Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Foreword: What Does Trauma Do?
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction An Anthropology of the Effects of Genocide and Mass Violence
- Part I Private and Public Memory
- Part II Symptom and Syndrome
- Part III Response and Recovery
- 11 The Chaplain Turns to God
- 12 Acehnese Women’s Narratives of Traumatic Experience, Resilience, and Recovery
- 13 Rwanda’s Gacaca Trials
- 14 Pasts Imperfect
- 15 Atrocity and Non-Sense
- 16 Growing Up on the Front Line
- 17 The Role of Traditional Rituals for Reintegration and
- Commentary Wrestling with the Angels of History
- Index
- References
11 - The Chaplain Turns to God
Negotiating Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the American Military
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Foreword: What Does Trauma Do?
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction An Anthropology of the Effects of Genocide and Mass Violence
- Part I Private and Public Memory
- Part II Symptom and Syndrome
- Part III Response and Recovery
- 11 The Chaplain Turns to God
- 12 Acehnese Women’s Narratives of Traumatic Experience, Resilience, and Recovery
- 13 Rwanda’s Gacaca Trials
- 14 Pasts Imperfect
- 15 Atrocity and Non-Sense
- 16 Growing Up on the Front Line
- 17 The Role of Traditional Rituals for Reintegration and
- Commentary Wrestling with the Angels of History
- Index
- References
Summary
In the spring of 2007, I sat down at a café in San Antonio, Texas, to talk with a recently retired army officer, whom I will call Chaplain Matthew. He had spent much of the early Iraq war in Baghdad, offering spiritual guidance and counseling to American service members there. He said that many of the U.S. soldiers then fighting in Iraq were raised on after-school reruns of the 1970s show The Brady Bunch, with its mild portrayal of suburban family life, and that this was the kind of an ideal world they were expecting when they went to Iraq and faced the consequences of war for the first time. He reported finding that war brings about “a loss of innocence.” He mused a little further about American apple pie optimism before asking, rather sharply, “But does that make ’em PTSD?”
The fact that Chaplain Matthew felt in a position to ask this question is, at base, the subject of this chapter, which briefly examines how posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been actively negotiated and contested among service members, chaplains, and mental health care providers in the U.S. military. In framing this discussion, it helps to take a step back and consider the history of PTSD itself and how it has traditionally been approached in the scholarly literature.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Genocide and Mass ViolenceMemory, Symptom, and Recovery, pp. 263 - 279Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014