The combat environment, according to Jonathan Shay, generates “psychologically catastrophic conditions” that can break a soldier.1 Eric Bergerud agrees: “The interaction between fear, stress, exhaustion, and illness created a dreadful dynamic that threatened to break the spirit of fighting men.”2 Despite their best efforts to cope with war’s catastrophic conditions, some soldiers “couldn’t take it any more” and broke down, ran away, or inflicted wounds on themselves to escape combat.
That soldiers could break down psychologically from the stresses of combat first became widely recognized during World War I, when such breakdowns were called “shell shock.” By the end of World War I, shell shock had been replaced by “war neurosis” and “psychoneurosis,” which gave way during World War II to “combat exhaustion” and then “combat fatigue.” Combat fatigue remained in use through the Vietnam War but was supplemented by terms such as “combat reaction.”
These shifts in terminology were more than just a semantics drill. The chosen term reflected the catalyst that psychiatrists considered to be the primary cause for breakdown, and this cause, in turn, conferred or denied legitimacy. Shell shock, for example, reflected the belief early in World War I that soldiers broke down because of the physiological effects of concussion from shelling. Because the soldier had no control over the enemy’s artillery, breakdown from shell shock was legitimate, according to Albert J. Glass: “Members of the combat . . . group, including commanders and medical officers, could readily understand and accept ‘shell shock’ as a direct consequence of unavoidable events of battle which might happen to anyone.”3
Terminology was important for another reason as well. Soldiers who broke down tended to display the symptoms appropriate to the recognized cause, because subconsciously they wanted their exit from combat to be accepted.4 Shell-shocked soldiers therefore displayed symptoms of concussion. By the time America entered World War I, doctors had largely discounted concussion as a cause of breakdown, but the term “shell shock” nevertheless remained common to the vernacular. Descriptions in the memoirs of doughboys who broke down thus refer to enemy shelling as the cause and concussion as the effect. Sergeant Merritt D. Cutler, in describing shell shock to oral historian Henry Berry decades after the war, still attributed its occurrence to shelling: “Most of the shell-shock victims of World War I weren’t what we’d call today battle fatigue. Real shell shock was the actual scrambling of a man’s brain by concussion. If you’ve ever seen a man actually lose his wits through shelling, you’d never forget it. The poor guys became jibbering idiots.”5
In reality, concussion cases were rare. Many doughboys came to realize, as did the doctors, that psychological problems were the real cause of breakdown. Sergeant Earl Goldsmith learned that after months of hard fighting, some men just could not take any more: “Some of our lads . . . just snapped. I can think of one man in particular. He went through all those fights we had in July and August [1918]. Then he finally collapsed. . . . Why, the poor guy just sat down and started to bawl like a baby.”6
By war’s end, the term “war neurosis” had replaced shell shock because it reflected psychological rather than physiological causes for breakdown. “War neurosis” and “psychoneurosis” were the terms in use when American soldiers next engaged in serious ground combat in North Africa in World War II. Unfortunately, psychoneurosis implied a personality defect as the primary cause for breakdown, hence psycho cases, as they were inevitably nicknamed, were not always viewed as legitimate casualties. As Glass explains it, “With such labeling and connotation of psychopathology, psychiatric casualties were not accepted by the combat group as being the result of battle conditions. Rather, they were considered to be weaker or predisposed individuals.”7
Not surprisingly, commanders and even medical personnel sometimes considered these casualties cowards, or at least morally deficient individuals, as evidenced by the notorious incidents in which General George S. Patton Jr. slapped “cowardly” psychiatric patients.8 Furthermore, psycho casualties unconsciously adopted the symptoms proper for the cause, which reinforced the appearance of character deficiencies: “Many psychiatric casualties from the Tunisia fighting were described as manifesting dramatic and bizarre reactions . . . which seemed to portray the fearful plight of the individual unable to cope with battle conditions.”9 These casualties exhibited terror states, gross tremors, severe startle reactions, mutism, and catatonic-like syndromes.10
The belief in character disorders as the main cause of breakdown came into question as the fighting progressed. Much like the case described by Sergeant Goldsmith, GIs who had performed bravely under fire for weeks or even months began to snap. Roy R. Grinker and John P. Spiegel, serving in North Africa, began to notice that soldiers with no prior indication of character disorders were breaking down. They concluded that external factors must be as important as character flaws, or perhaps more important: “As in the etiology of any neurosis, constitutional factors and the individual’s life history, including the genetic background of his personality, are very important. Yet many observers have given these factors undue weight. The realities of war, including the nature of army ‘society,’ and traumatic stimuli, cooperate to produce a potential war neurosis in every soldier.”11
In May 1943 the terminology changed from “psychoneurosis” to “exhaustion,” and eventually to “combat exhaustion” or “combat fatigue,” to emphasize these external factors.12 Glass notes that this new term reestablished the legitimacy of breakdowns: “‘Exhaustion’ was readily accepted by both psychiatric casualties and the combat reference group. . . . Almost all combat personnel could appreciate that anyone could become exhausted by the stress and strain of continued battle.”13
This shift in terminology again stimulated a shift in symptoms. The often hysterical psycho casualty was joined by the shaky, “burned-out,” battle-fatigued soldier. The correspondent Richard Tregaskis describes a lieutenant he knew who ended up in a hospital in Italy suffering from exhaustion: “He looked lost. His eyes were sunken; his chin and neck jerked nervously in spasms, like a turtle’s head poking out of its shell. But he recognized me, and confided, ‘It’s the Goddamnedest feeling. I can’t sleep, and I can’t rest. I can’t stop the jitters.’”14
“Combat fatigue” continued as the accepted term in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. It was common in the Korean War, especially in the first year or so, but the sporadic nature of the fighting in Vietnam, though intense on occasion, did not generate many cases of classic combat fatigue of the type brought on by long-term exposure to constant fighting. Military psychiatrists in Vietnam did see cases, however, of psychiatric casualties in response to short but intense combat, often coupled with a traumatic event such as the loss of a comrade or trusted leader. One psychiatrist dubbed this phenomenon “combat reaction.”15 Some psychiatrists returned to the issue of personality, attributing most Vietnam War psychiatric breakdowns to “character and behavior disorders.” One psychiatrist called it “pseudo-combat fatigue” because these casualties exhibited symptoms of classic combat fatigue, but in reality they suffered from various “personality disorders.”16
