Jonathan Shay > Quotes

“Melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. [But we must face] the painful awareness that in all likelyhood one's own character would not have stood firm.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“As beasts are beneath human restraints, gods are above them... It would be foolish and untruthful to deny the appeal of exalted, godlike intoxication....We have seen the paradox that these godlike exalted moments often correspond to times when the men who have survived them say that they have acted like beasts....Above all, a sense of merely human virtue, a sense of being valued and of valuing anything seems to have fled their lives....However, all of our virtues come from not being gods. Generosity is meaningless to a god, who never suffers shortage or want. Courage is meaningless to a god, who is immortal and can never suffer permanent injury. The godlike berserk state can destroy the capacity for virtue. Whether the berserker is beneath humanity as an animal, above it as a god, or both, he is cut off from all human community when he is in this state.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“As products of a biblic culture, most veterans believed it is nobler to strive to be like God than to want to be human. However, all of our virtues come from not being gods: Generosity is meaningless to a god, who never suffers shortage or want; courage is meaningless to a god, who is immortal and can never suffer permanent injury; and so on. Our virtues and our dignity arise from our mortality, our humanity -- and not from any success in being God. The godlike berserk state can destroy the capacity for virtue.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Major recovery, however, requires that personal narrative be particular, not general. The friends who died in Vietnam were not friends in general but particular human beings. The survivors who lost them are also particular human beings, and they must be given permission by the community to speak without fear that their particularity will rupture the we-all-went-through-the-same-thing support that they have come to rely upon. In a fully realized personal narrative the survivor grips the herald's staff and speaks as himself.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“I recall canoeing with veterans along tranquil meanders of the Saco River in Maine, when one of them, who had served on riverboats in the Mekong Delta, pointed out the tan mudbank on the outside of a curve. He said that such an innocent riverbank would be riddled with tunnels and invisible machine-gun and rock-propelled-grenade positions. The cumulative effect of prolonged attacks on mental function is to undermine the soldier's trust in his own perceptions. Another veteran said:

Nothing is what it seems. That mountain there--maybe it wasn't there yesterday, and won't be there tomorrow. You get to the point where you're not even sure it is a mountain.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Alterations in time sense begin with the obliteration of the future but eventually progress to obliteration of the past.... [At first they] cultivate memories of their past lives in order to combat their isolation ... [and then they] lose the sense of continuity with their past. The past, like the future, becomes too painful to bear, for memory, like hope, brings back the yearning for all that has been lost. Thus prisoners are eventually reduced to living in an endless present.

For combat soldiers, the temporal horizon shrinks as much as the moral and social horizon. Only getting through now has any existence. With this loss of a meaningful personal narrative that links past, present, and future comes a shrinkage of volition.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Democratic process embodies the apparent contradiction of safe struggle. Combat veterans with unhealed PTSD have the greatest difficulty conceiving of any struggle apart from killing and dying. Passionate struggle conducted within rules of safety and fairness simply doesn't make sense to them or seems a hollow charade. For them it is psychologically impossible to win a struggle without killing or to lose without dying, and they do not want to do either. Many veterans' response is to withdraw and not participate. Democracy embodies safe struggle over the shape and implementation of a future. An unhealed combat veteran cannot think in terms of a future. Democratic political activity presupposes that the future exists and that it is meaningful. Combat taught the survivor of prolonged combat not to imagine a future or to want anything. Prior to seeing the point of one's voluntary participation in a social process, one must feel that it is safe to want something.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“To return to my blunder in group therapy, a veteran whose voice is often heard in this book turned black with anger and, glaring at me, said, "I won my war. It's you who fucking lost!" He got up and left the room to remove himself from the opportunity to physically hurt me. Toward the end of the group session he returned and said, "What we lost in Vietnam was some good fucking kids!”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Forgetting combat trauma is not a legitimate goal of treatment. Veterans find it morally degrading to forget the dead. To know why this is so, we need only recall what we have seen in the earliest chapters on the existential functions of guilt and rage. The task is to remember -- rather than relive and reenact -- and to grieve. For combat veterans this means grieving not only the dead but also their own lost innocence in both its meanings, as blamelessness and as unawareness of evil. Also, many prewar relationships with parents, friends, siblings, and spouses are now gone forever. A secure sense of the goodness of the social order is irretrievably lost and must be mourned. One veteran said,

You're afraid that once you start to cry you'll never stop. And once you do start, it seems like it will never stop. I cried for a whole year.

We must all strive to be a trustworthy audience for victims of abuse of power. I like to think that Aristotle had something like this in mind when he made tragedy the centerpiece of education for citizens in a democracy.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Combat with these weapons is face to face, hand to hand, personal. When face-to-face combatants share a common tongue, complex speech occurs between them. The American Civil War was the last time in our own history when both sides spoke the same language.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“The enemy must in some way be dehumanized, degraded to less than full human status. Collectively, the population [and soldiers] of the other country must become "gooks," "Nips," "Japs," "Krauts," or "Huns." One must first hide from the full humanity of the opponent before [one] is able to kill him.

