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JOHN CONNOLLY: The Whisperers
A CHARLIE PARKER THRILLER
Stress damages the mind: that was what they didn't understand, the people back home, the ones who hadn't been there. Even the army didn't understand that, not until it was too late. Take a little R & G, they said. Hang out with the family. Make love to your girlfriend. Occupy yourself. Get a job, find a routine, embrace normality.
But he couldn't have done that, even if his legs didn't end halfway down his thighs, because stress is like a poison, a toxin working its way through the system, except that it affects only one vital organ: the brain.
(…) You became like the dregs, and it wasn't your fault, because you hadn't done anything wrong. You'd simply done your duty.
During the Civil War, they called it 'irritable heart.' For the soldiers of the Great War, it was 'shell shock,' and in World War II it was 'battle fatigue,' or 'war neurosis.' Then it became 'post-Vietnam syndrome,' and now it was PTSD. He sometimes wondered if the Romans had a word for it, and the Greeks. He had read the Iliad upon his return, part of his attempt to understand war through its literature, and believed that he saw in the grief of Achilles for his friend Patroclus, and in the rage that followed, something of his own grief for the comrades that he had lost, Damien most of all.
They left you this way. Your emotions are no longer under control. You become depressed, paranoid, removed from those who care about you. You believe that you are still at war. You fight your bedclothes at night. You become estranged from your loved ones, and they leave you.
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