The sum of experience in four wars was that external factors generated internal stresses and anxieties—Bergerud’s “dreadful dynamic”—that led to a soldier’s breakdown. In some cases, character or behavior flaws hastened the process. How many soldiers broke down as a result of this dreadful dynamic? No one can be certain. Men with physical ailments were sometimes misdiagnosed as combat-fatigue cases, or vice versa. Commanders occasionally abused the combat-fatigue category to get rid of malcontents or soldiers with drug or alcohol problems. Conversely, some commanders tried to minimize the number of reported cases of psychiatric casualties because a high rate might be construed as an indicator of morale and leadership problems. Further, combat-fatigue cases treated at the lowest levels often did not make it into any statistical count. Some soldiers broke down more than once and hence were double counted. Moreover, there is the issue of “deferred” casualties—soldiers or veterans who broke down only after leaving combat.17 Whatever the actual number of psychiatric casualties, it is safe to say, as Richard A. Gabriel does, that it was significant: “In every war in which American soldiers have fought in this century the chances of becoming a psychiatric casualty—of being debilitated for some period of time as a consequence of the stresses of military life—were greater than the chances of being killed by enemy fire. The only exception was the Vietnam War, where the chances were almost equal.”18
The extent of the problem becomes even more significant if Gabriel’s criterion of debilitation “for some period of time” is liberally interpreted. Many soldiers suffered what Bergerud calls “transient breakdown”: “A death of a friend, an ugly firefight, or a host of other things could trigger momentary loss of will. Sometimes friends helped men through dark hours, sometimes they worked it through themselves.”19 These cases varied from a panic of short duration to an emotionally and physically exhausted soldier who just needed a few days’ rest.20
For a panicking soldier, a few sharp words or a slap in the face might suffice to bring him around. In the midst of an attack in World War II, Lieutenant George William Sefton discovered the artillery forward observer “cowering face down in the ditch.”21 Knowing his company needed fire support, Sefton proceeded to motivate him: “My heated verbal suggestions that he get on with his job proved ineffective, but an unrestrained kick in the butt restored his devotion to duty.”22
Sometimes the transient breakdown took more than a few sharp words or a kick in the pants to overcome. Private Roscoe C. Blunt Jr. lost his nerve during an intense barrage in World War II. He jumped out of his foxhole and began running around in the midst of the shelling, cursing the Germans. His ever-faithful companion Everett forcibly dragged him back to cover. After the barrage ended, Blunt remembered nothing about his actions. His commander had him evacuated for several days’ rest, after which Blunt felt fine and returned to his unit.23
During a botched night ambush in Vietnam, Lieutenant James R. McDonough was almost killed by a burst of machine-gun fire from his own men, who had mistakenly turned their gun to point inside their ambush position. McDonough lay in the dirt where he had dropped for cover: “A few moments earlier I had been an effective platoon leader doing his job. Now I could actually feel my chest throbbing against the dirt where I lay. . . . I could not think. My body began to tremble, then shiver, then shake uncontrollably.”24 He continued to lie in the same spot, too scared to move, even though he was attacked by an ant colony and then drenched in a monsoon downpour. Only at dawn did he regain control of his shattered nerves.
EVERYONE HAS HIS BREAKING POINT
At what point does temporary panic or short-term breakdown qualify as combat fatigue? The difficulty in answering this question illustrates why statistics on the occurrence of combat fatigue are suspect. A more useful way of thinking about combat fatigue is to accept what the soldiers themselves came to understand—everyone has his breaking point. A man may have personality traits that make him susceptible to anxiety and breakdown, but no soldier is immune, as the World War II military correspondent Ralph G. Martin notes, “Every man has his breaking point. You can hear just so many shells, see just so many torn bodies, fear just so much fear, soak just so much rain, spend just so many sleepless nights.”25
Doughboys and their psychiatrists were the first soldiers of the draft era to appreciate that every man had his breaking point. John H. W. Rhein, in examining 320 cases of breakdown among doughboys, found that less than half had any previous history of nervous disorders or phobias. The combat environment was the main culprit: “The experiences at the front in combat were so intense, so strenuous and so exhausting that one acquired in a short time a state of nervous instability which in civil life would require months or years to bring about.”26
Sergeant Bob Hoffman describes what just five days of heavy fighting for the French town of Fismette did to his company: “Men began to go out of their heads—shell shocked if you could call it that, or just crazy from weakness, strain, suffering and hunger, with death all around them.”27 Lieutenant Joseph D. Lawrence and his company were in equally bad shape after four days of continuous combat in the Meuse-Argonne: “Many of our men were showing signs of cracking under the strain. We had been under continuous shellfire, rifle and machine-gun fire, gassing, attacks by planes, no food, and only what muddy rainwater we could get from holes in the ground. It was drizzling rain and cold, the men were wet to the skin, cold, hungry, thirsty, some of them frightened, many sick from the gas, all in dread of the never-ceasing, screaming, crashing shells. The strain was terrible.”28 After nine days of combat, Lawrence’s company was finally relieved by another outfit. Such breaks in the action allowed for sorely needed rest, but they provided only temporary reprieves. Over time, a soldier’s bank account of courage, to use Lieutenant Paul Fussell’s analogy, was spent: “We came to understand what more have known than spoken of, that normally each man begins with a certain full reservoir, or bank account, of bravery, but that each time it’s called upon, some is expended, never to be regained. After several months it has all been expended, and it’s time for your breakdown.”29
The deeper and longer the soldier was immersed in the environment of war, the more it wore him down. Finally, often after some sort of last straw, or “precipitating shock” as the World War I psychiatrist Frederick W. Parsons called it, the soldier broke down: “His chum is killed by his side; his officer is wounded in a particularly distressing manner; or, being detailed to escort walking wounded to the dressing-station, he is shocked by what he sees.”30 The World War II psychiatrists Roy L. Swank and Walter E. Marchand also observed how a final traumatic event often pushed a soldier over the edge: “A soldier with combat exhaustion usually continued in battle until he was exposed to an acute and severe ‘incident,’ such as a ‘near miss’ from artillery or mortar fire or a heavy artillery barrage. In many instances a close friend was . . . killed before ‘his very eyes.’ This usually provoked a violent emotional explosion.”31
Raymond Sobel, a division psychiatrist in World War II, called this process of deterioration “Old Sergeant Syndrome,” because it happened to seasoned veterans who broke down after months of satisfactory, even distinguished, combat service. These soldiers had lost confidence in their martial and leadership skills, had long since abandoned any illusions that “it couldn’t happen to them,” were nervous and physically run down, and no longer felt close to a primary group that by then contained few of their old comrades: “Being unable or disinclined to form permanent attachments to new men, the ‘Old Sergeants’ found themselves running on depleted reserves.”32 Despite the group’s overall ability to form new bonds as its composition changed, some veteran soldiers did not want the pain of new ties that would again be broken by death or injury.
