Ruin

“Shoulds' come only from leftover thinking. If we are truly in this moment (the only one there really is), we don’t should on ourselves.

It’s a great freedom.”
― Kelly Corbet, BIG: the practice of joy

“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

“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

“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