PTSD and the Wars that Won't go Away

Book Jacket.   (Dick Bergeron Image)

Potomac, MD.  The testimonials on the back of the book jacket for “In the Name of Honor” don’t do it justice.  I wonder if any one of those whose names appear on it ever read the book front-to-back, if at all.

The author, Richard North Patterson, is a master storyteller with a disciplined grip on the English language. 

Throughout this highly readable 400-pager, he skillfully employs words and phrases to buttress his main thesis – that the deadening  impact of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) on American families and their loved ones returning home from Iraq has not been counted into the price of that war.

The forcefulness and validity of that message is wrapped within the story of two military families.  The first can boast of an intergenerational West Point succession of high-ranking Army officers whose current patriarch is a general and the Army Chief of Staff.  He is slated to become head of the Joint Chiefs. 

The general’s son, Lieutenant Brian McCarran, has physically survived a brutal series of assignments in Sadr City, Iraq.  The story begins with him returning home, suffering from PTSD and the denial which often accompanies and intensifies it.

In the second family, Joe D’Abruzzo is a first-time Army Captain who marries into this military prominence, but does not bring to it the same long line of history, tradition, and sacrifice that distinguishes the former. Slowly, the two families become irreversibly entangled within a Gordian knot of shocking circumstances.

Demonstrators burn U.S. flag in Sadr City, Iraq.  (Credit/Google Images)

Patterson uses these and other characters to describe episodes of  betrayal, infidelity, fighting and death to drive home the reality of the devastating impact that PTSD ravages within the minds and souls of American fighting men, as the result of a merciless desert war which has degenerated into house-to-house combat. 

The story depicting the causal factors of PTSD unfolds within the scorching hellhole that is Iraq’s sectarian-controlled Sadr City.   It ends up in the confines of a U.S. Army court martial.

Several of Patterson’s excerpts quoted below drive home the hopelessness of the repetitive assignments demanded of Lieutenant McCarran and of his men who are regularly dispatched on mission after mission to fight in Sadr City where the rules of engagement are heavily stacked against their survival:

“In Sadr City, our soldiers couldn’t control their environment and couldn’t escape it.  On the worst days there was carnage all around you – not just dead, but dead friends in pieces.  And you never knew if the can of Pepsi that cute Iraqi kid was holding was a soft drink or an IED. 

Or maybe you were trapped for days in a building surrounded by Iraqi militia, and your dead had started decomposing.”

 “His (Lieutenant Brian McCarran’s) contempt for those who planned this war was profound. He said that he’d seen his men maimed and slaughtered and stripped of any belief in the mission they’d been sent for.  And when they came home feeling lost, we abandoned them.”

So there you have it.  Echoes of Korea and Vietnam.

Thanks for checking in and for reading this book review about our brave American soldiers.