Everyone Sang
- Frank Davidoff, MD, Editor
For those of us who have never actually been in live battle, under real fire, the horrors of war are hard to get ahold of. And for those who have, it seems difficult to tell the others what really happened.
Still, many have tried. After telling about killing someone during a battle in Vietnam (“I am pulling back the slide to put a round in the chamber. I must kill this man before he kills me. I must take his life away from him. My hand shakes. I will ask God to steady my hand. I will ask God to help me kill this man killing me.”), Michael Norman puts it this way [1]:
I, too, of course, am dead. The bullet that killed Dong killed me. One shot, two souls. I am now a hollow man, empty and alone. My psyche has a cicatrix.
It can hardly be any wonder, therefore, that all wars create war syndromes, those constellations of nonspecific but disabling symptoms and signs whose ultimate explanation is still elusive but that seem in part to be a way for persons who have been in war to express things they've seen and done that are literally unspeakable [2]. In Norman's words:
War …
This 100-word excerpt has been provided in the absence of an abstract.
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