In my last blog, I wrote about experiencing a duality of positive and negative impacts on my postwar personality. Karl Marlantes acknowledges a similar observation in the dedication to his Vietnam War novel, Matterhorn.

In a simple statement, the author acknowledges there are positives and negatives of going to war. It might seem oxymoronic to say any good can come out of such trauma, but let’s explore some of the implications.

Some Vietnam veterans have expressed resentment that in the minds of many Americans, they’d become synonyms for psychiatric problems. They pointed out that most veterans had returned and gotten on with their lives in normal ways.

Richard Tedeschi, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, has spent a career examining trauma not from its negative consequences, but its positive ones. To paraphrase, adversity builds character. He estimates that half to two-thirds of people suffering life-changing traumatic events come to experience some form of positive growth. His research identifies five ways this occurs—personal strength, appreciation of life, relation to others (empathy), new possibilities, and spiritual and existential change. The latter would include philosophical outlook. Overlap occurs.

Tedeschi cites many cultures and religious traditions that associate forms of privation and suffering with the accumulation of wisdom. I’ll quote just one example in this vein from David Morris’ comprehensive work on PTSD: The Evil Hours.

In Tedeschi’s work with military veterans he emphasizes that it’s not about what is wrong with them but what has happened to them. His research concludes that post traumatic growth is more common than post-traumatic stress.

To pull another quote from The Evil Hours, Morris cites Matthew Friedman the retired director of the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

This coincides with Marlantes words above and the duality of positive and negative impacts on my personality after my year in the war zone.

Speaking of his own mix of the good and bad, Morris asked himself:

Three paragraphs later, he writes.



To quote my own author’s note in Poisoned Jungle, “war is not only transformational on the human psyche—but ongoing.” I believe war shatters many of our shallower preconceptions. It reorders our priorities. Facing and witnessing death can bring a type of wisdom normally reserved for the old. This doesn’t happen overnight or in a grand epiphany. It takes time to sort through the psychic wreckage of our shattered perceptions and emerge with anything resembling positive growth.

In retrospect, I returned from the war searching for remnants of my former life. I wasn’t the only one who had changed. The Vietnam War had the country polarized. My mind soon took a philosophical turn. The meaning I could no longer find in the structures of society I looked for in the wisdom of great thinkers. I sought the core of existence.

There is not only great agony in witnessing death, but great mystery. What has transpired? A complex being abruptly vanishes, at least to the living. Where have they gone? Is the end of consciousness the end of the line, or is there another realm in another dimension? What is consciousness? Is it grounded in something beyond self-awareness? Can we know? Greater minds have not answered these questions, but they have been asked by all of humanity.

I believe a duality of good and bad from the war have remained with me. Along with the life-long sleep disorders my reflective side emerged, and a curious mind to explore the meaningful questions of existence. There is isolation in not being able to simply accept common mores at face value, but consolation in developing an independent mind. There is humility in having seen the suffering of others so much greater than mine. It is not abstract.   

I’ll leave you with a final quote from David Morris. He could have taken the very thoughts right out of my mind.

Yes, and those experiences link us to something more profound than the superficial differences that lead to war—our shared humanity.