Resilience Read Online Free

the wars of early civilization it was called a trembling; later it was shell shock, then battle fatigue; finally, in the 1970s, we gave it a medical name—post-traumatic stress disorder. All were a form of war neuroses, but whatever the name, many of those men who went to war as courageous soldiers came home with the war still inside them. Courageous or cowardly, strong or weak, there was no predicting it. A solder blinded at the Battle of Marathon when he witnessed the warrior to his side struck dead. An infantryman who developed a facial tic after stabbing an enemy soldier in the face with a bayonet. Physical manifestations of a psychological wound. A Vietnam veteran awaking in a sweat with a half-remembered horror played out in the darkness. And it is repeatedwar after war. The Greatest Generation from World War II was not simply too humble to take credit for their accomplishments in battle (though they were often that), they were also good men too stunned that what they had seen was now part of their own life story. The son of a dairyman being asked to shoot young German boys, his own age, as they emerged wounded from a foxhole. They watched men with whom they had eaten dinner the night before be blown into unidentifiable pieces. Maybe if they never said it out loud, it would not be so. But it was so, and too many died years after the war with their stories silently eating at them from the inside.
Life
magazine described Tom Lea's painting of a tormented World War II marine as “the two thousand yard stare,” looking out at nothing at all, unable to focus on the world that was close enough to touch.
    Some from Vietnam tried to quiet the war within with drugs or alcohol. They had left for war as young men who made Mother's Day cards and helped their grandfathers bring in firewood, who tried three times to call that girl in their biology class before getting the courage even to say hello. They had served because they were called or because they felt a duty or because they had nowhereelse to go. They left as young men and came back as old men. They were, as are all soldiers from chess boards to desert battlefields, actors in a play gone awry, when all the ways in which we avoid unspeakable inhumanity to one another have failed. Only, it wasn't just knocking over someone's knight. It wasn't figurative at all. They witnessed and lived the worst horrors that man can perpetrate on man. It must be impossible to go back to the spirit of the boy making that Mother's Day card. And some did not, and the mothers and wives and brothers and fathers recognized only the physical man who returned from war.
    Ajax went off to the Trojan War and came back a still man, half-empty. Near the end of this terrible war, Ajax expected an honor befitting his heroics, but the honor went elsewhere, and Ajax went mad. Perhaps the honor, had it come, might have forestalled the madness; perhaps nothing would have warded it off. But Ajax's madness played out as he committed atrocities against animals as if they were human enemies. His story is tragic, but the universality of it is made very clear by Tecmessa, the wife to whom he returns in Sophocles' play. He is foreverchanged by war and by his recognition of what he is capable of doing. She begs for help for him, “He used to grieve but never wail aloud—just a deep moan, like from a lowing bull. But now, overwhelmed, he takes no food, no drink, sprawled in silence.” His body had returned to her. She wondered when the rest would return. The answer was never. Tecmessa begs for someone to lift this burden from her husband, but it does not happen, cannot happen. Ajax is someone else now, and despairing his new monstrous self, he eventually takes his own life.
    Blame is not an issue here, except perhaps in some geopolitical sense. But in terms of these lives, Ajax has not failed, the marine with the two-thousand-yard stare is not too weak, and the son of the dairyman is not a monster. It is