The Civil War in Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning

1. “Really, Though, I’m Fine”: Civil War Veterans and the Psychological Aftereffects of Killing

11 1 “Really, Though, I’m Fine” Civil War Veterans and the Psychological Aftereffects of Killing Michael W. Schaefer Forty years after serving as an infantryman in the Confederate army, Texan George Gautier justified the title of his autobiography, Harder than Death, by explaining to his readers that killing other men, as he did during the Civil War, “will bring you to ruin and distress the balance of your life.”1 Although many historians argue that Gautier’s guilt-ridden postwar life was anomalous among Civil War veterans, research into the experiences of veterans of more recent wars, coupled with an attentive reading of the memoirs of Gautier’s peers, suggests that Gautier was an exception not in his haunted feelings but only in his willingness to state them so overtly. It is common knowledge that a considerable number of soldiers who served in America’s wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries —Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq—suffer from depression or posttraumatic stress disorder. The figure among Iraq veterans in 2003–2004 stood at 16 percent, according to a July 2004 report in the New England Journal of Medicine.2 What is less well known is that a significant measure of veterans’ distress, like Gautier’s a century earlier, stems from guilt at having killed in combat, as Dan Baum points out in an essay in the New Yorker. This lack of awareness—and, in fact, much of the stress itself—is caused primarily by the army’s reluctance to address the issue, which leaves veterans largely unequipped to confront their condition. The Army Medical 12 Michael W. Schaefer Corps’ standard psychological manual on combat trauma, Baum notes, runs to 500 pages and provides a chart that “lists twenty ‘Combat Stress Factors,’ including ‘fear of death,’ ‘disrupted circadian rhythms,’ ‘loss of a buddy,’ and ‘breakdown of Ur (narcissistic) defenses.’” However, the manual “makes no mention of killing, and offers no suggestions for ameliorating any psychological aftereffects,” despite its admission that “casualties that the soldier inflicted himself on enemy soldiers were usually described as the most stressful events” of the combat experience. The manual goes on to acknowledge “the aversion most mammals have to killing conspecifics (members of their own species)” and notes that in war this is often overcome by “pseudospeciation, the ability of humans and some other primates to classify certain members of their own species as ‘other,’ [which] can neutralize the threshold of inhibition” as far as killing is concerned. However, this section continues, due to “phylogenetically strong inhibitions,” soldiers are often “left with . . . psychological afterburn ” in the wake of killing—the very condition for which the manual offers no treatment.3 As an illustration of this afterburn, Baum cites twenty-four-year-old Carl Cranston, whose self-assessment rejects Gautier’s warning. A sergeant in a mechanized unit that saw a great deal of action during the initial phase of the Iraq War, Cranston admits “we killed a lot of people” but asserts that despite a lack of formal counseling, he has suffered no ill effects from the experience. However, Baum observes that Cranston, now back at Fort Benning, Georgia, obsessively and repetitively watches the realistically gory HBO series Band of Brothers, about American paratroopers in World War II—“‘millions’ of times,” according to his mother-in-law. Cranston’s wife describes an evening at Fort Benning’s Afterhours Enlisted Club when Cranston, after several drinks, began shouting at the disk jockey, “I want to hear music about people blowing people’s brains out, cutting people’s throats! . . . I want to hear music about shit I’ve seen!” Cranston claims he has no memory of this event but admits that his wife is correct in saying that he suffers what she calls “flashbacks —like, he sits still and stares.” Nevertheless, he reassures Baum, “Really, though, I’m fine.” As he does so, his wife, sitting beside him, silently mouths, “Not fine. Not fine.”4 A common view among Civil War historians is that veterans of that conflict really were fine. Despite an experience that Confederate soldier George Gibbs called a “dirty, bloody mess, unworthy of people who claim to be civilized ” and that Union soldier Cyrus Boyd said “benumbs all the tender “Really, Though, I’m Fine” 13 feelings of men and makes of them brutes,”5 the vast majority did not suffer long-term trauma but rather...