The memoirs provide examples of veteran soldiers who just couldn’t take it any more. Lieutenant Paul Boesch describes how his predecessor in command of G Company, Captain Black, broke down in the midst of the fighting in the Huertgen Forest after two of his sergeants were killed and his executive officer lost his leg to a mine: “‘Why did it happen to them?’ he cried. He dropped his head in his hands and began to sob. ‘Why didn’t it happen to me? McCarthy gets both his legs blown off. Men get killed and wounded all around me. Those two sergeants were with me ever since I got here. I made them sergeants. Now they’re dead. Joe loses his leg. Why doesn’t it happen to me?’”33
Often when a veteran like Captain Black finally broke, he lost all ability to function. After weeks of heavy fighting on Okinawa, a seasoned marine in Eugene B. Sledge’s outfit snapped. While under heavy enemy fire, “suddenly he began babbling incoherently, grabbed his rifle, and shouted, ‘Those slant-eyed yellow bastards, they’ve killed enougha my buddies. I’m goin’ after em.’ He jumped up and started for the crest of the ridge.” Sledge and a nearby sergeant managed to drag the marine back to cover, undoubtedly saving his life, and turned the sobbing, trembling man over to the corpsmen. The broken marine had fought bravely in two previous campaigns. The sergeant summed it up: “He’s a damn good Marine. . . . I’ll lower the boom on anybody says he ain’t. But he’s just had all he can take. That’s it. He’s just had all he can take.”34
During the heavy fighting in the first year of the Korean War, before the rotation system was established, veteran combatants broke down much like Sobel’s “old sergeants.” A forward observer, Sergeant Thomas Randell, sent to support a rifle company, encountered an old acquaintance named Blackburn, who by March 1951 had been in Korea for about seven months and was one of the few survivors of the original complement: “We talked for a while, and he told me about his friends, now all dead or wounded.” During the ensuing battle, a rifle grenade landed next to him but failed to explode: “This was one close call too many for poor Blackburn, who took one look at the unexploded grenade lying next to us and completely cracked up. The man had reached his breaking point, then gone beyond it.” Until that moment, Blackburn had been a “fine and dependable soldier,” according to his company commander, but the “burden had become just too heavy to bear.”35
Psychiatric casualties of the Old Sergeant Syndrome type declined sharply in the late stages of the Korean War and during the Vietnam War, in part because of the reduced intensity of the fighting, but also because of the hope for escape from combat provided by rotation.36 Nonetheless, some soldiers still broke down after too much combat. Lieutenant Philip Caputo, who served for a while as his regiment’s casualty reporting officer during his tour in Vietnam, noticed the rise in psychiatric casualties in his old battalion after months of combat: “The war was beginning to take a psychological toll. . . . The phrases acute anxiety reaction and acute depressive reaction started to appear on the sick-and-injured reports. . . . I noticed, in myself and in other men, a tendency to fall into black, gloomy moods and then to explode out of them in fits of bitterness and rage. It was partly caused by grief, grief over the deaths of friends.”37
Soldiers and psychiatrists thus came to understand that everyone had his breaking point. The only debatable issue was how long this breakdown process took for the average soldier. Swank and Marchand, in their study of infantry soldiers in the Normandy campaign in World War II, noticed that symptoms of “emotional exhaustion” began to appear after forty to forty-five days of combat. GIs became mentally slow, listless, and tremulous. If not soon treated, then they would break down completely after a final triggering event or would sink into a “vegetative existence.”38 The psychiatrist John W. Appel and the medical statistician Gilbert W. Beebe estimated that infantrymen in North Africa in World War II broke down after 200 to 240 aggregate days of combat.39 The Research Branch surveyed infantry divisions in Italy in World War II and found that the breakdown rate increased after nine months in the combat zone.40
There are differences in these time estimates because Swank and Marchand are considering continuous days of combat; Appel and Beebe look at aggregate days, and the Research Branch simply considers time in the combat zone. Exposure to continuous combat without breaks in the action precipitated breakdowns. Furthermore, the more intense that combat, the sooner soldiers broke down. The violent Pacific island campaigns in World War II, for example, although of short duration, produced cases of Old Sergeant Syndrome long before the soldier made it to the rank of sergeant.41 As Lieutenant Gerald P. Averill put it, Iwo Jima was “a hell of a place to get snapped in,” referring to a novice marine’s first exposure to combat.42 Private Allen R. Matthews was one of those marines who got “snapped in” on Iwo Jima. After twelve days of continuous fighting, he was the only one left from his original squad. He could no longer function physically or mentally and was evacuated to a hospital ship. Matthews describes his condition: “I was tired. My muscles ached and my joints hurt and I could not co-ordinate my mind and my actions. . . . My mind and my body seemed disconnected, as if they were standing apart one from the other, each glaring at the other in impotent confusion.”43
In extreme conditions of danger and hardship, soldiers could wear out in a matter of weeks rather than months. But what about the men who broke down after a few hours in combat, or even before reaching the front? Some soldiers cracked long before the brutal environment of war had a chance to do its worst. Indeed, the occurrence of psychiatric casualties even before doughboys were in harm’s way was a reason for ruling out shell shock as the cause of all breakdowns. John F. W. Meagher saw numerous “cases suffering from neuroses who never reached a position nearer the firing line than Liverpool [England].”44
Soldiers broke early in World War II as well. While some soldiers looked forward to their first combat with naive eagerness, Ernie Pyle noticed that others were overwhelmed by anxiety: “I suppose the anticipation during the few days before a man’s first battle is one of the worst ordeals in a lifetime. Now and then a soldier would crack up before he ever went into action.”45 Private Lester Atwell, who worked in his battalion’s aid station, saw men who cracked up almost immediately: “Different men had different breaking points. . . . Some with the best of intentions . . . would go to pieces in the first big attack, perhaps in its first five minutes.”46
Ironically, and tragically, some green soldiers were so overwhelmed by their fear of combat that they committed suicide. General Mark W. Clark, as a young captain and infantry company commander in World War I, discovered a man missing on the morning the company was to move to the front: “The poor devil, he just didn’t want to go. He’d deserted just before we left New York, but I’d had him sent over on the next boat. . . . Of course, we all felt he’d gone AWOL again, but we were wrong—he’d walked over to the woods and blown his brains out.”47
The rotation system established in the Korean and Vietnam Wars was a significant factor in reducing long-term, or classic, combat fatigue, but some soldiers still broke down early in their tours of duty.48 Matthew Brennan described his new platoon sergeant as a tall, nervous man in his forties who “had spent the last four years [serving] in Italy, doing everything in his power to stay out of Vietnam.”49 The sergeant fell apart in his first firefight. Brennan found him hiding under a helicopter tail boom, “shaking and talking to himself.”50
Seeing a man go to pieces even before the first incoming shell or curl up in a ball and shiver during his first firefight sharply impressed on the soldier that he had more to fear than just death or injury.51 Lieutenant McDonough, newly arrived in Vietnam, began talking to a veteran lieutenant from the same outfit he had just been assigned to, typically seeking information about “what it’s like.” McDonough soon realized, to his horror, that the lieutenant was no longer sane: “Earlier, I had been afraid only of being physically maimed or killed. But now I saw that there was another threat, that of a madness born of terror and dehumanizing ferocity. The veteran lieutenant was mad. Perhaps once he had been like me. He was alive, but he had not really survived. Physically he was unmarked; spiritually he was dead; mentally he was. . . mutilated and twisted. . . . If this could happen to him, could it happen to me? I was shaken to my bones.”52
Lieutenant George Wilson, who pointedly notes that his training in Officer Candidate School in World War II did not include even a mention of soldier breakdown, was taken by surprise when a man in his platoon cracked up after only three days of fighting in Normandy. The man began to shake violently and broke into loud sobs. Wilson finally told the medics to take the man away, but “it was too late . . . to keep the fear from spreading. My men looked sick, and they wouldn’t look me in the eye.”53
