After War

[grandpa]

This thread is about human behavior after a war. I'll sue the Bataan Death March as an example. First, a little background:

Japan Focus April 9, 2008 [marked] the 66th anniversary of the fall of Bataan which resulted in the largest surrender by the United States Army in its history. Over 77,000 American and Filipino troops were to become victims of one of the most brutal episodes in the Pacific War—the Bataan Death March.

Now, consider the following:

...Each survivor had to find his own way to deal with the painful memory of being a POW of the Japanese. Not many people understood “post traumatic stress disorder” in those days. Robert Brown of Army Air Corps was only 17 years old when he walked the Bataan Death March. He weighed 82 pounds when he was sent to a POW camp in Mukden, Manchuria. He was liberated by Soviet forces in August 1945. When he came home, he did not know how to readjust to normal life: I came home, but I was still in jail… I couldn’t sleep… I couldn’t converse with anybody. I spoke some Japanese and knew some Chinese cuss words. But I couldn’t talk to anyone…There were no jobs. I was uneducated, for all purposes. I knew I could survive in a prisoner-of-war camp, but what else could I do? The only thing I could do was to drink. One time, I was sleeping and was having flashbacks. My mother came in to shake me and wake me up. I came out of the bed and held her by the throat. I woke up and said, "What in the hell am I doing!" I told her, "Mother, don't ever come in and touch me when I am sleeping because I don't know what I am going to do."

How do we deal with these kinds of situations? War really does change the "public mind," and most of us have surely seen examples of PTSD.

Grandpa h.