Watching a friend die is not an easy thing to cope with and, and in a sense, will haunt you until the day you die. The Vietnam War was one of the biggest mistakes in American history. This was the first war in American history where the country started learning about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.). Soldiers, who were young adults, in Vietnam encountered many horrific images during their time overseas. Considering the environment that these young men were thrown into, it is easy to understand how thousands came back to the states with P.T.S.D. Today, scientists know everything about P.T.S.D. and how to treat it properly, but back in the 1970s people did not know much about the disorder and how serious the affects were on the veterans.

In Leslie Roberts’ article, “the Veterans Administration (VA) has found that 470,000 Vietnam veterans still suffer from a major psychological disorder directly related to the war. The earlier study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), found only 66,000 to be affected with post-traumatic stress disorder” (Leslie Roberts). This is important to take notice of, because this quote represents the differing views of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in the United States back in the 1970s. Some of the most common people who came back with P.T.S.D. were soldiers who “experienced heavy combat or were otherwise exposed to ‘war zone stress,’ such as loss of buddies or witnessing or participating in atrocities” (Leslie Roberts). During the war, soldiers had to have distractions to take their minds off of the horrors of war. Horrors like witnessing friends die, killing of innocent civilians (women and children), etc. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried each character has his own item that reminds them of home. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross had letters and a picture of his college girl crush Martha, Henry Dobbins carried extra rations, Dave Jensen carried hygiene products, Ted Lavender had tranquilizers, Norman Bowker had a diary, Rat Kiley had comic books, and Kiowa had a New Testament. Each item meant something different to each man, but the one common factor with each item is that it reminds the men of home. These items helped up to a certain point, but some images were just too traumatizing for these soldiers. 

Another technique soldiers used to help get them through the war was they tried to dehumanize the human life. A perfect example of dehumanization of a body is when Mitchell Sanders gave a dead Vietnamese boy’s thumb to Norman Bowker. The way Mitchell Sanders talked about and dealt with the boy’s body was startling to say the least. Sanders not only cut off the boy’s thumb, but he also “kicked the boy’s head, [and] watched the flies scatter” (O’Brien 334). Mitchell Sanders did not see the boy as a previous living human, but more as just an object in war. Some soldiers had to have that same mindset just so they can try and live with what was going on around them. When Ted Lavender was shot and killed, everyone reacted differently to his death.  Lieutenant Cross was devastated and broken when he learned about Ted Lavender’s death. Cross felt like he was responsible for one of his men’s death and he took the news accordingly. Lieutenant Cross felt like he loved Martha more than his own men, and he knows that “this is something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war” (O’Brien 336). Cross reacted by burning Martha’s letters and pictures as coping mechanism. Norman Bowker reacted much more casually about the death. He started talking about how he has heard of people getting shot while “pissing”.

America today knows the serious effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and how to look/test for the symptoms. Leslie Roberts writes that in the 1980s, “[the] CDC used a structured interview known as the Diagnostic Interview Schedule” (Leslie Roberts). The main problem with this interview was that it had never been tested to identify P.T.S.D. in a person, so people did not know how well it picked up the symptoms for the disorder. The Veterans Association had researchers test to see if the CDC’s interview was accurate at picking up Post Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms, and they said that the DIS (Diagnostic Interview Schedule) “did not do very well” (Leslie Roberts). Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was not a new phenomenon associated with just the Vietnam War, veterans from Laos and Cambodia still have and suffer from this disorder. Leslie Robert’s writes that the VA conducted a new study that showed 15% of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia veterans suffered with P.T.S.D., which is around 470,000 American soldiers. This same study also shows that the soldiers who came back with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder were 9% women, 19% black, and 27% Hispanic.

The war with Vietnam brought out huge amounts ugliness in American soldiers. Bob Kerrey, a veteran from the Vietnam War, admitted that he led a combat mission that was “responsible for shooting dead more than 20 unarmed civilians, mostly women and children. After the killings, the squad’s commander reported that the unit killed 21 Viet Cong, and Kerrey was awarded a Bronze Star” (M.S.S.) on the anniversary of the Vietnam War in 2001. Gerhard Klann, A soldier, in Kerrey’s unit said that Kerrey intentionally targeted Vietnamese civilians. Kerrey responded to Klann’s remarks by denying that he purposely slaughtered innocent civilians, and he said he only returned fire after being shot at. Part of the blame goes to the orders that Bob Kerrey received. The orders were to “take no prisoners”, and to “kill any Vietnamese who crossed paths with the US forces” (M.S.S.). The frightening thing is that Kerrey was not even one of the worst cases of war crime. In The Things They Carried, the reader saw the ugliness in dehumanization and in death. After the death of Lavender, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross “led his men into the village of Than Khe. They burned everything. They shot chickens and dogs, they trashed the village well, they called in artillery and watched the wreckage. (O’Brien 336). This quote shows how emotions run deep even with just one soldier dying, imagine the emotions when witnessing a massacre of 20 plus innocent civilians. 

    The Vietnam War hit Americans hard. The war took many lives during battle, and even after the war was over. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ran rampant in the minds of most of the United States’ soldiers, coming back home to the states with severe mental problems from what they witnessed. 470,000 people came back with P.T.S.D., which is almost half a million people. Even though soldiers had their own ways of attempting to cope with the pain of this war, ultimately the efforts did nothing for a good amount of soldiers.  
