough.

Massoud’s men were outnumbered three to one and in short supply of everything from tank rounds to food. At one point I and the men I was with made our way to a frontline position that had just been taken from the Taliban and arrived in time for the inevitable counterattack. We curled up in the slit trenches and listened to rockets come screaming in and detonate against the packed-clay earth. The Northern Alliance had no artillery to speak of, so all we could do was stay down and wait for the Taliban to run out of rockets. We eventually managed to get out of there, though we lost one of our packhorses in the barrage. I felt deranged for days afterward, as if I’d lived through the end of the world.

By the time I got home, though, I’d stopped thinking about that or any of the other horrific things we’d seen—casualties from an infantry assault through a minefield, starving civilians, MiG jets circling us, looking for a place to drop their bombs. I mentally buried all of it until one day a few months later when I went into the subway at rush hour to catch the C train downtown. Suddenly I found myself backed up against an iron support column, convinced I was going to die. For some reason everything seemed like a threat: there were too many people on the platform, the trains were moving too fast, the lights were too bright, the world was too loud. I couldn’t really explain what was wrong, but I was more scared than I’d ever been in Afghanistan.

I stood there with my back to the column until I couldn’t take it anymore, and then I sprinted for the exit and walked home. The nation wasn’t at war yet, and I had no idea that what I’d just experienced had anything to do with combat; I just thought I was going crazy. For the next several months I kept having panic attacks whenever I was in a small place with too many people—airplanes, ski gondolas, bars. The incidents eventually stopped happening, and I didn’t think about it again until two or three years later, when I found myself at a family picnic, talking to a woman who worked as a psychotherapist. The United States had just invaded Iraq, and that may have been what prompted her to ask whether I’d been traumatized by the wars I’d covered. I told her that I didn’t think so, but that for a while I’d had panic attacks in crowded places. She nodded.

“That’s called post-traumatic stress disorder,” she said. “You’ll be hearing a lot more about that in the next few years.”

What I had was classic short-term PTSD. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s exactly the response you want to have when your life is in danger: you want to be vigilant, you want to avoid situations where you are not in control, you want to react to strange noises, you want to sleep lightly and wake easily, you want to have flashbacks and nightmares that remind you of specific threats to your life, and you want to be, by turns, angry and depressed. Anger keeps you ready to fight, and depression keeps you from being too active and putting yourself in more danger. Flashbacks also serve to remind you of the danger that’s out there—a “highly efficient single-event survival-learning mechanism,” as one researcher termed it. All humans react to trauma in this way, and most mammals do as well. It may be unpleasant, but it’s preferable to getting killed.

Like depression and grief, PTSD can be exacerbated by other factors but tends to diminish with time. My panic attacks eased up and eventually stopped, though a strange emotionality took their place. I found myself tearing up at things that I otherwise would have just smiled at or not noticed at all. Once, I got so emotional watching an elderly clerk doing her job at the post office that I had to walk out and come back later to send my mail. It happened in my sleep too: strange combat dreams that weren’t scary but somehow triggered a catastrophic outpouring of sorrow. Invariably I would wake up and just lie there in the dark, trying to figure out why feelings that seemed to belong to other people kept spilling out of me. I wasn’t a soldier—though I’d spent plenty of time with soldiers—and at that point I hadn’t lost any close friends in combat. And yet when I went to sleep, it was like I became part of some larger human experience that was utterly heartbreaking. It was far too much to acknowledge when I was awake.

I had a much older friend named Joanna who was very concerned about how I was faring psychologically after the wars I’d covered. Joanna died soon after I came back from one particularly long stint overseas, and I had almost no reaction to the news until I started talking to her nephew about the trips she’d taken during the early 1960s to register black voters in the South. People were getting killed for doing that, and I remember Joanna telling me that she and her husband, Ellis, never knew if she would make it back alive when she left on those trips. After a year of covering combat there was something about her willingness to die for others—for human dignity—that completely undid me. Stories about soldiers had the same effect on me: completely divorced from any sense of patriotism, accounts of great bravery could emotionally annihilate me. The human concern for others would seem to be the one story that, adequately told, no person can fully bear to hear.

