‘GI Joe’ comic tackles the psychological burden of coming home from war

Thank you for the great share LTC Eugene Chu

A medical doctor can clean and suture, set and splint, amputate and bandage, repair and replace, prescribe and inject, but they cannot give life or heal. Even when procreating, doctors are not creating life, only perpetuating the species. Complicated surgeries are facilitated by thousands of years of trial and error, mechanical inventions, electrical devices, and pharmacological compounds and potions. Yet none of their ritual dancing, feather waving, gourd shaking, or magic beads can induce healing.
Healing relies exclusively on an individuals autoimmune and repair systems that fight infection and repair cellular damage. A medical facility manned and equipped by the best medical technology and practitioners merely "facilitates" healing by preventing further injury, illness, or infection. Doctors cannot force the healing process. Medical science is much more art than science. Scientific method has been combined with analytical thinking to create optimal choices in a menu of options. Correctly identify the signs and symptoms, followed by the appropriate treatment, the patient lives if the body then heals itself. Misidentify the problem, pursue the wrong treatment, and the patient most likely dies. Drilling holes in the cranium and draining "bad blood" have their place, even in "modern" medicine.
When it comes to analyzing the thought processes and aberrant perceptions of reality in the human mind, the practitioners are much more reliant on "juju". The dance ritual involves many sessions with a "therapist" asking mountains of questions to determine the mental state of a patient and their reasoning ability. This depends entirely on the patient providing complete and honest responses about their thoughts and emotions, despite their defense mechanisms and coping mechanisms. Evasion and outright prevarication on the part of the patient help maintain a positive self image or public persona. Socially unacceptable responses are avoided and memory of traumatic experiences are frequently suppressed.
A patient is still a human being with natural instincts. Being a social animal, humans want to create a positive perception of themselves in the minds of others. The evasion technique can be compared to a game of cat and mouse. Knowing that the other person cannot see or sense our thoughts, we give only information that supports our positive selfimage. The prevarication technique can be called the fox and hare game. In order to achieve their goal, a fox does not announce their intentions to the hare and spoil their odds of success. To inform anyone of perverse or illegal intentions is to invite Intervention by government authorities.
If a person has contemplated or perpetrated an illegal or immoral act, it will likely affect their conscience. Sociopaths and psychopaths are generally aware of the legal and moral standards of conduct. For them, the reward is simply greater than their concern with being ostracized or punished. If a person has justified these thoughts and actions to themselves, they feel no compulsion to admit them to others or restrained from repeating them.
How do you answer the question: "Do you now or have you ever had thoughts of harming yourself or others"? An honest person would answer "yes". A prudent person would answer "no".
A troubled person wants to understand their experiences, thoughts, emotions, and the recurring dreams. They do not want to be judged, analysed, treated, reported, committed to an institution, self-incriminated, or embarrassed. Can a decorated soldier forget that in their first engagement on a battlefield that they released everything in their bowels and bladder into their pants? Can they forget that at some point that they were incapacitated by fear and regurgitated the contents of their stomach all over themselves? Not really. Can they ever relate that experience to another living soul? Not likely. Can they ever dispel the thought that they could have captured an enemy combatant rather than having shot, stabbed, or otherwise killed them? Not really. Can they ever reveal that to another living soul? Most unlikely.
Why do combat veterans not want to discuss their combat experience? Because they do not want to relive the memory, disgust the listener, or risk rejection and loss of respect. They don't want to take it out of the dark place it is stored, turn it over and over like a baseball to examine it from all angles, or try to explain it to someone that has no frame of reference. We may relate innocuous or humorous incidents, but taking the cover off of the baseball and looking inside is taboo. We don't get together with a comrade that was mere feet away during an incident to compare notes on what happened. We look at one another, nod a greeting, simply acknowledge that shit happens, and that we were there when shit happened.

Whatever medium is most effective in getting into the head of the solder/veteran.