Psychiatrists discovered that soldiers who broke down early often suffered from character flaws that made it especially difficult for them to cope with combat. They were “predisposed” to breaking down under stress.54 Surveys of men who broke down early during World War II revealed that they were less intelligent, less able to adjust socially, and more anxiety-ridden than the average soldier.55 Thus, while every man had his breaking point, the threshold was lower for some than for others. The importance of intelligence in coping with combat stress came as a surprise to some, but military sociologists and psychiatrists have verified that intelligent, well-educated soldiers are better soldiers, in combat and peacetime. Slow-witted soldiers had difficulty learning basic skills and thus could not function successfully within the group.56 Intelligent soldiers were not only less likely to break down in combat but were also more likely to be superior soldiers, or “fighters,” as one study of Korean War GIs called them: “Perhaps the most striking difference between the fighter and the non-fighter is the fighter’s relatively greater intelligence.” A soldier lacking intelligence, the study added, was “simply not adept enough to perfect easily the many techniques and skills which are necessary for efficient performance.”57
The educational screening conducted during induction and the demands of initial training weeded out most of the dullards, but a few slipped through the system; they did not fare well on the battlefield. Private Atwell describes the case of Dick Gann, a fellow GI in his medical detachment who was a “mental defective of sorts.” He was “morose and slow,” stuttered, and mumbled to himself.58 He tried his best, but he was not soldier material. The battalion surgeon evacuated Gann, who was on the verge of cracking up, as a medical casualty. The men were glad to see him go: “We never expected or wanted to see him again. . . . Hell, he never belonged up here [at the front] in the first place.”59
Soldiers who broke down early also tended to have difficulty forming ties with the group. Jesse Glenn Gray labeled these soldiers “constitutional cowards”: “The coward may have comrades, but they are not able to sustain him emotionally. His relation to them is not one of depth or inner community.” The constitutional coward was not motivated by the group because he felt no attachment to it. He faced the prospect of combat emotionally alone, and thus, Gray noted, his fears were overpowering: “Death is a personal enemy of his, a relentless, absolute, all-encompassing enemy. But the coward’s inner poverty of life and love makes him no fit antagonist.”60 And as Sergeant William Manchester puts it, “Any man in combat who lacks comrades who will die for him, or for whom he is willing to die, is not a man at all. He is truly damned.”61
Constitutional cowards crop up as loners, braggarts, or shirkers who did not fit in, and most of them broke down sooner rather than later. Lieutenants Harold P. Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell describe one of the replacements who arrived in their company in World War II as “a real braggart, tough-acting, who kept saying, ‘Boy, let me at ’em!’” The braggart lasted less than a day. After being shelled and shot at by a machine gun, “the guy broke down completely. He couldn’t cope. He was worse than useless and we had to send him back.”62
Just prior to shipping out for Europe, Standifer’s platoon received a replacement named Lehrer. He wanted to take over Standifer’s job as scout, but no one trusted him, according to Standifer’s friend George: “‘Hell, no, I don’t want Lehrer up there [in front] or on my flank. He won’t carry his part of the load when things get rough. Lehrer is a loner. He has the guts to do a job if it benefits him, but he will never be a team man.’ George had hit the key point that worried me. The squad was my family, and I was ready to risk my life for them. I wasn’t sure that Lehrer would.” George’s assessment proved correct. Lehrer was useless in combat because he did not fit in: “Patrols terrified him, probably because he knew that if he got into trouble no one would want to help him out.”63
The psychological screening of recruits, which occurred during all the wars of the draft era, was supposed to identify those men who could not perform effectively. The high incidence of breakdowns, however, despite the rejection of thousands of men deemed psychologically unfit for service, indicates that screening was marginally effective at best.64 The most obvious misfits and psychopaths could be identified, but the quick, assembly-line interviews conducted at the induction stations could not begin to reveal deep-seated flaws and phobias. Aggravating the problem were the recruits who attempted to appear unstable in hopes of getting rejected and, conversely, the men with real disturbances who tried to hide them because they wanted to serve or did not want to be labeled a psycho.65 Many unstable soldiers were weeded out during training or deployment, but it often took the stress of combat to reveal who was emotionally illequipped to cope with war.
THE DEBATE OVER CAUSES
Psychiatrists and sociologists agree that a mix of behavioral and situational factors affected a soldier’s ability to function in combat.66 But what were the situational factors that drove a soldier to the breaking point? Physical exhaustion caused by the hardships of combat was common and so seemingly overwhelming that observers like Ernie Pyle attributed breakdown to physical wear and tear alone: “A large proportion of those [neurosis] cases were brought about by complete fatigue, by fighting day and night on end with little sleep and little to eat.”67 Yet this plausible theory did not hold up. During periods of rapid advance, for example, troops were pushed beyond the point of exhaustion, but the incidence of breakdowns dropped off dramatically. Albert Glass and Calvin S. Drayer cited the victorious American advance into the Po River Valley in Italy late in the war as “a final demonstration that physical fatigue alone . . . was not productive of psychiatric casualties.”68
Psychiatrists did believe, however, that exhaustion contributed to psychological breakdown. Meagher found that fatigue slowed the recovery of neurosis cases: “The lack of sleep, whether from the arduous work in the trenches accentuated by a state of anxiety, or from other causes, was an important factor in delaying recovery.”69 World War II psychiatrists agreed, and the adoption of the terms “combat exhaustion” and “combat fatigue” reflected their acceptance of the role of physical as well as psychological factors in causing breakdown. According to Grinker and Spiegel, “When fatigue, hunger, and thirst are combined with continuous exposure to danger and the constant pounding of heavy artillery and aerial bombs, the resistance of even the strongest to the development of anxiety may become impaired.”70 If physical exhaustion was at most a contributing factor, then only psychological trauma remained to explain why, beyond personal characteristics, a soldier broke down. But students of soldier behavior are not in accord over what fears and anxieties most contributed to that trauma. A few argue that anxiety over having to kill and the guilt that resulted from doing so made a major contribution to soldier stress and hence breakdown.71 Samuel L. A. Marshall argued, for example, that the World War II GI, who as a civilian had been taught that aggression was wrong, was stressed over having to kill. He cited unnamed military psychiatrists in the European theater who had found that “fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure in the individual.”72
Although psychiatrists did encounter cases in which anxiety or guilt over killing appeared to be the primary precipitator of combat fatigue, a majority of psychiatrists, Marshall’s unnamed sources aside, considered stress produced by the fear of death or mutilation to be the main cause of breakdown.73 The U.S. Army Medical Department’s history of neuropsychiatry in World War II notes that a unit’s ratio of psychiatric breakdowns directly reflected the casualty rate and adds: “Clearly, the immediate and continued threat of battle danger was the essential element in . . . psychiatric breakdown.”74 Appel and Beebe agree: “The key to an understanding of the psychiatric problem is the simple fact that the danger of being killed or maimed imposes a strain so great that it causes men to break down.”75