Joanna’s husband, Ellis, was part Lakotah, part Apache, and had been born on a wagon in Missouri just before the Great Depression. He married Joanna when she was sixteen and he was twenty-five. I would go visit them on weekends when I was in college; Joanna would put me to work around their property until it got dark, and then the three of us would have dinner together. Afterward, Ellis and I would retreat to the living room to talk. He would smoke Carlton ultralights and drink cold coffee and tell me about the world, and I mostly just sat and listened. He seemed to have access to a kind of ancient human knowledge that completely transcended the odd, cloistered life that he was living in Connecticut when I met him. One of his favorite stories took place during some senseless war between the English and the French. At one point it was proposed that a lighthouse off the coast of France be destroyed by British warships to impede shipping and navigation.

“Sir,” an English admiral reminded the king, “we are at war with the French, not with the entire human race.”

If war were purely and absolutely bad in every single aspect and toxic in all its effects, it would probably not happen as often as it does. But in addition to all the destruction and loss of life, war also inspires ancient human virtues of courage, loyalty, and selflessness that can be utterly intoxicating to the people who experience them. Ellis’s story is affecting because it demonstrates war’s ability to ennoble people rather than just debase them. The Iroquois Nation presumably understood the transformative power of war when they developed parallel systems of government that protected civilians from warriors and vice versa. Peacetime leaders, called sachems, were often chosen by women and had complete authority over the civil affairs of the tribe until war broke out. At that point war leaders took over, and their sole concern was the physical survival of the tribe. They were not concerned with justice or harmony or fairness, they were concerned only with defeating the enemy. If the enemy tried to negotiate an end to hostilities, however, it was the sachems, not the war leaders, who made the final decision. If the offer was accepted, the war leaders stepped down so that the sachems could resume leadership of the tribe.

The Iroquois system reflected the radically divergent priorities that a society must have during peacetime and during war. Because modern society often fights wars far away from the civilian population, soldiers wind up being the only people who have to switch back and forth. Siegfried Sassoon, who was wounded in World War I, wrote a poem called “Sick Leave” that perfectly described the crippling alienation many soldiers feel at home: “In bitter safety I awake, unfriended,” he wrote. “And while the dawn begins with slashing rain / I think of the Battalion in the mud.”

Given the profound alienation of modern society, when combat vets say that they miss the war, they might be having an entirely healthy response to life back home. Iroquois warriors did not have to struggle with that sort of alienation because warfare and society existed in such close proximity that there was effectively no transition from one to the other. In addition, defeat meant that a catastrophic violence might be visited upon everyone they loved, and in that context, fighting to the death made complete sense from both an evolutionary and an emotional point of view. Certainly, some Iroquois warriors must have been traumatized by the warfare they were engaged in—much of it was conducted at close quarters with clubs and hatchets—but they didn’t have to contain that trauma within themselves. The entire society was undergoing wartime trauma, so it was a collective experience—and therefore an easier one.

A rapid recovery from psychological trauma must have been exceedingly important in our evolutionary past, and individuals who could climb out of their shock reaction and resume fleeing or fighting must have survived at higher rates than those who couldn’t. A 2011 study of street children in Burundi found the lowest PTSD rates among the most aggressive and violent children. Aggression seemed to buffer them from the effects of previous trauma that they had experienced. Because trauma recovery is greatly affected by social factors, and because it presumably had such high survival value in our evolutionary past, one way to evaluate the health of a society might be to look at how quickly its soldiers or warriors recover, psychologically, from the experience of combat.

Almost everyone exposed to trauma reacts by having some sort of short-term reaction to it—acute PTSD. That reaction clearly has evolved in mammals to keep them both reactive to danger and out of harm’s way until the threat has passed. Long-term PTSD, on the other hand—the kind that can last years or even a lifetime—is clearly maladaptive and relatively uncommon. Many studies have shown that in the general population, at most 20 percent of people who have been traumatized get long-term PTSD. Rather than being better prepared for extraordinary danger, these people become poorly adjusted to everyday life. Rape is one of the most psychologically devastating things that can happen to a person, for example—far more traumatizing than most military deployments—and according to a 1992 study, close to one hundred percent of rape survivors exhibited extreme trauma immediately afterward. And yet almost half of rape survivors experienced a significant decline in their trauma symptoms within weeks or months of their assault.

