What I had was classic short-term PTSD. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s exactly the response you want to have when your life is in danger: you want to be vigilant, you want to avoid situations where you are not in control, you want to react to strange noises, you want to sleep lightly and wake easily, you want to have flashbacks and nightmares that remind you of specific threats to your life, and you want to be, by turns, angry and depressed. Anger keeps you ready to fight, and depression keeps you from being too active and putting yourself in more danger. Flashbacks also serve to remind you of the danger that’s out there—a “highly efficient single-event survival-learning mechanism,” as one researcher termed it. All humans react to trauma in this way, and most mammals do as well. It may be unpleasant, but it’s preferable to getting killed.
Like depression and grief, PTSD can be exacerbated by other factors but tends to diminish with time. My panic attacks eased up and eventually stopped, though a strange emotionality took their place. I found myself tearing up at things that I otherwise would have just smiled at or not noticed at all. Once, I got so emotional watching an elderly clerk doing her job at the post office that I had to walk out and come back later to send my mail. It happened in my sleep too: strange combat dreams that weren’t scary but somehow triggered a catastrophic outpouring of sorrow. Invariably I would wake up and just lie there in the dark, trying to figure out why feelings that seemed to belong to other people kept spilling out of me. I wasn’t a soldier—though I’d spent plenty of time with soldiers—and at that point I hadn’t lost any close friends in combat. And yet when I went to sleep, it was like I became part of some larger human experience that was utterly heartbreaking. It was far too much to acknowledge when I was awake.
I had a much older friend named Joanna who was very concerned about how I was faring psychologically after the wars I’d covered. Joanna died soon after I came back from one particularly long stint overseas, and I had almost no reaction to the news until I started talking to her nephew about the trips she’d taken during the early 1960s to register black voters in the South. People were getting killed for doing that, and I remember Joanna telling me that she and her husband, Ellis, never knew if she would make it back alive when she left on those trips. After a year of covering combat there was something about her willingness to die for others—for human dignity—that completely undid me. Stories about soldiers had the same effect on me: completely divorced from any sense of patriotism, accounts of great bravery could emotionally annihilate me. The human concern for others would seem to be the one story that, adequately told, no person can fully bear to hear.
Joanna’s husband, Ellis, was part Lakotah, part Apache, and had been born on a wagon in Missouri just before the Great Depression. He married Joanna when she was sixteen and he was twenty-five. I would go visit them on weekends when I was in college; Joanna would put me to work around their property until it got dark, and then the three of us would have dinner together. Afterward, Ellis and I would retreat to the living room to talk. He would smoke Carlton ultralights and drink cold coffee and tell me about the world, and I mostly just sat and listened. He seemed to have access to a kind of ancient human knowledge that completely transcended the odd, cloistered life that he was living in Connecticut when I met him. One of his favorite stories took place during some senseless war between the English and the French. At one point it was proposed that a lighthouse off the coast of France be destroyed by British warships to impede shipping and navigation.
“Sir,” an English admiral reminded the king, “we are at war with the French, not with the entire human race.”
If war were purely and absolutely bad in every single aspect and toxic in all its effects, it would probably not happen as often as it does. But in addition to all the destruction and loss of life, war also inspires ancient human virtues of courage, loyalty, and selflessness that can be utterly intoxicating to the people who experience them. Ellis’s story is affecting because it demonstrates war’s ability to ennoble people rather than just debase them. The Iroquois Nation presumably understood the transformative power of war when they developed parallel systems of government that protected civilians from warriors and vice versa. Peacetime leaders, called sachems, were often chosen by women and had complete authority over the civil affairs of the tribe until war broke out. At that point war leaders took over, and their sole concern was the physical survival of the tribe. They were not concerned with justice or harmony or fairness, they were concerned only with defeating the enemy. If the enemy tried to negotiate an end to hostilities, however, it was the sachems, not the war leaders, who made the final decision. If the offer was accepted, the war leaders stepped down so that the sachems could resume leadership of the tribe.