HISTORY

PTSD was brand new on the diagnostic scene (DSM-III) at about the same time that Sergeant Back Again was published in 1980, and the diagnosis was really predicated on the symptoms displayed by some of the 9 million individuals who served during the Vietnam War Era, approximately 2.7 of whom returned home from active in-country combat tours of which over 300,000 were wounded and 58,220 never returned alive. Of the 2.7 million who did survive and returned state-side, estimates suggest that approximately 16% of the males and 8.75% of the females suffered from PTSD upon-or soon after-their return, with a subsequent, post-separation longitudinal study (NVVRS) indicating that about 30% of all veterans experienced PTSD at some point in their lifetime.

By 2000-25 years after the fall of Saigon and 20 years post-publication of Sergeant-PTSD was close to becoming a “household” initialism having been “passed on” from predominately a” disorder of combat vets” (e.g. Rambo, Apocalypse Now, Sergeant Back Again) to the greater population of first responders and on into the general population of everyday civilians who experience some sort of (psychological) traumatic stress whether in-person, observed or imagined. That’s a far cry-literally-from the post-war symptoms of veterans and civilians of any wartime conflict.

PTSD is not really new. It’s been described in hundreds of thousands of letters, poems, novels, paintings, plays, movies, and songs-even as far back as the Greek historian, Herodotus, who described the exact same symptoms of PTSD in his observations and commentary of the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE) and a soldier, Epizelus, who “suffered sudden, permanent hysterical blindness after witnessing a terrifying vision of a giant warrior slaying the man beside him, despite sustaining no physical wounds” himself. This “accounting” is strikingly similar to what “Danny Two” experiences in his own “accounting” his “blindness” caused by what he witnessed during the Pinkville Massacre resulting in his later shooting himself through his right eye in The Gentling of Hanna Johansen: A Betrayal of Trust).

Sergeant Back Again: The Anthology of Critical and Clinical Commentary was published by PTSD Press in 2010 with the express purpose of putting “PTSD of the 1980’s” into contemporary context, in part because not only had the clinical diagnoses and categorical classification morphed, but a new breed of victim-survivors was emerging to join the ranks of victim-survivors of wartime atrocities beginning with the so-called Texas Tower Massacre(1966) where 14 people gunned down by ex-Marine Charles Whitman on the campus of the UT-Austin followed by the Columbine High School Massacre (1999) of 12 students and 1 teacher by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold followed by Seung-Hui Cho who massacred 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech (2007) followed by….

The point being that a new kind of “domestic terrorism” was (is) contributing a yet another “cause” of PTSD which is only now being fully realized as a traumatic stressor at a national level. But the origins of PTSD, historically, have been with us, as a species, in earlier forms when they were not yet recognized as symptoms of PTSD including, for example, in the character of Nick Adams in Heminway’s short story, “A Way You’ll Never Be,” and in the works of Robert Graves as critiqued in Dr. John Presley’s brilliant historical perspective entitled “Neurasthenia and the Cure of Literature: Robert Graves, Seigfried Sassoon, Andy Collins,” and in Dr. Philip Beidler’s comprehensive Itinerary “Introduction” to Sergeant Back Again “THE VIETNAM WAR NOVEL THAT MADE PTSD REAL!”
Also included in The Anthology of singular clincal importance of the Vietanm War Novel that Made PTSD REAL The Anthology. Also included are two perspectives of Sergeant Back action is:

Texas Tower
Neil Young song, 4 Dead in Ohio.
and clinical papers, grounds for incarceration and divorce, and lectures, of any oday, virtually anything can be described as a “stressor”. That’s a far cry from as stress itself has been recently “

Begining with Philip Beidler, PhD., US Army veteran of Vietnam, Profrssor, U
Harold Kudler, M.D., US Army VA psychiatrist
John Presley, Ph.D.
Tony Williams
George Kearns
Nathan Beck