The soldiers themselves, in their candid admissions of fear over dying, add convincing evidence to this argument. Ernie Pyle noticed that casualties were psychologically bearable to the GI only when there were not too many, too often: “It’s when casualties become so great that those who remain feel they have no chance to live if they have to go on and on taking it—that’s when morale in an army gets low.”76 For Private Rudolph W. Stephens, that feeling set in after about three weeks of combat in Korea: “As I saw other men wounded and killed, I began to wonder when my time would be up. Every day I would hear of someone getting hit one way or another, and the dread of death was always on my mind. The feeling was as if something was picking at your very soul. No matter what you did, you couldn’t get rid of the feeling.”77
It is more succinctly put by one of Mark Baker’s Vietnam veterans: “The hardest thing to accept is that it’s for real and forever. [Death] was permanent.” The veteran added that he had tried not to dwell on his mortality, “but you’re so tired, your mind is weak. When death comes into your head, you don’t have the strength to push it aside.”78
Fear of a serious wound was a natural extension of the fear of death. Lieutenant Lyle Rishell explained that this fear grew stronger when the rugged Korean terrain made evacuating the wounded difficult: “The fear of being wounded was always on our minds, especially when we were exposed in some inaccessible area, because we figured our chances of getting out were slim. I know that bringing a seriously wounded man off the mountain required several hours.”79 Rishell and Stephens were not atypical and certainly not cowardly in admitting their fears. Surveys confirm the axiom that anyone who says he is not scared in combat is a liar, and what soldiers feared most was death or crippling injury.80
While psychiatrists and soldiers alike considered fear of death the primary stress producer, they acknowledged that a host of other malevolent factors were also at work. Some soldiers did feel anxiety and guilt over killing. Most were physically worn down by the hardships of the combat zone. The green soldier feared that he might not hold up in his first combat, revealing himself to be a coward. Many men suffered from loneliness and longed for the affection of their loved ones. Some soldiers were torn by grief or rage over the loss of close comrades. Others dreaded the uncertainty and feelings of helplessness generated by the random nature of combat. And the almost total lack of privacy demoralized some soldiers.81
Nor is this list of deleterious factors complete. Soldiers were stressed by yet other aspects of their combat environment. They not only grieved for lost comrades but also suffered guilt over surviving.82 Sergeant Dan Levin felt he had no right to live while so many good men had died: “The sense that I was taking up earth-space that belonged to better, braver, less lucky men, that I had given only a frightened, reluctant minimum and had been unaccountably and undeservedly spared, would grow like a subterranean echo.”83 More typically, anguished soldiers believed, sometimes irrationally so, that they could have done more to save a buddy. Corporal Albert French lost his best friend, Vernon, in a firefight in Vietnam. French had already been seriously wounded by the time his friend was killed, but he still faulted himself for not continuing with his squad—perhaps he could have made a difference: “I’m sorry I didn’t keep going, keep moving. Maybe I might have said, ‘Let’s go this way, keep down, spread out.’ Maybe I would have seen something, seen it coming, got us out of the way. I don’t know, man, but I think just maybe I was too scared to move on. Just wanted to lie behind the [rice paddy] dike, not wanting to know who was dying, not wanting to die.”84
Stress was also caused by a rapid transition from relative comfort and safety to danger and carnage. This phenomenon came to psychiatrists’ attention during World War II, when air crews experienced just such an abrupt transition, called “discontinuity,” on almost a daily basis.85 The helicopter brought discontinuity into the realm of ground combat in Vietnam. Psychiatrist Peter G. Bourne, who accompanied helicopter medics on several missions, discovered how stressful it could be: “The pilots are busy with the multiple demands of flying the helicopter and have little time to think of anything else, but there is no anxiety-relieving task on which those in the back can concentrate. Minutes ago they were drinking coffee in the comfort and security of the office; now they are flying into a jungle battle about which they know little except that two men have already lost their lives, and all they can do is sit and wait and think about the impending danger.”86
Those in the back nervously waiting were often grunts conducting an air assault. Tim O’Brien describes the shock of departing the safety of a base camp on a “hopelessly short ride” to the landing zone. In a matter of seconds, the post exchange and servicemen’s club were left behind, replaced by rice paddies and jungle. “You begin to sweat,” despite the cool air. All too soon comes the descent: “We started to go down. The worst part of the Combat Assault, the thing you think about on the way down, is how perfectly exposed you are. Nowhere to hide. A fragile machine. . . . You sit in your helicopter, watching the earth come spinning up at you. . . . The helicopter nestled into its landing area, hovering and trembling over the [rice] paddy, and we piled out like frantic rats. We scrambled for paddy dikes and depressions and rocks.”87
The stress created by a rapid transition into the environment of war was not limited to air assaults but could occur to any soldier reentering combat after a break in the action. Private Blunt recalled how “jumpy” soldiers could be, including himself, when going back to the front line during World War II: “To be totally immersed in the horror of war for months and then to be suddenly transplanted temporarily to the relative tranquility of a rear area, only to be abruptly returned without any mental preparation to combat again, strained the nervous system’s ability to compensate for the upheaval, and the man could easily become paralyzed with fear. The bravery born of necessity often deserted him.”88
As if the trauma of discontinuity, survivor’s guilt, and the other perilous factors were not enough, in some theaters of war the soldier was stressed to the point of breakdown by his very surroundings. A harsh environment could generate what Eli Ginzberg and his team, examining soldier effectiveness in World War II, called “location stress”: “Military service can prove to be a particularly severe burden for the soldier who is assigned to a locale that he despises—a rugged mountain area or the tropics.”89 Location stress coupled with loneliness and boredom could cause a man to break, even without the pressures of combat. David Rothschild, a psychiatrist in the Pacific in World War II, noted that the troops called such a breakdown “going tropical” or “jungle wacky”: “Many soldiers feel they are entering a remote corner of the earth in which vaguely defined mysteries and dangers are lurking. They find the climate unpleasant and taxing.”90
Private Robert G. Thobaben’s infantry battalion saw only sporadic combat while performing security duty on various Pacific islands in World War II, but it did see a great deal of boredom and privation, and he explains how alien this existence was to the typical young GI: “We were at an age when female companionship was the rule, but there were no women. We lived a life of celibacy, an armed monastic order. The normal freedom to move, particularly the freedom to jump in your car and just go, is practically eliminated for soldiers on an island. The normal involvements in school, listening to pop music and just hearing the news, are a rare luxury overseas in these island paradises. Even the normal craving for some solitude is denied the soldier; one is constantly immersed in a sea of humanity where there is no escape, no privacy.”91
Isolated Pacific islands were not the only “armpit,” to use an old army saying, that soldiers had to serve in. The cold, desolate mountains of Korea were perhaps even worse. Private Dean Westberg described the stress and discomfort caused by the biting Korean wind: “A howling wind blew the snow and cold into the foxhole . . . the noise of the wind makes it seem danger is lurking everywhere.”92 The wind’s howl, day in and day out, could drive a man over the edge, as occurred in Lieutenant James Brady’s marine company: “Kelso, the machine-gun sergeant, lost a man. . . . It wasn’t the gooks that did it but the wind. We’d been on line three weeks and the wind never stopped. One night Kelso’s corporal went berserk, firing off a heavy machine gun inside the bunker, trying to kill rats that no one else saw. They carried him off in the morning, cursing the wind and the rats, drooling and trying to tear off his clothes.”93
THE TREATMENT OF COMBAT FATIGUE
From howling wind to island tedium, the soldier faced myriad situational stresses. Although each man wrestled with his own personal mix of noxious factors, the fear of death or mutilation, accompanied by some degree of physical exhaustion, remained the main stress producers. The techniques found most useful in treating psychiatric casualties, therefore, were remarkably similar in all the wars of the draft era.
