Week 10 Assigned Topic

One reoccuring theme that I see in the stories we've read has been PTSD, or post traumactic stress disorder. We saw this in "the Little Red Convertible", when Henry's brother Lyman says, "When he came home, though, Henry was very different, and I'll say this: the change was no good. You could hardly expect him to change for the better, I know. But he was quiet, so quiet, and never comfortable sitting still anywhere but always up and moving around. I thought back to times we'd sat still for whole afternoons, never moving a muscle, just shifting our weight along the ground, talking to whoever sat with us, watching things. He'd always had a joke, then, too, and now you couldn't get him to laugh, or when he did it was more the sound of a man choking, a sound that stopped up the throats of other people around him. They got to leaving him alone most of the time, and I didn't blame them. It was a fact: Henry was jumpy and mean." We all know that war changes people and it's not always for the best. Militaries break their soldiers down physically and emotionally so that they have no mind to fight back with or any body to fight back with, they lose their true identity and are property of the government.

Another example we see of PTSD was in "The Things They Carried." After the war, the psychological burdens the men carry during the war continue to define them. Those who survive carry guilt, grief, and confusion, and many of the stories in the collection are about these survivors’ attempts to come to terms with their experience. In “Love,” for example, Jimmy Cross confides in O’Brien that he has never forgiven himself for Ted Lavender’s death. Norman Bowker’s grief and confusion are so strong that they prompt him to drive aimlessly around his hometown lake in “Speaking of Courage,” to write O’Brien a seventeen-page letter explaining how he never felt right after the war in “Notes,” and to hang himself in a YMCA.

This theme is also apparent in "In Country." We see this early in the story by how quiet Emmett always is. He hardly talks while they're driving and maybe this is due to the company he'd driving with, since he hardly knows mamaw, or if he really is just set apart from the world due to the war. Another example is on page 89, "She bounded in the side door and saw Emmett playing Space Invaders in the darkened living room. Moon Pie was sitting right beside him, like a trusted assistant, as though Emmett were playing a game the cat truly understood. Emmett sat there, firing away, and for the first time Sam had a picture of him with an M-16, in a tropical jungle, firing at hidden faces in the banana leaves." Emmett doesn't have a job and Sam later talk about how she might not be able to defend her Uncle anymore because people thought that he was wounded and that's why he wasn't working, but he wasn't and all he did was play video games and eat Moon Pies. I think it's symbolic though that he's playing a shooting game, Space Invaders, since he was in the army. He'll always have that soldier mentality, and I myself enjoy playing shooter games, but I'm sure it's different for him. The dark room is also symbolic of how he is in his own place away from everyone and everything and while he's playing his game this darkness is able to transport him mentally back to Vietnam. It sets the mood. He is fading from the present back to his past in Nam.

The National Institute of Mental Health is a good source for PTSD. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/index.shtml
This website says that PTSD is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occured or could have occured. They later go on to say that some traumatic events that may trigger PTSD are violent personal assaults, natural or human-caused disasters, accidents, or military combat. This website is helpful because it lists signs and symptoms of this disorder and even describes ways of treating it and coping with it.