The Mental Damage of War

I have been with the 44th infantry for 2 weeks now. My job is to observe them,
and what life is like for the soldiers here in Vietnam. One thing jumped out to me
after an attack a little over a week ago though. We were walking through the jungle,
when a young man named Chris Roberts who was at the head of the unit sprained his
ankle when he got his foot stuck between tree roots. He got moved to the middle of
the unit so he could lean on a fellow soldier, and Paul Benning moved to the front.
About 50 yards further, Paul stepped on a landmine, and was killed instantly. The
sudden loss was hard for the whole group, but that night I noticed something seemed
off about Chris. Every once in awhile his leg would slightly twitch, and during
conversations hed sometimes drift off and just stare into space (Bourke).
Something seemed very familiar about how he was acting, but I couldnt place
my finger on it. It suddenly hit me the next day, when memories of my dad taking me
to see some of his old WWI buddies came to me, specifically his friend Morty. Morty
was a nice enough fellow, but similar to what I now noticed in Chris, Morty had a
twitch in his face, and would drift off into his own world in the middle of
conversations. I asked my dad about it when I got older, and he said it was due to
shell shock from what Morty did during WWI. My dad said he had had shell shock
himself, and gave me a little lesson about how there were 80,000 cases of shell
shock in the British army during WWI (Bourke).
That day, even though Chris was still hobbling a bit due to his ankle, he
demanded to walk at the front of the group. When we stopped I decided to have a
little talk with Chris. He was closed off at first, but after a bit I got him to finally open
up about what was bothering him. I was thrown back when he said he felt guilty
about Pauls death. Chris felt it should have been him, because he had originally been
at the front where Paul was when he stepped on the landmine. I told him that didnt
make him responsible, and that he had nothing to feel guilty over, but he said he still

couldnt shake the feeling of guilt. As we walked on I remembered Nietzsche's Das

schlechte gewissen, or bad conscience, the idea that humans can feel guilt or
remorse even though they have done nothing bad, but rather from a sense of
responsibility (Sherman). This got me thinking more about the Pauls death, and
simply the senselessness of it. Its impossible to think of why Pauls death happened,
and I realized it becomes easier to just place the blame on yourself, what you did or
didnt do (Wood). Chris Roberts is carrying underserved weight on his mind, and if
you look closer at this war and others, there are too many men like Chris and Morty.
JP