That is a far faster recovery rate than soldiers have exhibited in the recent wars America has fought. One of the reasons, paradoxically, is because the trauma of combat is interwoven with other, positive experiences that become difficult to separate from the harm. “Treating combat veterans is different from treating rape victims, because rape victims don’t have this idea that some aspects of their experience are worth retaining,” I was told by Dr. Rachel Yehuda, the director of traumatic stress studies at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Yehuda has studied PTSD in a wide range of people, including combat veterans and Holocaust survivors. “For most people in combat, their experiences range from the best of times to the worst of times. It’s the most important thing someone has ever done—especially since these people are so young when they go in—and it’s probably the first time they’ve ever been free, completely, of societal constraints. They’re going to miss being entrenched in this defining world.”

Except for sociopaths, one of the most traumatic events that a soldier can experience is witnessing harm to others—even to the enemy. In a survey carried out after the first Gulf War by David Marlowe, an anthropologist who later worked for the US Department of Defense, combat veterans reported that killing an enemy soldier, or even witnessing one getting killed, was more distressing than being wounded themselves. But the very worst experience, by far, was having a friend die. In war after war, army after army, losing a buddy is considered the most devastating thing that can possibly happen. It is far more disturbing than experiencing mortal danger oneself and often serves as a trigger for psychological breakdown on the battlefield or later in life.

Still, most soldiers go through that and other terrible experiences and don’t wind up with long-term trauma. Multiple studies, including a 2007 analysis from the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, found that a person’s chance of getting chronic PTSD is in great part a function of their experiences before going to war. Statistically, the 20 percent of people who fail to overcome trauma tend to be those who are already burdened by psychological issues, either because they inherited them or because they suffered abuse as children. If you fought in Vietnam and your twin brother did not—but he suffers from a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia—you are statistically more likely to get PTSD. If you experienced the death of a loved one, or if you weren’t held enough as a child, you are up to seven times more likely to develop the kinds of anxiety disorders that contribute to PTSD. According to a 2000 study in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, if you have an educational deficit, if you are female, if you have a low IQ, or if you were abused as a child, you are also at an elevated risk of developing PTSD. (The elevated risk for women is due to their greater likelihood of getting PTSD after a physical assault. For other forms of trauma, men and women are fairly equal.) These risk factors are nearly as predictive of PTSD as the severity of the trauma itself.

Suicide is often seen as an extreme expression of PTSD, but researchers have not yet found any relationship between suicide and combat. Combat veterans are, statistically, no more likely to kill themselves than veterans who were never under fire. The much-discussed estimate of twenty-two vets a day committing suicide in the United States is deceptive: it was only in 2008 that—for the first time in decades—the suicide rate among veterans surpassed the civilian rate in America, and though each death is enormously tragic, the majority of those veterans were over the age of fifty. Many were Vietnam vets and, generally speaking, the more time that passes after a trauma, the less likely a suicide is to have anything to do with it. Among younger vets, deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan actually lowers the risk of suicide, because soldiers with obvious mental health issues are not deployed with their units.

Further confusing the issue, voluntary service has resulted in a military population that has a disproportionate number of young people with a history of sexual abuse. One theory for this holds that military service is an easy way for young people to get out of their home, and so the military will disproportionally draw recruits from troubled families. According to a 2014 study in the American Medical Association’s JAMA Psychiatry, men with military service are now twice as likely to report sexual assault during their childhood as men who never served. This was not true during the draft. Sexual abuse is a well-known predictor of depression and other mental health issues, and the military suicide rate may in part be a result of that.

Killing seems to traumatize people regardless of the danger they’re in or the perceived righteousness of their cause. Pilots of unmanned drones, who watch their missiles kill human beings by remote camera, have been calculated to have the same PTSD rates as pilots who fly actual combat missions in war zones. And even among regular infantry, danger and trauma are not necessarily connected. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Israel was simultaneously invaded by Egypt and Syria, rear-base troops had psychological breakdowns at three times the rate of elite frontline troops, relative to the casualties they suffered. (In other words, rear-base troops had fairly light casualties but suffered a disproportionately high level of psychiatric breakdowns.) Similarly, more than 80 percent of psychiatric casualties in the US Army’s VII Corps came from support units that took almost no incoming fire during the air campaign of the first Gulf War.

