War and the Mind

The U.S. Army now discharges hundreds of mental cases a week. When a man has a mental crackup in battle, his local draft board may be to blame--chances are two to one that he showed signs of mental disease before he was inducted. Captain David J. Flicker of the Army Medical Corps estimates in War Medicine that draft boards oblivious to mental disease and overworked Army psychiatrists catch only 25% of future Army misfits.

The Weakling Fallacy. In July 1918, export of mental cases to the Army in France reached such proportions that General Pershing complained by cable. Among many laymen the idea still prevails that Army life will do a "weakling" good, a belief so strong that courts have even put psychopaths on probation provided they joined the service.

Obvious mental disease is usually detected by local boards. But there are four kinds of mental cases not so often ruled out: 1) psychopaths, 2) men of low-grade mentality, 3) manic depressives, 4) epileptics.

P: A psychopath with normal intelligence anxious to get into the Army may, in his few minutes with a psychiatrist at the induction center, fool him completely. But draft-board members in a small community may know that he is a heavy drinker, or has attacked girls, or never keeps a job, or is a thief. In the Army such a man will sometimes win a medal through sheer love of action. More often he is the man who is A.W.O.L. With his quick suggestibility he spreads rumors. He may even sell out to the enemy.

P: School records of morons and imbeciles usually give them away, yet many of them are inducted. Their mental inadequacy coupled with the strains of military life may bring out latent mental disease which would not appear in civilian life.

P: A manic depressive between attacks of depression or elation may fool an Army psychiatrist on a quick test. But a draft board member who remembers how George sometimes got so blue that he never went out, sometimes got so high that he ran himself and his relatives into debt on a buying spree, can save the Army & Navy lot of trouble by insisting that George be kept at home.

P:No branch of service wants any man who has ever had an epileptic fit.

Wounds of the Mind. Said an Army medical officer last week: "Every man has his breaking point." The breaking point of a psychotic soldier is, simply, more easily reached than that of a well-balanced man. In World War I, men's nerves snapped from inactive confinement to trenches under shellfire; in World War II, they break down from long-continued bombardment and strafing without the advantage of shelter. (Artillery fire anxiety is usually worse than that from aerial bombing--when a big gun gets the range, a man begins to feel that each shell has his number on it.)

The conflict between duty-to-comrades-and-country (herd instinct) and the instinct for self-preservation may disturb even a well-balanced, man in battle. Under stress, he may suffer from intestinal disturbances and disordered heart rate. A man with poor mental balance may develop hysterical blindness, paralysis, stiff joints, which will genuinely disqualify him as a fighter (hysteria rarely occurs in newly wounded men--presumably because real wounds eliminate them from battle). Another common type of war breakdown is the hallucinatory reliving of terrifying scenes. A psychopath may quit fighting, give way to panic, or commit suicide. Still other men will brood over every step of a battle, with remorse for their own inadequacy, or for having participated in killing.

The Greatest Gift. Psychiatrists say that soldiers should be taught that fear is a normal reaction. On this subject, World War I Veteran Ernest Hemingway makes a layman's observation in Men at War: "Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire."

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