The principles for treating battle fatigue, as the army currently calls it, are captured by the acronym PIES (proximity, immediacy, expectancy, and simplicity). Proximity refers to the treatment of battle-fatigue casualties as far forward as possible. Immediacy means treating them expeditiously. Expectancy calls for casualties to be reassured that they will quickly recover and return to duty. Simplicity refers to the need for keeping the treatment process simple and straightforward. These principles are found in current army literature, but their origins can be traced directly to the experiences of treating psychological casualties in World War I.94
World War I psychiatrists did not use the terms “proximity, immediacy, expectancy, and simplicity,” but they learned through experience to apply these principles. Official treatment policy in the AEF called for the use of “persuasion” and “rest” to bring about the “speedy restoration and return to their organizations of those in whom exhaustion is the chief or only factor.” Doughboys were to understand that “the disorders grouped under the term ‘shell shock’ are relatively simple and recoverable rather than complex and dangerous.” Further, evacuation of patients was to be controlled to ensure forward treatment.95
Unfortunately, these treatment principles and the need for specialists and facilities to apply them were forgotten during the interwar years or, more accurately, were set aside as no longer needed. Given postwar advances in the diagnosis and treatment of the mentally ill, the army’s Medical Department concluded that a modernized version of the psychological screening of recruits as conducted during World War I could identify those men unfit for service and hence cases of psychoneuroses would be few. With the advent of a high rate of combat neuroses during the North African campaign in World War II, however, it became apparent that screening had not eliminated those men predisposed to breakdown, if only because all soldiers were susceptible to breaking down over time.96
The army spent the rest of World War II catching up in the treatment of combat fatigue. Division psychiatrists and psychiatric hospitals were established, much as they had been during World War I, and the treatment principles from that earlier war again proved effective. William C. Menninger, director of the army’s Neuropsychiatric Consultants Division, Office of the Surgeon General, summarized treatment practices in terms similar to those used by his World War I counterparts: “If intensive treatment was provided early, in an environment in which the expectation of recovery prevailed, remarkable results were obtained.”97
Other World War II psychiatrists likewise describe the success of proximity, immediacy, expectancy, and simplicity, although still not using exactly those terms.98 Fortunately, these treatment principles were not forgotten or ignored again. Albert J. Glass, who had been a division psychiatrist in World War II and was the psychiatric consultant to the Far East Command during much of the Korean War, wrote in 1955 that enough “evidence has accumulated” after three wars to “permit crystallization of certain operational principles of field psychiatry.”99 He advocated “decentralization” (a combination of proximity and immediacy, which go hand in hand), “expectancy,” and “simplicity,” principles that remain in effect.100
In application, these principles meant treating the combat-fatigue casualty at or near a forward aid station, allowing for rapid treatment. The casualty was placed out of immediate danger and allowed to rest, have a hot meal, and clean up. In some cases he was given medicine to help him sleep. The battalion or regimental surgeon and his aidmen (who ideally had been trained by the division psychiatrist to identify and treat combat fatigue) assured him that he would soon feel fit and rested and rejoin his outfit. Not all battle-fatigue cases recovered quickly and some never did, but a significant number responded well to this simple treatment and within a few days were able to return to their unit.101 An examination of why this process worked reveals a few facts about soldiers’ fears and motivations.
Austere treatment close to the front worked precisely because it was close to the front—the casualty was not completely removed from the environment of war. He was safe enough, perhaps in the cellar or dugout of a battalion aid station, to have a much needed physical respite and, even more important, to get relief from the stress caused by fear of imminent death. But he was not far from his unit and was still treated like a soldier, not a patient. Frederick Parsons explains that for the milder cases of war neuroses, this simple treatment returned many soldiers to combat in short order: “Men go for days without sleep, have insufficient food, suffer from lack of water, reach a stage of absolute physical exhaustion, and perhaps are nervous, dazed, and jumpy. After twenty-four or thirty-six hours rest, they are well and . . . they want to get back to the company.”102
The soldier, despite his breakdown, still considered himself part of his unit and did not want to let his buddies down. He also did not want to embarrass himself by seeming to be shirking or cowardly; thus he wished to rejoin his outfit. Glass, reflecting on his experiences in two wars, noted that the soldier’s bond to his group was key: “At a forward level of therapy, where the psychiatric casualty is still emotionally tied to his unit, efforts to improve lowered physical capacity and foster the sustaining power of group identification are appropriate and remarkably successful in restoring previous ability to maintain combat effectiveness.”103
Once a battle-fatigue casualty had been bedded down in a safe, clean hospital, however, his chances of recovering sufficiently to return to combat dropped off dramatically. Some psychiatric casualties had such severe symptoms that hospitalization was the only option, but too often battle-fatigue cases were “overevacuated,” especially if forward treatment was not possible because of the lack of psychiatric specialists and medical facilities, or if the existing treatment organizations were swamped by casualties. Once removed from the environment of war, the battle-fatigue casualty resisted, albeit subconsciously, returning to it. His symptoms, which could include depression, amnesia, psychosomatic illnesses, extreme startle reaction, irritability, insomnia, grief, apathy, and extreme physical weakness, tended to harden and his recovery proceeded slowly, if at all.104
Thomas W. Salmon, head of neuropsychiatry for the American Expeditionary Forces, admitted that overevacuation had been a problem until adequate facilities for forward treatment were established in September 1918: “In consequence, many hundreds of men suffering from exhaustion, concussion neurosis, fear, and other emotional states found themselves, within a few days after leaving their organizations, in hospitals a hundred miles or more away from the front. Very few of these men ever returned to active duty.”105
Overevacuation occurred again early in World War II because of the lack of psychiatric care specialists and facilities, as Glass notes concerning the North African campaign: “The winter and spring battles of the Tunisian campaign in late 1942 and early 1943 . . . brought forth large numbers of psychiatric casualties. As in the early phase of World War I, these patients were evacuated hundreds of miles to rear hospitals whose psychiatric facilities were insufficient. . . . There resulted a fixation of symptoms and the formation of chronic disabling syndromes. Relatively few psychiatric casualties were recovered for combat duty.”106
Men subconsciously lost their will to recover once they had been evacuated to a hospital because recovery meant a return to the war. Even soldiers initially hospitalized for wounds or ailments sometimes developed psychiatric disorders as they began to recover physically, in a subconscious attempt to remain hospitalized. Of the 3,921 World War II combat soldiers in Eli Ginzberg’s study who had been hospitalized and eventually discharged from the army as psychologically unfit, 1,707 had been admitted as psychiatric casualties, but the remaining 2,214 had been admitted for wounds or illness. Only when in the hospital did they develop serious symptoms of psychiatric disability. Ginzberg attributes this phenomenon to the “hold of the hospital”: “These figures suggest the ‘holding power’ of the hospital. It was not easy for men to return to combat or to remain effective once they had been exposed to the security and comfort of the hospital.”107
World War I psychiatrists also witnessed the hold of the hospital. Rhein, who commanded a neurological hospital in the American Expeditionary Forces, noticed that patients healed of wounds and about to be returned to the front “began to complain of physical ailments,” which proved to be “in the nature of hypochondrical [sic] manifestations,” no doubt resulting “from the opportunity to think over the dangers of the front in comparison with the safe and comfortable conditions under which the soldiers found themselves” in the hospital.108
The veteran soldier who did return to combat after recovering from a physical or psychiatric ailment was burdened by his knowledge of what lay ahead. Some hospital returnees did not last long before they broke down.109 Late in World War II, a lieutenant rejoined Audie Murphy’s company after recovering from a serious wound caused by enemy artillery fire. This lieutenant was liked and respected, and he tried his best, but whenever he came under artillery fire, he went to pieces: “His nerves collapse again. His mouth sags; his speech becomes jerky; and his hands shake so that he can hardly insert an ammunition clip into his carbine. Whether he knows or wants it, he is through. Finished.”110 Murphy sent the lieutenant to the rear and asked his battalion commander not to send him forward again.