The discrepancy might be due to the fact that intensive training and danger create what is known as unit cohesion—strong emotional bonds within the company or the platoon—and high unit cohesion is correlated with lower rates of psychiatric breakdown. During World War II, American airborne units had some of the lowest psychiatric casualty rates of the entire US military, relative to their number of wounded. The same is true for armies in other countries: Sri Lankan special forces experience far more combat than line troops, and yet in 2010 they were found to suffer from significantly lower rates of both physical and mental health issues. (The one mental health issue they led everyone else in was “hazardous drinking.”) And Israeli commanders suffered four times the mortality rate of their men during the Yom Kippur War, yet had one-fifth the rate of psychological breakdown on the battlefield.

All this is a new way to think about battlefield trauma, however. For most of America’s history, psychological breakdown on the battlefield, as well as impairment afterward, has been written off to neuroses, shell shock, or simple cowardice. When men have failed to obey orders due to trauma, they have been beaten, imprisoned, “treated” with electrocution, or simply shot as a warning to others. It was not until after the Vietnam War that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) listed combat trauma as an official diagnosis. Tens of thousands of vets were struggling with “post-Vietnam syndrome”—nightmares, insomnia, addiction, paranoia—and their struggle could no longer be written off to weakness or personal failings. Obviously, these problems could also affect war reporters, cops, firemen, or anyone else subjected to trauma. In 1980, the APA finally included post-traumatic stress disorder in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Thirty-five years after finally acknowledging the problem, the US military now has the highest reported PTSD rate in its history—and probably in the world. American soldiers appear to suffer PTSD at around twice the rate of British soldiers who were in combat with them. The United States currently spends more than $4 billion annually in disability compensation for PTSD, most of which will continue for the entire lifetime of these veterans. Horrific experiences are unfortunately a human universal, but long-term impairment from them is not, and despite billions of dollars spent on treatment, roughly half of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have applied for permanent PTSD disability. Since only 10 percent of our armed forces experience actual combat, the majority of vets claiming to suffer from PTSD seem to have been affected by something other than direct exposure to danger.

This is not a new phenomenon: decade after decade and war after war, American combat deaths have generally dropped while disability claims have risen. Most disability claims are for medical issues and should decline with casualty rates and combat intensity, but they don’t. They are in an almost inverse relationship with one another. Soldiers in Vietnam suffered one-quarter the mortality rate of troops in World War II, for example, but filed for both physical and psychological disability compensation at a rate that was 50 percent higher. It’s tempting to attribute that to the toxic reception they had at home, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Today’s vets claim three times the number of disabilities that Vietnam vets did, despite a generally warm reception back home and a casualty rate that, thank God, is roughly one-third what it was in Vietnam. Today, most disability claims are for hearing loss, tinnitus, and PTSD—the latter two of which can be imagined, exaggerated, or even faked.

Part of the problem is bureaucratic: in an effort to speed up access to benefits, in 2010 the Veterans Administration declared that soldiers no longer have to cite a specific incident—a firefight, a roadside bomb—in order to be eligible for disability compensation. They simply had to claim “a credible fear of being attacked” during deployment. As with welfare and other so-called “entitlement” programs, a less rigorous definition of need—though well-intentioned—may have produced a system that is vulnerable to error or fraud. Self-reporting of PTSD by veterans has been found to lead to a misdiagnosis rate as high as 50 percent. A recent investigation by the VA Office of Inspector General found that the higher a veteran’s PTSD disability rating, the more treatment he or she tends to seek until achieving a rating of 100 percent, at which point treatment visits plummet and many vets quit completely. (A 100 percent disability rating entitles a veteran to a tax-free income of around $3,000 a month.) In theory, the most traumatized people should be seeking more help, not less. Investigators reluctantly came to the conclusion that some vets were getting treatment simply to raise their disability rating and claim more compensation.

In addition to being an enormous waste of taxpayer money, misdiagnosis does real harm to vets who truly need help. One Veterans Administration counselor I spoke with, who asked to remain anonymous, described having to physically protect someone in a PTSD support group because other vets wanted to beat him up for seeming to fake his trauma. This counselor said that many combat veterans actively avoid the VA because they worry about losing their temper around patients who they think are milking the system. “It’s the real deals—the guys who have seen the most—that this tends to bother,” he told me.

