My late maternal grandfather, David Lewis Stokes. I idolized him as a small boy. Still do. A tall, quiet, southern gentleman of the old school, he was drafted pretty quickly after Pearl Harbor like so many others.
He began his military career as an anti-aircraft gunner in a Pennsylvania National Guard unit where many of the men still spoke Pennsylvania-Dutch (a German-English patois). After time guarding Dutch oil fields on Curacao in the Caribbean, he later volunteered to become a paratrooper, jumping out of the old DC-3. He also trained as glider infantry.
Miraculously, however, he, his two brothers, and three brothers-in-law all managed to make it home from corners of various theaters of war. Many others did not.
At some point in all of this, my grandfather witnessed a friend's death nearby, something that I suspect troubled him for the rest of his life now that I look back on it. I asked about it as a small boy one time after perusing his division's memory book, which I now have on my bookshelf. He replied that he had been there when it happened, and the subject was quietly changed. Somehow, I realized even at that young age that it was an experience he did not care to talk about, so I never mentioned it again.
No one talked of PTSD in those days of the early to mid-1970s although there might have been early recognition that many recent veterans of the Vietnam War came home from their time in country with still open psychological wounds. My grandfather managed to rejoin civilian life where he enjoyed a reasonably productive postwar life and career after mustering out in September 1945 although he was not back home in North Carolina until early '46.
But when I was a child and teenager, he would occasionally wake us in the night with soft, eery cries of "No! No! No!" until my grandmother would calm him, so he could return to sleep. Again, this was something no one talked about at the time. Piecing things together now, however, I suspect strongly those episodes stemmed from that incident when he was a young soldier.
When I think about it, those kinds of sacrifices that so many around the world have made for the rest of us in various conflicts, I am struck dumb and realize just how much we take for granted. I am reasonably sure that I could not do myself what service men and women have done and continue to do when called upon to perform their duty.
While my own politics and views might not align with those of earlier times and other places, or indeed own own era, military personnel past and present have my deepest admiration and respect. In many ways, they were and are the best of us.
-- Stokes
Comments
I remember my own grandfather having served in the far east during WWII was reluctant to go into any detail relating to being in action, as a child I too had a understanding that it was not a topic to dwell on.
My Great-Grandfather meanwhile went into a mental health institution shortly after the Great War and I remember a family story relating that his mind was damaged by the effects of poison gas. Only recently I found his service makes no mention of gas and I therefore assume his breakdown was probably more likely related to his experiences on the Western Front. Blaming gas I think was a way of dealing with it at a time when, as you say, PTSD was not understood or accepted, being viewed through old, redundant notions of bravery and cowardice.