Sometimes a hospital returnee did not even make it back. Amos N. Wilder, returning to his artillery battery after several days in the hospital for minor surgery, broke down during the ambulance ride: “En route back alone in flying ambulance had a mental crisis. It seemed I never would get any strength—and they were rushing me back into that hell of life in the Battery with enthusiasm gone to the last and alone.” The ambulance returned Wilder to the hospital for “further attention.” He spent time in a convalescent camp and eventually rejoined his outfit, where he was assigned to “more congenial tasks” as a clerk at regimental headquarters.111
Lieutenant Fussell spent most of February 1945 in the hospital recovering from pneumonia. He overcame the pneumonia, but overcoming his fear of future battles was another matter: “That month away from the line helped me survive for four weeks more but it broke the rhythm and, never badly scared before, when I returned to the line early in March I found for the first time that I was terrified, unwilling to take the chances that before had seemed rather sporting. My month of safety had renewed my interest in survival, and I was psychologically and morally ill prepared to lead my platoon in the great Seventh Army attack of March 15, 1945.”112
SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS AND DESERTION
A soldier worn out from too much combat often sensed that he was nearing the end of his emotional rope, but his breakdown was ultimately a subconscious act. Some soldiers, however, made conscious decisions to escape the fighting. Typically they tried to shirk their combat duties, but some took more drastic measures, inflicting wounds upon themselves or fleeing from the battlefield.
The frequency of occurrence of self-inflicted wounds is impossible to determine. Soldiers who wounded themselves invariably claimed it was an accident or that they had been hit by enemy fire. Although the incidence of self-inflicted wounds may be difficult to ascertain, the rationale for them is clear enough. If a million-dollar wound provided an escape from combat without causing permanent injury, then why wait for the enemy to do it? Besides, who could count on the enemy’s aim?
More soldiers contemplated a self-inflicted wound than actually attempted it. John Saddic, a marine in the Korean War, considered falling into a hole in such a way that he would “accidentally” break his hand but decided against it: “I’m not the slightest bit ashamed of thinking about it. Ask any guy who’s been in combat. You’re bound to think that way at one time or another. But in the long run, most guys don’t do it. After all, you have to live with yourself.”113 Soldiers had such thoughts when they were demoralized and exhausted. Private Standifer, sick and miserable on a bitterly cold day in Germany in 1945, had almost reached his breaking point: “I’ve got to get out of here. . . . To hell with courage. I’ve got to leave this God-forsaken place. If I don’t get sick enough to leave by the time of the next attack, I’m going to find a way to get wounded.”114 Before he did anything drastic, he was evacuated with pneumonia and frostbite.
Some soldiers did resort to self-inflicted wounds, however, despite the shame associated with it, not to mention possible disciplinary action if the medics or a witness turned them in. A self-inflicted wound was a court-martial offense. In Private Carl Andrew Brannen’s company in World War I, a marine replacement lying just behind him shot off his own trigger finger. Yet only the most distraught soldiers so blatantly inflicted wounds on themselves. Most shot themselves while “cleaning” their weapon.115 Klaus H. Huebner was sometimes asked to rule on supposedly accidental shootings. It was not easy to do so: “A self-inflicted wound always poses somewhat of a problem. Is it intentional or accidental? Carbine wounds through the web of toes, through the heel, and through hands do occur now and them. I hate to accuse a man of shooting himself in order to be evacuated. I suppose most are accidental, although I can never be too sure.”116
Even more difficult to judge were cases of self-inflicted illnesses. Some GIs in the Pacific in World War II deliberately avoided taking their antimalaria medicine, hoping to catch a case of malaria serious enough to get them evacuated.117 Soldiers fighting in wet, cold climates exposed their extremities in order to come down with immersion foot or frostbite. Private Atwell saw several cases of self-inflicted frostbite come through his battalion aid station. The men talked among themselves about it: “They envied those who had been wounded and sent home, and in an uncritical way they talked of men deliberately freezing their feet, leaving them outside the covers at night or even holding them in a helmet filled with ice and snow.”118
With the advent of rotation in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, soldiers were less likely to consider wounding themselves, just as they were less likely to wish for a million-dollar wound. Self-inflicted wounds did occur, however, and the pattern was similar to that of the world wars. Like the replacement marine in Brannen’s company who shot off his trigger finger, some Korean and Vietnam War soldiers inflicted a wound on themselves early on. Like men who broke down early or committed suicide, these soldiers could not face what lay ahead. Private Floyd Atkins tells of a new lieutenant who arrived in his outfit in Korea: “He spent one day with us on the line. Then he took his .45 automatic and shot himself in the foot. I think he did it on purpose. That first day he said he wouldn’t be in Korea long.”119
At the other extreme were men like Standifer, who contemplated or inflicted a wound on themselves only after they were physically and emotionally worn out. After nine months in Vietnam, corpsman Douglas Anderson “couldn’t take it anymore. I told this friend of mine . . . that I was going to throw a grenade around the corner of this hootch and stick my leg out. I wanted to go home, I wasn’t going to do this anymore.”120 His friend talked him out of it, and shortly thereafter Anderson was transferred to duty at a hospital.
