Haunted By Combat

Across history, the condition has been called soldier's heart, shell shock, or combat fatigue. It is now increasingly common as our service men and women return from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other ongoing combat zones. Since 1990, Veterans' centers here have treated more than 1.6 million affected men and women, including an estimated 100,000 from the Gulf War and an untallied total from the Iraq front and fighting in Afghanistan. The number also includes some 35,000 World War II veterans, because PTSD does not fade easily. Regardless of the months, years, and even decades that have passed, the traumatic events can flash back as seemingly real as they were when they occurred.In Haunted by Combat Paulson and Krippner range across history and into current experiences and treatments for this haunting disorder. They take us into the minds of PTSD-affected veterans, as they struggle against the traumatic events lingering in their minds, sometimes exploding into violent behavior. The authors explain how and why PTSD develops—and how we can help service members take the steps to heal today.

The Proceedings of the Calgary History of Medicine Days represent a series of volumes in the history of medicine and healthcare that publishes the work of young and emerging researchers in the field, hence providing a unique publishing format. The annual Calgary History of Medicine Days Conference, established in 1991, brings together undergraduate and early graduate students from across Canada, the USA, the UK, and Europe to give paper and poster presentations on a wide variety of topics from the history of medicine and healthcare from an interdisciplinary perspective. The History of Medicine Days offers an annual platform for discussions and exchanges between participants over recent research findings, methodological perspectives, or work-in-progress descriptions of ongoing historiographical projects. This book brings together a number of reviewed and edited conference papers, comprising topics from historical medical classics, physicianship and the doctor’s role, military medicine, and disfigured bodies in anatomical and media perspectives. In addition, it includes the papers given by the conference’s internationally renowned keynote speaker, Dr Guel Russel. It further comprises all of the abstracts of the conference for documentation purposes and is well illustrated with diagrams and images pertaining to the history of medicine.

A harrowing yet inspiring portrait of a tormented consciousness struggling for reconciliation and peace, JARHEAD is authentic, revelatory and brilliantly crafted. Anthony Swofford's grandfather fought in WWII; his father fought in Vietnam; and he - a directionless, testosterone-battered teenager - became a scout/sniper in the marines and fought in the Gulf War. His account of that time is also part of a lineage - after Wilfred Owen, Norman Mailer, Michael Herr and Tim O'Brien, it brings the raw and searing tradition of soldiers' stories up to date.

Winner of a 2021 South Central Modern Language Association Book Prize At the heart of America’s slave system was the legal definition of people as property. While property ownership is a cornerstone of the American dream, the status of enslaved people supplies a contrasting American nightmare. Sarah Gilbreath Ford considers how writers in works from nineteenth-century slave narratives to twenty-first-century poetry employ gothic tools, such as ghosts and haunted houses, to portray the horrors of this nightmare. Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic thus reimagines the southern gothic, which has too often been simply equated with the macabre or grotesque and then dismissed as regional. Although literary critics have argued that the American gothic is driven by the nation’s history of racial injustice, what is missing in this critical conversation is the key role of property. Ford argues that out of all of slavery’s perils, the definition of people as property is the central impetus for haunting because it allows the perpetration of all other terrors. Property becomes the engine for the white accumulation of wealth and power fueled by the destruction of black personhood. Specters often linger, however, to claim title, and Ford argues that haunting can be a bid for property ownership. Through examining works by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Sherley Anne Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Natasha Trethewey, Ford reveals how writers can use the gothic to combat legal possession with spectral possession.

The house next door to the Kennedys appears to be haunted by an all-pervasive evil, and the couple watches as a succession of owners becomes engulfed by the sinister force, until the Kennedys set out to destroy the house themselves.

A powerful, haunting, provocative memoir of a Marine in Iraq—and his struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in a system trying to hide the damage done Marine Sergeant Clint Van Winkle flew to war on Valentine's Day 2003. His battalion was among the first wave of troops that crossed into Iraq, and his first combat experience was the battle of Nasiriyah, followed by patrols throughout the country, house to house searches, and operations in the dangerous Baghdad slums. But after two tours of duty, certain images would not leave his memory—a fragmented mental movie of shooting a little girl; of scavenging parts from a destroyed, blood-spattered tank; of obliterating several Iraqi men hidden behind an ancient wall; and of mistakenly stepping on a "soft spot," the remains of a Marine killed in combat. After his return home, Van Winkle sought help at a Veterans Administration facility, and so began a maddening journey through an indifferent system that promises to care for veterans, but in fact abandons many of them. From riveting scenes of combat violence, to the gallows humor of soldiers fighting a war that seems to make no sense, to moments of tenderness in a civilian life ravaged by flashbacks, rage, and doubt, Soft Spots reveals the mind of a soldier like no other recent memoir of the war that has consumed America.

"Originally published in single magazine form in G.I. combat #120-156"--Vol. 2.

An Iraq War veteran's riveting journey from suicidal despair to hope After serving in a scout-sniper platoon in Mosul, Tom Voss came home carrying invisible wounds of war — the memory of doing or witnessing things that went against his fundamental beliefs. This was not a physical injury that could heal with medication and time but a "moral injury" — a wound to the soul that eventually urged him toward suicide. Desperate for relief from the pain and guilt that haunted him, Voss embarked on a 2,700-mile journey across America, walking from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to the Pacific Ocean with a fellow veteran. Readers walk with these men as they meet other veterans, Native American healers, and spiritual teachers who appear in the most unexpected forms. At the end of their trek, Voss realizes he is really just beginning his healing. He pursues meditation training and discovers sacred breathing techniques that shatter his understanding of war and himself, and move him from despair to hope. Voss's story will give inspiration to veterans, their friends and family, and survivors of all kinds.