Invisible wounds that kill

[babylonsister]

Invisible wounds that kill
The Japanese didn't take the life of this soldier. The horrible memories did.

By Chris Gibbons


I stood there in the Har Nebo Cemetery on Oxford Avenue and looked out at the gravestones that surrounded me. The high autumn lawn of the cemetery undulated like an ocean in the wind, green grass waves breaking over tombstone shores. I was heading to the section for indigent Jews, searching for the gravesite of a World War II veteran.

Although I never met him, I felt that I had to come and pay my respects. I found his grave, marked only by a 4-square-inch plaque bearing his name, and knelt down next to it. I planted a small American flag and said a short prayer. The silence was broken only by the sound of the flag whipping in the wind.

Marvin Ravinsky grew up in a tough Jewish section of North Philadelphia. He enlisted in the Army in 1943 and fought in some of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific theater. He was at Okinawa, where the incidence of psychiatric combat stress among American soldiers was an unbelievable 48 percent; more than 26,000 U.S. soldiers had to be removed from the battlefield because of "battle fatigue."

During the fighting, the Japanese trapped Ravinsky and some other soldiers in a cave. They riddled the cave with bullets, killing everyone but him. Then they entered the cave and began bayoneting the bodies in an effort to find and kill any survivors.

Ravinsky played dead and, out of sheer will to live, didn't move or cry out when a Japanese bayonet pierced his thigh. Bleeding profusely, he waited until they left the cave, and then crawled out from under the lifeless bodies of his friends.

Ravinsky returned home with a Purple Heart awarded for his physical injuries, but there was no recognition of his hidden mental wounds. He fought a long, losing battle with post-traumatic stress disorder.

more...

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20090525_Invisible_wounds_that_kill.html

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Thanks for posting this

recently I've read posts and articles that claim PTSD only happened since Viet Nam. Battle fatigue, as it used to be called, has been around a lot longer. I've done some research about Civil War veterans, and you found it among them as well.

[MADem]

2. Before "battle fatigue" it was called shellshock.

Any time you put people under stress and give them a task to kill or be killed you're going to get a reaction.

They keep adding words to to the condition as if somehow that makes it more clinical or politically correct....George Carlin did a riff on that very subject--wish I had a link to it, it was a good rant.

[knowbody0]

3. my grandfather, in his later dimentia age 94,

would sob endlessly about walking over the dead bodies (WWI) looking for his friends. I remember them calling it "shell shocked". I'm thinking humanity should go ahead and evolve out of this war thing.

[babylonsister]

4. Wow. I'm thinking you're right about

getting out of this war thing. Your granddad suffered all his life from what happened early in his life. You just heard about it later. :cry:

Thanks for sharing.

[BlueJessamine]

5. K&R. n/t.