Rather than shooting themselves, some soldiers elected to desert. Studies of deserters from combat are scarce, but two that exist for the Italian campaign in World War II indicate that soldiers deserted for the same reason that they broke down or inflicted a wound upon themselves—they were overcome by fear.121 According to one of the studies, “three out of four subjects frankly stated that fear of combat was the cause of their AWOL.” The deserter thus “consciously elects to avoid combat as a result of chronic anticipatory anxiety deriving from accumulated battle experiences.”122 These deserters had often endured several months of combat, some had been hospitalized for wounds, many were physically worn out, and some exhibited the excessive anxiety and group adjustment problems common to soldiers who broke down early on. They were so stressed out by the time they elected to desert that even the probability of apprehension did not deter them. Ties to the group no longer sufficed to hold them. In some cases they felt little connection to the group because their original comrades were gone.123
GROUP NORMS AND THE FAILURE TO COPE
As with self-inflicted wounds, more soldiers contemplated desertion than actually did so. Loyalty to the group and concerns over personal reputation kept most men from deserting. Richard Newman thought about “bugging out,” as desertion from combat was called during the Korean War, but he never seriously considered doing it: “You did not want to let your buddies down. How could you face them if you bugged out? Oh, there were plenty of times when I wondered what the hell I was doing there, but I never considered taking off.”124 Given the primary group’s disdain for malingerers, the logical conclusion is that it would consider a deserter or a soldier who inflicts a wound on himself the lowest of the low, according to S. Kirson Weinberg: “The unit increases the individual’s endurance and courage by challenging him to uphold his self-esteem. When a group realizes that a member is looking for an ‘out’ and is about to depart, the attitudes of the others may be expressed as follows: ‘The yellow so-and-so is going. He’s a quitter, leaving us to take it—get hurt and maybe killed.’”125
Weinberg, who was describing a typical group of World War II soldiers, is generally correct in his assessment, but the reality was not so simple, as Weinberg himself noted by adding this qualifier: “These attitudes vary with the conditions under which the soldier departs.”126 Specifically, if a soldier had endured at least some combat and had pulled his own weight before deserting or wounding himself, then his comrades tended to excuse his actions. During World War II, Arnold M. Rose found that veteran soldiers “do not condemn the typical AWOL from combat; rather they tend to sympathize with him. . . . One reason why non–AWOL’s sympathize with most AWOL’s is that they know about the strains of combat and they realize that some men ‘can’t take it’ as well as others.”127 This attitude is apparent in the memoirs. Marine Private Richard Suarez noticed that during the gruelling retreat from the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, “not everyone was John Wayne. . . . Our battalion had three self-inflicted wounds. . . . A lot of [the men] were at the limit of what they could take. I saw one officer sitting by the side of the road crying. I guess he just cracked under the strain. Everybody has a breaking point, and everybody’s breaking point is different.”128
Sergeant Glenn Hubenette, wounded and evacuated to a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War, heard a surgeon berate a young GI who had shot himself in the foot. The doctor “told the kid if he had his way, he’d let him bleed to death, and that the guy didn’t belong in the same army with men who’d been legitimately wounded.” Hubenette, however, was inclined to give the GI the benefit of the doubt: “Who knew what the kid had gone through before he shot his foot? When the GI and I were alone in the hallway, I told him, ‘Take it easy, kid.’”129
During World War II, Private Atwell pondered the varying attitudes of his comrades toward self-inflicted wounds. He noted that an unpopular sergeant who had wounded himself in the unit’s first battle was condemned but that a man who deliberately induced frostbite after enduring weeks of combat was forgiven: “No one . . . criticized Nugent for deliberately freezing his feet, yet from what I heard, feeling was mounting steadily against Sergeant Weems for taking a similar way out of combat. Wherein did the difference lie? In the fact that Jack Nugent . . . was likable and popular and Sergeant Weems was not? Or was it that Sergeant Weems had shot himself through the foot on the first day of combat, whereas Jack Nugent had gone through attack after attack, patrol after patrol, and had come at last to feel, as most of them felt, that his chances for survival were fast running out?”130
As in the case of Sergeant Weems, soldiers did not condone desertion or selfwounding by a man who had not first made a reasonable effort to cope and to do his share. Frank Chadwick knew a sergeant on Guadalcanal who was ostracized for deliberately allowing his jungle rot to fester: “He wouldn’t take care of it because he wanted to get the hell out of there. And he did. But before he left everyone understood what he was doing, and they blackballed him. No one had anything to do with him.”131
To further complicate matters, the attitudes of the soldiers passing judgment on deserters or men who wounded themselves shifted over time. Men not yet deeply immersed in the environment of war were less tolerant because they did not yet appreciate the possibility that they, too, might reach a point where they could not take it anymore. Lieutenant Louis Brockway and his fellow doughboys, yet to experience combat, were appalled to hear veteran British troops talking about million-dollar wounds: “How naive we all were at this point. I remember hearing those Tommies talking about how nice it would be to get a little ‘blighty’ so they could get the hell out of there. We all felt this was awful; how were they going to win the war that way? What we didn’t think about was how long the British had been bleeding. It didn’t take us very long to understand their feeling.”132
Shortly after Boesch took over his platoon in World War II, his platoon sergeant deserted from combat. Boesch was furious, not only because the sergeant deserted but also because the company commander declined to courtmartial the man, who had been through a “tough time” before Boesch’s arrival. The commander elected instead to reduce the sergeant’s rank and transfer him. With more combat experience, however, Boesch’s anger changed to ambiguity: “Perhaps if I had been more experienced at the time, I might have insisted on court martial. Then again, after all I saw later, would I have been more mellowed perhaps, more understanding?”133
The group’s attitude toward deserters and self-inflicted wounds thus varied from condemnation to sympathy, depending on how much combat the group itself had seen and its perception of how long and hard a compatriot had tried to cope before seeking an out. The reaction to psychological breakdowns was similar. The Research Branch discovered during World War II that the group did not blame men for “being afraid or for being emotionally upset by the threat of danger, but they were expected to try to put up a struggle to carry on despite their fear.” A soldier could be “visibly shaken,” even “trembling violently,” but he “was not regarded as a coward unless he made no apparent effort to stick out his job.”134 Lieutenants Leinbaugh and Campbell differentiated between a combatfatigue case who had tried to stick it out and one who had not: “One of the men who went to the exhaustion center was a first-rate NCO who’d tried his damnedest, but couldn’t stay up [on the front line]; he’d be back to try again. Another who went back for a rest wasn’t held in such high esteem. The difference between the two was a matter of will: One wanted to be with the company, and the other didn’t.”135
Soldiers who broke down early in combat, or even before reaching the battlefield, were thus often denigrated for cowardly behavior. A sergeant in Howard Matthias’s marine company in Korea broke down on his first night patrol. He was transferred to a different platoon within the company and again failed to perform. No one sympathized with his plight: “His fellow NCO’s criticized him and none of the enlisted men would have anything to do with him.”136 The man was soon transferred out of the company.
On the other hand, soldiers who had obviously tried their best before breaking down were usually viewed with sympathy by their fellow combatants. Dan Levin’s first dispatch about the fighting on Iwo Jima concerned a marine who broke down and had to be carried off. This man had endured three previous island campaigns. Levin quoted one of the marine’s buddies, who said that his broken comrade was “a good man”: “How much can one man take? Too much is too much.”137
Even men who broke down relatively early in their combat careers might be accorded a measure of sympathy if the group believed they had good reason to crack up. Two men in Private Blunt’s squad in World War II broke down after only five days of combat. Their best friend had been killed in the unit’s first fight, and they were “unable to cope with their loss. When both eventually became too terrified to venture out onto the street, some of us brought them their meals. Whenever a shell exploded in the city, they cowered in a corner trembling.” The two men were transferred to a rear-area job, but Blunt did not resent it: “Battle fatigue hit men of all ages and in many different ways. No one ridiculed them. We all knew it could happen to anyone at any time, and we realized that understanding was called for.”138 The primary group thus accepted or condemned psychological breakdown, desertion, and self-inflicted wounds based on individual circumstances and the mind-set of the group at the time.
Thus far combat has been portrayed as unremitting physical and emotional travail, with death, injury, or psychological breakdown the inevitable consequence. How then could so many Americans set out, more or less willingly, to fight four major wars in fifty years? Certainly each new generation’s ignorance of the nature of war explains much, but another factor was also at work—one not often candidly discussed. Some aspects of combat and army life were stimulating, even enjoyable, or at least were nostalgically viewed as such. Furthermore, some men did more than endure war. They were good at it and even thrived on it.