I can just imagine what the late, legendary Army General George S. Patton might have said about Jeff Hanks, the Army Spc from Fort Campbell, Ky., who recently went AWOL (Absent Without Leave) because of what he says was his untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), only to turn himself in on Veterans Day.
In a scene from the classic bio-pic "Patton," the General, played so powerfully by George C. Scott, encounters a young American soldier at a field hospital in Sicily who is suffering from severe emotional stress from combat. Patton asks the soldier to describe his injuries. 'It's my nerves,' the soldier replies. Instead of trying to understand the young man's plight, Patton reportedly went ballistic, slapped the soldier, and berated him as a coward. The scene came from a 1943 dispatch from journalist Drew Pearson, who said on his radio show that it got so ugly in the hospital that day that a nurse tried to tackle Patton, and had to be held back by a doctor.
Watching "Patton" as a kid, I got caught up in Scott's macho, larger-than-life portrayal as much as anyone else. Scott won an Oscar for the role. But war isn't a movie, and I've learned a lot since then about the psychological effects of combat on even our very toughest fighters. PTSD is as old as war itself, as this well-researched article points out, and the military has come far in terms of how it views and treats soldiers with combat-induced psychological trauma. But the old-school stigma of PTSD has certainly not gone away completely.
What do you think Patton would say about our troops with PTSD if he were alive today? Do you think that troops and veterans who file PTSD claims are cowards? I'd like your honest opinion, please share them in the comment section below.
I'm not going to sit here and say that General Patton was evil. But he was such a loose cannon he was prone to making preposterous declarations, and his wrong-minded thoughts on the subject of combat fatigue, or combat stress, or shell shock, as they called it back in the day, prevailed among many in his generation.
By numerous accounts a man who simply loved war, Patton was wrong about that young man in that hospital bed. He didn't know the first thing about PTSD, or maybe he was just in denial or didn't care. As many as half of our troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from some form of PTSD and/or Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and it's likely that the percentages were near that high in World War II and Korea and certainly Vietnam. Cowards? No, General, our troops are not cowards. They weren't then, and they aren't now. They are quite the opposite. They're tough as nails. But they're human. And war can and often is truly hell.