The vast majority of traumatized vets are not faking their symptoms, however. They return from wars that are safer than those their fathers and grandfathers fought, and yet far greater numbers of them wind up alienated and depressed. This is true even for people who didn’t experience combat. In other words, the problem doesn’t seem to be trauma on the battlefield so much as reentry into society. And vets are not alone in this. It’s common knowledge in the Peace Corps that as stressful as life in a developing country can be, returning to a modern country can be far harder. One study found that one in four Peace Corps volunteers reported experiencing significant depression after their return home, and that figure more than doubled for people who had been evacuated from their host country during wartime or some other kind of emergency.

Studies from around the world show that recovery from war—from any trauma—is heavily influenced by the society one belongs to, and there are societies that make that process relatively easy. Modern society does not seem to be one of them. Among American vets, if one weeds out obviously exaggerated trauma on the one hand and deep trauma on the other, there are still enormous numbers of people who had utterly ordinary wartime experiences and yet feel dangerously alienated back home. Clinically speaking, such alienation is not the same as PTSD—and maybe deserves its own diagnostic term—but both result from military service abroad, so it’s understandable that vets and clinicians alike are prone to conflating them. Either way, it makes one wonder exactly what it is about modern society that is so mortally dispiriting to come home to.

Any discussion of veterans and their common experience of alienation must address the fact that so many soldiers find themselves missing the war after it’s over. That troubling fact can be found in written accounts from war after war, country after country, century after century. As awkward as it is to say, part of the trauma of war seems to be giving it up. “For the first time in [our] lives… we were in a tribal sort of situation where we could help each other without fear,” a former gunner in the 62nd Coast Artillery named Win Stracke told oral historian Studs Terkel for his book The Good War. (Stracke was also a well-known folk singer and labor organizer who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era for his political activity.) “There were fifteen men to a gun. You had fifteen guys who for the first time in their lives were not living in a competitive society. We had no hopes of becoming officers. I liked that feeling very much… It was the absence of competition and boundaries and all those phony standards that created the thing I loved about the Army.”

Adversity often leads people to depend more on one another, and that closeness can produce a kind of nostalgia for the hard times that even civilians are susceptible to. After World War II, many Londoners claimed to miss the exciting and perilous days of the Blitz (“I wouldn’t mind having an evening like it, say, once a week—ordinarily there’s no excitement,” one man commented to Mass-Observation about the air raids), and the war that is missed doesn’t even have to be a shooting war: “I am a survivor of the AIDS epidemic,” an American man wrote in 2014 on the comment board of an online lecture about war. “Now that AIDS is no longer a death sentence, I must admit that I miss those days of extreme brotherhood… which led to deep emotions and understandings that are above anything I have felt since the plague years.”

What people miss presumably isn’t danger or loss but the unity that these things often engender. There are obvious stresses on a person in a group, but there may be even greater stresses on a person in isolation, so during disasters there is a net gain in well-being. Most primates, including humans, are intensely social, and there are very few instances of lone primates surviving in the wild. A modern soldier returning from combat—or a survivor of Sarajevo—goes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good. Even if he or she is part of a family, that is not the same as belonging to a group that shares resources and experiences almost everything collectively. Whatever the technological advances of modern society—and they’re nearly miraculous—the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.

“You’ll have to be prepared to say that we are not a good society—that we are an antihuman society,” anthropologist Sharon Abramowitz warned when I tried this idea out on her. Abramowitz was in Ivory Coast as a Peace Corps volunteer during the start of the civil war in 2002 and experienced firsthand the extremely close bonds created by hardship and danger. “We are not good to each other. Our tribalism is to an extremely narrow group of people: our children, our spouse, maybe our parents. Our society is alienating, technical, cold, and mystifying. Our fundamental desire, as human beings, is to be close to others, and our society does not allow for that.”

One of the most noticeable things about life in the military, even in support units, is that you are almost never alone. Day after day, month after month, you are close enough to speak to, if not touch, a dozen or more people. When I was with American soldiers at a remote outpost in Afghanistan, we slept ten to a hut in bunks that were only a few feet apart. I could touch three other men with my outstretched hand from where I lay. They snored, they talked, they got up in the middle of the night to use the piss tubes, but we always felt safe because we were in a group. The outpost was attacked dozens of times, yet I slept better surrounded by those noisy, snoring men than I ever did camping alone in the woods of New England.

