Opinion: Their war ended 70 years ago. Their trauma didn’t.

By Tim Madigan

Crewmen aboard the USS Yorktown battle fire after the carrier was hit by Japanese bombs,
during the Battle of Midway, seen in this June 4, 1942, file photo. (Anonymous/ASSOCIATED
PRESS)

I sat in the suburban Dallas living room of Earl Crumby as the old soldier quietly wept. His wife
had died a few years before, but Crumby said his tears that day weren’t for her. “As dearly as I
loved that woman, her death didn’t affect me near as much as it does to sit down here and talk to
you about seeing those young boys butchered during the war,” said the white-haired World War
II veteran, who was 71 on that day in 1997. “It was nothing but arms and legs, heads and guts.”

“You’d think you could forget something like that,” said Crumby, whose own war ended with a
shrapnel wound in the Battle of the Bulge. “But you can’t.”
● This part of the article made me feel sad because no matter how hard he attempted he
could not forget the horrors that he witness well in war.
There were also guys named Otis Mackey and George Swinney, and a half-dozen other vets who
inspired my novel of the Greatest Generation that was published this spring. Each had survived
Omaha Beach, the Ardennes Forest or the Pacific Islands, only to have the psychic residue of
combat shatter their golden years.
They talked of night terrors, heavy drinking, survivor’s guilt, depression, exaggerated startle
responses, profound and lingering sadness. The symptoms were familiar to the world by then,
but post-traumatic stress disorder, the diagnosis that came into being in 1980, was widely
assumed to be unique to veterans of Vietnam. “Bad war, bad outcome, bad aftereffects,” is the
way historian Thomas Childers put it.

Those of age in the late 1940s would have known differently. Though it was referred to by other
names (shell shock, combat fatigue, neuropsychiatric disorders) the emotional toll of World War
II was hard to miss in the immediate postwar years; military psychiatric hospitals across the
nation were full of afflicted soldiers, and the press was full of woeful tales. But with the passage
of time and the prevailing male ethos — the strong, silent type — World War II was soon
overshadowed by the Cold War and eventually Vietnam. By the 1990s, amid the mythology of
the Greatest Generation, the psychological costs of the last “good war” had been forgotten.

Yet those costs, as hard as the nation tried to ignore them, did not go away. The soldiers I
interviewed nearly two decades ago, and tens of thousands of others like them, were painful and
often poignant proof of that. Though the reverential books of Tom Brokaw and Stephen Ambrose
glossed over it, the hidden anguish of the Greatest Generation has always been there. “Our
conceptualization of the Greatest Generation is that [the soldiers] came home and got to work,”
said Paula Schnurr, executive director of the National Center for PTSD, who has worked with
World War II veterans since the 1990s. “Many of them looked okay because they went to work,
got married, they raised families — but it doesn’t mean they didn’t have PTSD.”
● This part made me feel despair because these are adults that served and came home and
were expected to move on from all the horrors that they witness.

Of all the men and women who served in the armed forces during World War II, less than 6
percent, about 850,000, are still alive, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. World
War II vets die at the rate of 492 a day. Before it’s too late, we ought to reach beyond the
nostalgia and myth and embrace the truth of war and the Greatest Generation. Bad war, good war
— for those who fight, it’s all the same — means death, disfigurement and horrors no human
heart is equipped to bear.

‘When we got out, you couldn’t talk about things like that,” Otis Mackey told me in his East
Texas living room. “You held it all in. I didn’t want to take it to my family. If you’d say anything,
people wouldn’t believe half of what you say, anyway.”

He was rocking furiously, faster and faster, speaking of his first day in combat, when his best
friend was shot through the neck and killed, and the day he watched fellow soldiers dismembered
by landmines. “The leg with the combat boot and all . . . I had to duck,” he told me. “I seen it
coming at me. I just ducked, and McGhee’s leg went flying right by my head. That has been one
of my guilty points, because I was right there ready to step on that mine. I never could figure out
why it was him and not me.”

