Deja Vu

Black Heart

Tags:

Iraq War,

PTSD,

Siegfried Sassoon,

World War I

“Pentagon: No Purple Heart for PTSD,” Stars and Stripes, Jan. 6, 2009.

ARLINGTON, Va. — Defense officials have rejected the idea that troops suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder should be eligible for the Purple Heart.

"PTSD is an anxiety disorder caused by witnessing or experiencing a traumatic event; it is not a wound intentionally caused by the enemy from an ‘outside force or agent,’ but is a secondary effect caused by witnessing or experiencing a traumatic event," said Defense Department spokeswoman Eileen Lainez.

The matter came up in May, when a military psychologist at Fort Bliss, Texas, told reporters he felt that making troops suffering from PTSD eligible for the Purple Heart would help remove the disorder’s stigma.

"These guys have paid at least a high — as high a price, some of them — as anybody with a traumatic brain injury, as anybody with shrapnel wound, and what it does is it says this is the wound that isn’t worthy, and I say it is," John E. Fortunato said in May.

“A Soldier’s Declaration,” by Siegfried Sassoon, July 1917.
With the help of pacifists Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell, Siegfried Sassoon’s “Declaration” made its way into British newspapers and was even read aloud in Parliament. Sassoon, among the most celebrated of the First World War’s soldier-poets (and also one of Britain’s most courageous officers during the war), was eventually treated for neurasthenia (shell-shock) at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland.

Lt. Siegfried Sassoon.
3rd Batt: Royal Welsh Fusiliers.
July, 1917.

I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise.

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