Excellent literature that a sort of came from this first generation of contemporary war memoirs and reporters and just started to have this sense of the activities that war actually consists of are often, often bare of strange, of stranger or sort of i cant find the word. They often dont relate in any sort of direct way to the things that we tend to talk about war as being about. So, that was the spirit in which i did this on and its something that i still find myself thinking about a lot but thanks for the question. I hear that question mark especially since i have a military background. And i mentioned before reading some articles and being interested in trying to understand that and its also around the time in the newspapers starting to release reports about the suicide epidemic among soldiers. A kid killed himself not far from where i was living so i felt strangely complicit and yet having no power to understand what was going on, you know for the people that were Walking Around me
Traumatic memory as sort of one that cant be fully assimilated by the mind and that happens over and over again and that follows you and haunts you, and thats coming from a past thats difficult and painful, then what does that mean to still inhabit the present when its sort of fully taken over by the past . And going off what ken said just about a refusal to understand, i think thats a really important word and a word i kept running into over and over again when i was reading about ptsd and learning more about its history. And its pretty much a history of our refusal to accept many things; capacity for violence, capacity for evil, our willingness to understand difficult circumstances, the fact that war can be, you know, purposeless at times. The symbolic value and the glory we give to it might not be, you know, may not fully follow through for homecoming always. And how to make sense of that discrepancy. And caleb was interesting because he sort of refused to accept traditional definit