Mackey drank heavily when he returned to Texas and worked three jobs as a machinist so he was
too tired to remember his dreams at night. “I don’t know why my wife even stayed with me,” he
said.

By the time we talked, Mackey had been in group therapy for several months with Earl Crumby
and a few other World War II vets at the Dallas VA hospital. By that time in the 1990s, thousands
of old soldiers had been finding their way to PTSD treatment.

“Most of the World War II men that I worked with came to me in their 70s or 80s, after
retirement or the death of a spouse,” said Joan Cook, a professor of psychiatry at Yale and a
PTSD researcher for Veterans Affairs. “Their symptoms seemed to be increasing, and those
events seemed to act as a floodgate.”

Emotional Wheel Check-in 1

So, far after reading this article select the emotion in the first two inner rings that you are
currently feeling at this moment after reading the article.
1. Which emotion did you select? Why? (2-3 sentences)
a. Sad → Despair
b. I selected sad and despair because these soldiers came home with all this trauma
that was valid from everything they witness. I selected despair also because of the
despair these soldiers must have felt coming home and just having to move on
from it.
 2. Highlight 2 examples and annotate the parts of the article that made you feel this emotion
and give elaboration as to why these two parts of the article made you feel that emotion.

For so many veterans, that was when they finally learned they were not crazy or weak. “Pretty
much to a person, for them, learning about PTSD and understanding that people were
researching it in World War II veterans was a real relief,” Schnurr said. “Many people felt
isolated and crazy, and they thought it was just them. And they didn’t talk about it.”

Mackey told me that he generally felt better after VA therapy sessions with other haunted World
War II vets. But there were still days when “I get that empty feeling, just deep down, and I don’t
care whether I live or die.”

Seated on a sofa a few feet away, Mackey’s wife, Helen, began to cry. “He has not told me this,”
she said, “that he doesn’t care if he lives or dies.”

Similar dramas have played out across the centuries, of course, a part of the literature of war
going back to the Iliad. The psychic toll of war has been variously described as nostalgia,
soldier’s heart, shell shock, war neuroses or simply exhaustion, and there have always been
skeptics. Among them was Gen. George Patton, who in 1943 famously slapped two soldiers
being treated for combat-related neuroses, calling one a “yellow bastard.” Patton was sternly
reprimanded by Allied Commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.

The reality was that of the 16 million Americans who served in the armed forces during World
War II, fewer than half saw combat. Of those who did, more than 1 million were discharged for
combat-related neuroses, according to military statistics. In the summer of 1945, Newsweek
reported that “10,000 returning veterans per month . . . develop some kind of psychoneurotic
disorder. Last year there were more than 300,000 of them — and with fewer than 3,000
American psychiatrists and only 30 VA neuropsychiatric hospitals to attend to their painful
needs.”

One of those hospitals was the subject of John Huston's 1946 documentary, "Let There Be
Light," which said that "20% of all battle casualties in the American Army during World War II
were of a neuropsychiatric nature." The film followed the treatment, mostly with talk therapy,
drugs and hypnosis, of "men who tremble, men who cannot sleep, men with pains that are no less
real because they are of a mental origin." Huston's movie was confiscated by the Army just
minutes before its premiere in 1946 and was not allowed to be shown in public until 1981. The
government rationale at the time was protecting the privacy of the soldiers depicted, though
Huston maintained all had signed waivers..

It's true that millions of servicemen returned home and did exactly what Tom Brokaw described
in his seminal 1998 book, "The Greatest Generation." Through hard work and force of will, they
created modern America. But in 1947, nearly half of the beds in every VA hospital in the nation
were still occupied by soldiers with no visible wounds. While there were no reliable statistics on
the topic, the epidemic of alcohol abuse was widely known. The country was also experiencing a
divorce boom: In 1941, 293,000 American couples divorced, a rate of 2.2 per 1,000 people. That
number doubled to 610,000 in 1946, 4.3 divorces per 1,000. It was the highest divorce rate in
U.S. history until 1972, according to government statistics.

