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this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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James Jones' Whistle (the third book in his sort-of trilogy which includes From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line) is also about the post-battle trauma experienced by WWII combat veterans. It is remarkably like all the Vietnam books and movies - perhaps the moral aspect of whether the war was just or not is less important than the fact that war is a very fucked up experience.
Ooh, thanks for the comment! I was only familiar with From Here to Eternity, and looked up the other two. If I may try to expand and clarify my comment, absolutely, the trauma experienced in war can destroy the people, and it damages everybody. My grandfather, for example, served in the infantry in Italy, and, that's all we know. He never talked about it to anybody that I know of. I'm talking about a particular kind of trauma and the way that people process it, which honestly, I can't quite define, except to say that it's the result of moral injury, and it's part of the joke about Americans returning to the former war zone to make movies about how much killing people there traumatized them.
The summary of Whistle reinforces this, saying it's about four wounded veterans and their struggles to adjust to life at home. A good example of the type of story that I'm talking about from WWII is Slaughterhouse Five, and the way that the destruction of Dresden affected Vonnegut so profoundly. I guess a undercurrent of guilt would be one of the defining elements.