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Jonathan Shay's book appeared in 1994 as a hallmark text in understanding the PTSD symptoms of Vietnam veterans in the U.S. Now 84 years old, Shay was a 2007 MacArthur Fellow, and in 2018, the Volunteers of America established the Shay Moral Injury Center in his honour. Shay's main conclusion is that combat trauma also is a moral injury that destroys a soldier's good character.
He uses Homer's The Iliad to compare that seminal epic with the verbal reports of Vietnam veterans that he has heard in his clinical work across years of experience. Achilles is the central hero in Homer's tale, although his tragic flaw of hubris leads him to act out his rage over the death of his friend Patroclus. He brutally defiles the body of the Trojan prince Hector after defeating him in a one-to-one contest. Shay extracts two main points from The Iliad and applies these to the PTSD he has seen in his patients: 1) combat frequently betrays a soldier's sense of what's right; and 2) the after-effects of this include going berserk. A berserk state includes hyperarousal, mania, omnipotence, and increased strength—all of which come to good use during combat when a soldier becomes a berserker.
In his introduction, Shay quotes Paul Fussell, a cultural historian, who wrote about World War I. “The real reason [that soldiers fall silent] is that soldiers have discovered that no one is very interested in the bad news they have to report” (p. xxi). This silence compounds their loneliness, isolation, and suffering. After wars, a collective denial sets in to circumvent discourse about the war and the experiences of soldiers. In many ways, this resembles what we've all been through with the COVID-19 pandemic, which now finds little interest as a topic of collective loss to be mourned. Silence means an experience cannot be processed within a relationship or group to acquire new meanings and for healing to occur. This is one of Shay's damning observations about what happened to veterans of the Vietnam War