There was ubiquitous public discussion and concern for the complex issues facing the returning
soldiers. Popular magazines such as Redbook, Ladies' Home Journal and Life were full of
articles about how to find a job, use the GI bill, or deal with a vet who suffered from nightmares,
sudden rages and debilitating sadness. The film "The Best Years of Our Lives," the story of the
troubled homecoming of three World War II vets, won the 1947 Academy Award for best picture.

Yet that discussion was short-lived, and cultural amnesia set in. The economy recovered, and
jobs were suddenly plentiful. The Cold War began. Through the 1950s, the troubled vet routinely
surfaced as a character in film noir, often as the villain. But the lingering horrors of war
otherwise retreated from the public conversation, often overshadowed by communism.
● They were just forgotten about when the Cold War started and then the Vietnam War.
These veterans were seen as the ‘villain’ in most stories after the 1950’s.
Yet as they went on with their lives, many struggling soldiers would not have recognized
themselves in Brokaw’s eventual rendering: “Mature beyond their years, tempered by what they
had been through, disciplined by their military training and sacrifices. . . . They stayed true to
their values of personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith.”

The Greatest Generation certainly deserved every accolade bestowed on them, Childers says,
“but there is nothing to suggest how complicated those years were.”Or how difficult they
continued to be. A 2010 California study showed that aging World War II veterans were four
times more likely to commit suicide than those their age who had not served in the military.
● This stat is just horrifying to think about how many veterans wanted to commit suicide
and this doesn’t include the number of that actually did commit suicide.
Arthur "Dutch" Schultz, a hero of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, went on to become a
poster boy of sorts for the Greatest Generation, the basis of a character in the 1962 war movie
"The Longest Day" and prominently featured in other World War II books. But there was much
more to his story, including a long battle with alcoholism and two rocky marriages.
His daughter Carol Schultz Vento described his struggles in her 2011 book, "The Hidden Legacy
of World War II." She recently told me of the time she persuaded her suicidal father to put down
his gun. "For all his bravado and success, dad had returned home from the war a shattered and
broken man," Schultz Vento wrote. Dutch Schultz managed to mostly conquer the demons of war
before his death in 2005, but it took him half a century and, his daughter believes, required as
much courage as anything he faced on the battlefield.

She and so many others of her generation also suffered quietly, not understanding the tension in
their households, because the ghosts of the war rarely revealed themselves. This year, I published
a novel that featured a struggling World War II hero as the main character. I wondered about the
book’s relevance today, until I started hearing from readers across the nation who described the
night terrors, depression, heavy drinking and silent pain of their fathers. A story about the hidden
toll of the war helped them make sense of their childhoods. But those stories of the Greatest
Generation remain mostly untold.

Earl Crumby and his fellow soldiers knew too well that when it comes to the human toll, war
does not discriminate. A piece of a German shell tore through his shoulder, “but the deepest
wound was right here,” he said, pointing to his head. “Lord, some nights I have nightmares, and I
can still hear that shell going off in my head. There are just so many of us out there. I know
they’ve got to be having the same problems I have.”

“If you get to digging,” he told me, “you’ll find that soldiers of all wars, they’re bothered with it,
too.”

Emotional Wheel check-in two

So, far after reading this article select the emotion in the outer ring that you are currently feeling
at this moment after reading the article.
1. Which emotion did you select? Why? (2-3 sentences)
a. I selected horrified because it’s absolutely horrifying that these soldiers that
fought for our country. Were just forgotten about when the next war or major
historical event happened.

2. Highlight 2 examples and annotate the parts of the article that made you feel this emotion
and give elaboration as to why these two parts of the article made you feel that emotion.

Emotional Wheel Part 2

Death That Need Not Have Been
By Flora Hendricks

Death That Need Not Have Been

I feel the loneliness after,

The death that need not have been–
I hear the screech of brakes,
And see the muddy shoes removed,
Lying beside the still form,
The too-quick boy,
Covered with hempen bags,
Flies gathering.

It makes the heart sick,

As an old moon upsets a morning sky;
Or stills the heart
As does the shriek of wind through chimneys
Through old cellars,
Through attics
Through windows,
Rattling through insecure windows.

