What is stress? This war memorial is one of many sculpted signs
in the US capital area denoting US involvement in war. This is sculpture happens to
be a memorial to all the wars that the US has been involved with including the
American Revolution – and to me it speaks not of war but the traumatising impact
of war and its aftermath.
This sculpture by Felix W. de Weldon was based on a photo
taken by Joe Rosenthal - and the photo won a Pulitzer Prize. The event it
documented has been magnified into collective USA memory.
These US soldiers raising their country’s flag were part of one
of the most horrific and bloody battles against Japanese soldiers in the
Pacific in World War Two on the island of Iwo Jima. Thousands died, and of those
that survived on both sides, countless numbers experienced post-traumatic
stress disorder (PSTD).
In earlier times PSTD was known as battle fatigue, shell
shock and operational exhaustion. In the American Civil War it was called
soldiers heart. What happens to the ‘heart’ in war? PSTD is a huge issue for everyone impacted by war and trauma
– soldier and civilian alike – but in the USA it’s particularly significant
because of the high number of people involved in the armed services and the ‘off to
war’ we go expenditure. One measure of its scale is the per capita figures. In the USA active service personnel per capita is
approximately 4.2 and in Australia it’s approximately 2.4 per capita.
In 2015 there was an estimated 22 million US veterans potentially
bearing the scars of war inside (their minds) and outside (their bodies) - or both. An article from TIME earlier
this year estimated that 500,000 U.S Troops who served in the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq over the past 13 years have been diagnosed with PSTD. The
health burden is enormous. The US spends $3 billion to treat the disorder and is
the third most common US service disability and impacts those with and without
wounds. PSTD is signalled by hypervigilance, depression, flashbacks, isolation,
irritability and sleeplessness – with thousands and thousands of symptom
combinations - and these symptoms describe all those impacted by violence. (I’ve riffled a few of more facts in my blog from the April 6
edition of Time Magazine.)
In the USA they’ve started a brain bank to map the structural
signs of PSTD in the brain – but there is no brain bank for the mind
ultimately.
This statue of flag raising on Iwo Jima is situated within a short walking distance of
the Arlington War Cemetery – it’s kind of beautiful and kind of disturbing with
its endless rows of white headstones. War is endless, peace is fragile. Where in
that space can trauma heal: in our hearts perhaps, in our healing hearts.