That kind of group sleeping has been the norm throughout human history and is still commonplace in most of the world. Northern European societies are among the few where people sleep alone or with a partner in a private room, and that may have significant implications for mental health in general and for PTSD in particular. Virtually all mammals seem to benefit from companionship; even lab rats recover more quickly from trauma if they are caged with other rats rather than alone. In humans, lack of social support has been found to be twice as reliable at predicting PTSD as the severity of the trauma itself. In other words, you could be mildly traumatized—on a par with, say, an ordinary rear-base deployment to Afghanistan—and experience long-term PTSD simply because of a lack of social support back home.

Anthropologist Brandon Kohrt found a similar phenomenon in the villages of southern Nepal, where a civil war has been rumbling for years. There are two kinds of villages in that area: exclusively Hindu ones that have sharp class distinctions, and mixed Hindu and Buddhist ones that are far more open and cohesive. Child soldiers of either sex who went back to stratified villages could remain traumatized almost indefinitely, while those who returned to more communal villages tended to recover fairly quickly. “Some had trauma rates that were no different from children that had not gone to war at all,” Kohrt told me about those ex-combatants. “PTSD is a disorder of recovery, and if treatment only focuses on identifying symptoms, it pathologizes and alienates vets. But if the focus is on family and community, it puts them in a situation of collective healing.”

Israel is arguably the only modern country that retains a sufficient sense of community to mitigate the effects of combat on a mass scale. Despite decades of intermittent war, the Israel Defense Forces have by some measures a PTSD rate as low as 1 percent. Two of the foremost reasons may have to do with the proximity of the combat—the war is virtually on their doorstep—and national military service. “Being in the military is something that most people have done,” I was told by Dr. Arieh Shalev, who has devoted the last twenty years to studying PTSD. “Those who come back from combat are reintegrated into a society where those experiences are very well understood. We did a study of seventeen-year-olds who had lost their father in the military, compared to those who had lost their fathers to accidents. The ones whose fathers died in combat did much better than those whose fathers hadn’t.”

According to Shalev, the closer the public is to the actual combat, the better the war will be understood and the less difficulty soldiers will have when they come home. During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, many Israeli soldiers were fighting on the Golan Heights with their homes at their backs. Of the 1,323 soldiers who were wounded in that war and referred for psychiatric evaluation, only around 20 percent were diagnosed with PTSD, and less than 2 percent retained that diagnosis three decades later. The Israelis are benefiting from what the author and ethicist Austin Dacey describes as a “shared public meaning” of the war. Shared public meaning gives soldiers a context for their losses and their sacrifice that is acknowledged by most of the society. That helps keep at bay the sense of futility and rage that can develop among soldiers during a war that doesn’t seem to end.

Such public meaning is probably not generated by the kinds of formulaic phrases, such as “Thank you for your service,” that many Americans now feel compelled to offer soldiers and vets. Neither is it generated by honoring vets at sporting events, allowing them to board planes first, or giving them minor discounts at stores. If anything, these token acts only deepen the chasm between the military and civilian populations by highlighting the fact that some people serve their country but the vast majority don’t. In Israel, where around half of the population serves in the military, reflexively thanking someone for their service makes as little sense as thanking them for paying their taxes. It doesn’t cross anyone’s mind.

Because modern society has almost completely eliminated trauma and violence from everyday life, anyone who does suffer those things is deemed to be extraordinarily unfortunate. This gives people access to sympathy and resources but also creates an identity of victimhood that can delay recovery. Anthropologist Danny Hoffman, who studied Mende tribal combatants both during and after civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, found that international relief organizations introduced the idea of victimhood to combatants who until then had rarely, if ever, thought of themselves in those terms. “The language of ‘I am a victim too’ did not originate from the combatants themselves,” Hoffman told me. “[Aid organizations] would come in and say, ‘This is how you’re supposed to be feeling… and if you do, then you’ll have access to food supplies and training.’”