-- Rev William Mahedy”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Learn the psychological damage that war does, and work to prevent war. There is no contradiction between hating war and honoring the soldier. Learn how war damages the mind and spirit, and work to change those things in military institutions and culture that needlessly create or worsen these injuries. We don't have to go on repeating the same mistakes.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Thoughts of suicide are common symptoms of combat PTSD. Paradoxically, they are also signs of life. If a person enters the zombielike state of indifference beyond despair, rage, suicidality, and fear, he or she simply dies. This is the testimony of concentration camp survivors and combat veterans. The ability to kill oneself is the bottom line of human freedom. Many combat veterans think daily of suicide. Knowledge that one has this freedom seems to be sustaining.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Parallels between the veteran's words and Achilles' are inescapable. During berserk rage, the friend is constantly alive; letting go of the rage lets him die.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“I have emphasized the religious roots of dishonoring the enemy and its toxic psychological results. However, any ideology that debases the enemy endangers the lives of soldiers while they fight.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Here the veterans grapple with the question of moral luck: Can any workings of bad luck produce cruel or evil actions in a good person?”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Support on the home front for the soldier, regardless of ethical and political disagreements over the war itself. is essential. This is never easy in the emotionally polarized climate of a war. However, when facing individual soldiers, we must remember that all modern soldiers serve under constraint. The justice of overall war aims and of operational theories -- "strate-gic" bombing of civilians to weaken the industrial capacity to wage war is an example of such theory -- is not within the individual soldier's scope of moral choice, unless he or she is willing to face imprisonment or death by refusing to fight. I cannot hold soldiers to an ethical standard that requires martyrdom in order simply to be blameless. I am not arguing against the Nuremberg principles, which say that no person is absolved of responsibility for horrible acts by the fact that he or she was legally ordered to do them. I am speaking from the pain that I feel when I witness in our veterans the ruin of moral life by the overwhelming coercive social power of military institutions and of war itself.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“The overwhelming majority of combat veterans whom I have known are painfully aware of the absence of intimacy, tenderness, light playfulness, or easy mutuality in their sex lives. For many, sex is a trigger of intrusive recollection and emotion from Vietnam as the sound of explosions or the smell of a corpse. Sex and anger are intertwined that they often cannot conceive of tender, uncoerced sex that is free of rage. When successful treatment reduces their rage, they sometimes report that they have to completely relearn (or learn for the first time) the pleasures of sex with intimacy and playfulness.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“The poet Adrienne Rich wrote in a 1973 essay, toward the end of the Vietnam War:

Rape has always been a part of war; and rape in war may be an act of vengeance on the male enemy "whose" women are thus used... Rape [has been] used as a bribe to the peasants being impressed for service, as one of the perquisites of the military: as part of an invading army one has carte blanche to loot property and rape women ... Rape is a part of war; but it may be more accurate to say that the capacity for dehumanizing another which so corrodes male sexuality is carried over from sex into war. The chant of the basic training drill" This is my rifle, this is my gun [cock]; This is for killing, this is for fun" is not a piece of bizarre brainwashing invented by some infantry sergeant's fertile imagination; it is a recognition of the fact that when you strike the chord of sexuality in the ... [male] psyche, the chord of violence is like to vibrate in response; and vice versa.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Whether the berserker is beneath humanity as an animal, above it as a god, or both, he is cut off from all human community when he is in this state. No living human has any claim on him, not even the claim of being noticed and remembered.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“God's love for humankind is one of our present culture's allpervasive, invisible, unquestioned, and thus unconscious assumptions. When war shattered this assumption, American soldiers in Vietnam lost a sustaining idea.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“We have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“It was the water, the cleanliness. We didn't have any soap and water. We doused down with insect repellent every night. We didn't bathe like four, five works at a time. We didn't change clothes. The heat, the dehydration. The living situation was just as bad on us as facing the enemy, because you weren't always facing the enemy and you were always facing these conditions of jungle rot, dysentery, dehydration, hunger, fatigue despair, all the time. Almost wishing you'd get hit....

One of the most outstanding things ... was that the conditions we had to live under were animal, purely animal. And your thoughts went to the same way. You live like an animal, you start thinking and eating like an animal and heaving like an animal. Filthy rotten pig, pig, stink! And then how're you supposed to feel good about anything? Y'know, you can't feel good. You always hoping something would happen so you could fall down and get a rest.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Men become mothers to one another in combat. The grief and rage that they experience when the special comrade is killed appears virtually identical to that of a child suddenly orphaned, and they feel that the mother within them has died with the friend.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“the emergence of rage out of intense grief is a biological universal and that long-term obstruction of grief and failure to communalize grief and can lock a person in chronic rage.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Gang or individual rapes by soldiers -- whether or not these end in the woman's murder -- have never been counted as civilian war casualties. Psychological injuries to the surviving rape victims are often lifelong.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“A vast number of military officers, civilian defense officials, and civilian contractors, were involved in the specification, design, prototyping, testing, manufacture, field testing, and acceptance of the M-16. Yet as one retired military officer blandly put it, "Early models were plagued by stoppages that caused some units to request reissue of the older M-14." The veteran quoted above experienced the deficiencies of design, manufacture, and especially field testing and acceptance of the M-16 as a gross betrayal of the duties of care and loyalty by the officers who, by virtue of their office, held his life in trust.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Zeus, we might say, was the original REMF.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“I count eight separate deaths to which soldiers in the Iliad responded with tears, Several of these are quoted in the course of this chapter and need not to be repeated. The general answer to the question of who is wept is: everyone. American military culture in Vietnam regarded tears as dangerous but above all as demeaning, the sigh of a weakling, a loser. To weep was to lose one's dignity among American soldiers in Vietnam.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“What happens when the sacrifice, or the sincere willingness to sacrifice does not "work"? This is a situation experienced by many combat veterans with PTSD.

In an ethical universe run by a just, loving, and all-powerful God, the "person I was willing to die for" is not supposed to die. Incomprehensibly, he does die. Mortal soldiers discover that they differ from the immortals in this heartbreaking way: They cannot save, cannot protect, cannot resurrect the comrades they have come to value ore than themselves.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character