I feel the loneliness after death,

Death that need not have been–
I hear the muffled cry of millions
The battle shriek in martial music;
I hear the scream of bombs
And see the small feet flying,
Fear-whitened faces staring,
Huddled in death,
Death that need not have been.

Emotional Wheel Poem 1

Select three emotions starting off with the inner ring and working your way out from each ring
about the poem you read above.
Expectations
● 2 sentences per emotion that you felt

1. List the emotions you selected in the order you selected them. Following the listing of
each emotion elaborate on why you selected the emotion you did.
 a. Fearful → Anxious → Worried
i. Fearful
1. I felt fearful at the following part ‘I feel the loneliness after, The
death that need not have been.’ I felt this way because of how the
author mentioned loneliness. It makes me wonder if the author was
talking about someone who had died that was all alone and it was a
death that needed not have been.
ii. Anxious
1. I felt anxious at the following part ‘And see the muddy shoes
removed, Lying beside the still form, The too-quick boy, Covered
with hempen bags, Flies gathering.’ This part of the poem makes
me feel anxious because they are obviously describing a dead body
that they just found on the side of the road. Another thing that
made me feel anxious was the part of the author saying ‘flies
gathering’ and how long has the body been sitting there.
iii. Worried
1. I felt worried at the following part ‘I hear the scream of bombs and
see the small feet flying, fear-Whitened faces staring, Huddled in
death, Death that need not have been.’ I felt worried during this
part because of the line ‘small feet flying’ Are children being
bombed? And then ‘fear-whitened faces staring’ made me feel
worried because are they people just laying dead in the middle of
the street pale and white forever stuck with fear on their faces?

2. Highlight 3 examples from the poem that highlight the growth of your emotions.

The Extermination of the Jews

To Donald Justice

A thousand years from now

They will be remembered as heroes.
A thousand years from now
They will still be promised their past.

Objects of beauty notwithstanding,

Once more they will appear
For their ruin, seeking a purse,
Hard bread or a heavy weapon,
For those who must survive,
But no one shall survive,
We who have not forgotten,
Our child-shall out remember:

Their victims’ puous chanting—

Last wishes, last Yiddish, last dreaming—
Were defeats with which the Gestapo
Continues ceasing and ceasing

Emotional Wheel 2

Select three emotions starting off with the inner ring and working your way out from each ring
about the poem you read above.
Expectations
● 2 sentences per emotion that you felt

1. List the emotions you selected in the order you selected them. Following the listing of
each emotion elaborate on why you selected the emotion you did.
Happy → Proud → Valued
a. Happy
i. I felt happy during the following part ‘A thousand years from now. They
will be remembered as heroes.’ I felt happy at this part because of that the
lives that the lost will be remembered. And also that they will be
remembered as heroes.
 b. Proud
i. I felt bread during this part of the poem because in this part of the
highlighted poem they talk about how they will appear again. For their
spirits are seeking what was taken from them as they arrived at any
concertation camp that they arrived at.
c. Valued
i. I felt valued in this particular part because ‘We who have not forgotten’
because it’s stating that anyone who knows of the Jew’s stories values
them. And that we have not forgotten about everything that they went
through.

2. Highlight 3 examples from the poem that highlight the growth of emotions that you felt.

Reflection
● What was the overall emotion that you felt throughout the readings of the texts? How did
the overall mood of the poems and article make you feel? Articulate your thoughts below
in 2-3 paragraphs or 10-15 bullet points.
● Overall reaction: Astonished
○ I felt astonished because of everything that these soldiers went through.
○ These soldiers came home and were basically forgotten about by the American
public.
○ Even though those soldiers weren’t completely ignored they were helped out but
after 1947.
■ They were left to figure it out on their own with barely any help.
■ They suffered in silence and hid everything from their families.
● The things that these soldiers witness should be things no one
should bear witness to in their life.
○ Then reading the poems made me feel a whirlwind of emotions.
■ Such as happiness and fear.
● These emotions are on completely different spectrums of the
Emotion Wheel.