In such a poor society, food donations and job training gave an enormous advantage to ex-combatants. The consequence, Hoffman told me, was that ex-combatants were incentivized to see themselves as victims rather than as perpetrators. These people committed terrible acts of violence during their wars, and many of them felt enormously guilty about it, but they were never able to work through those feelings because their victim status eclipsed more accurate and meaningful understandings of violence. Mende combatants often described combat as something that makes the heart “heat up,” transforming a fighter to the point where he is thought to have literally become someone else. In that state he is capable of both great courage and great cruelty. Such a state of hyperarousal is familiar to many soldiers or athletes and has a firm basis in the neurobiology of the brain. For the Mende, it means that the moral excesses of the battlefield don’t necessarily have to be brought home.

I was in both Liberia and Sierra Leone during those wars, and the combatants who had a “hot heart” were unmistakable. They wore amulets and magical charms and acted as if they were possessed, deliberately running into gunfire and dancing while firing their weapons to prove how brave they were. Other people’s lives didn’t seem to matter to them because their own lives didn’t seem to matter to them. They were true nihilists, and that made them the most terrifying human beings I’ve ever encountered. According to Hoffman, even highly traumatized ex-combatants such as these could have been reincorporated into Mende society if indigenous concepts like the “hot heart” had been applied. Their classification as victims, however—with the attendant perks and benefits common to Western society—made their reintegration much harder.

The civil war in nearby Ivory Coast unfolded in much the same way, although relief organizations had less access to combatants afterward. “In tribal cultures, combat can be part of the maturation process,” I was told by Sharon Abramowitz, who was in Ivory Coast with the Peace Corps in 2002. “When youth return from combat, their return is seen as integral to their own society—they don’t feel like outsiders. In the United States we valorize our vets with words and posters and signs, but we don’t give them what’s really important to Americans, what really sets you apart as someone who is valuable to society—we don’t give them jobs. All the praise in the world doesn’t mean anything if you’re not recognized by society as someone who can contribute valuable labor.”

Anthropologists like Kohrt, Hoffman, and Abramowitz have identified three factors that seem to crucially affect a combatant’s transition back into civilian life. The United States seems to rank low on all three. First, cohesive and egalitarian tribal societies do a very good job at mitigating the effects of trauma, but by their very nature, many modern societies are exactly the opposite: hierarchical and alienating. America’s great wealth, although a blessing in many ways, has allowed for the growth of an individualistic society that suffers high rates of depression and anxiety. Both are correlated with chronic PTSD.

Secondly, ex-combatants shouldn’t be seen—or be encouraged to see themselves—as victims. One can be deeply traumatized, as firemen are by the deaths of both colleagues and civilians, without being viewed through the lens of victimhood. Lifelong disability payments for a disorder like PTSD, which is both treatable and usually not chronic, risks turning veterans into a victim class that is entirely dependent on the government for their livelihood. The United States is a wealthy country that may be able to afford this, but in human terms, the veterans can’t. The one way that soldiers are never allowed to see themselves during deployment is as victims, because the passivity of victimhood can get them killed. It’s yelled, beaten, and drilled out of them long before they get close to the battlefield. But when they come home they find themselves being viewed so sympathetically that they’re often excused from having to fully function in society. Some of them truly can’t function, and those people should be taken care of immediately; but imagine how confusing it must be to the rest of them.

Perhaps most important, veterans need to feel that they’re just as necessary and productive back in society as they were on the battlefield. Iroquois warriors who dominated just about every tribe within 500 miles of their home territory would return to a community that still needed them to hunt and fish and participate in the fabric of everyday life. There was no transition when they came home because—much like in Israel—the battlefield was an extension of society, and vice versa. Recent studies of something called “social resilience” have identified resource sharing and egalitarian wealth distribution as major components of a society’s ability to recover from hardship. And societies that rank high on social resilience—such as kibbutz settlements in Israel—provide soldiers with a significantly stronger buffer against PTSD than low-resilience societies. In fact, social resilience is an even better predictor of trauma recovery than the level of resilience of the person himself.

Unfortunately, for the past decade American soldiers have returned to a country that displays many indicators of low social resilience. Resources are not shared equally, a quarter of children live in poverty, jobs are hard to get, and minimum wage is almost impossible to live on. Instead of being able to work and contribute to society—a highly therapeutic thing to do—a large percentage of veterans are just offered lifelong disability payments. And they accept, of course—why shouldn’t they? A society that doesn’t distinguish between degrees of trauma can’t expect its warriors to, either.