Section 3

It’s kind of hard to understand Caleb’s injuries. Even doctors can’t say for sure exactly why he has flashbacks, why he could be standing in a bookstore when all of a sudden he’s sure he’s in Ramadi, the pictures in his brain disorienting him among the stacks, which could turn from stacks to rows of rooftops that need to be scanned for snipers. Sometimes he starts yelling, and often he doesn’t remember anything about it later. They don’t know exactly why it comes to him in dreams, and why especially that time he picked up the pieces of Baghdad bombing victims and that lady who appeared to have thrown herself on top of her child to save him only to find the child dead underneath torments him when he’s sleeping, and sometimes awake. They don’t know why some other guys in his unit who did and saw the same stuff that Caleb did and saw are fine but Caleb is so sensitive to light, why he can’t just watch the news like a regular person without feeling as if he might catch fire.

I believe that this is an illustrative claim. I came to this conclusion because it feels like this text really tries to put you in Caleb’s shoes, and utilizes imagery very well to make you empathize with him. This claim tells a story, and makes you feel deep emotions.

Some hypotheses for why PTSD only tortures some trauma victims blame it on unhappily coded proteins, or a misbehaving amygdala. Family history, or maybe previous trauma.

I believe this is an attributive claim because the author attempts to provide some sort of reasoning for why PTSD happens, but strictly mentions other peoples hypotheses.

Whatever is happening to Caleb, it’s as old as war itself. The ancient historian Herodotus told of Greeks being honorably dismissed for being “out of heart” and “unwilling to encounter danger.” Civil War doctors, who couldn’t think of any other thing that might be unpleasant about fighting the Civil War but homesickness, diagnosed thousands with “nostalgia.” Later, it was deemed “irritable heart.” In World War I it was called “shell shock.” In World War II, “battle fatigue.”

I believe this claim to be a categorical one. I think this because in all of the instances listed, they all fell under the category of what people used to refer to PTSD as. This text illustrates how little we formerly knew about PTSD, and gives nice listed examples of things we got wrong about it throughout history.

It wasn’t an official diagnosis until 1980, when Post Traumatic Stress Disorder made its debut in psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, uniting a flood of Vietnam vets suffering persistent psych issues with traumatized civilians—previously assigned labels like “accident neurosis” and “post-rape syndrome”—onto the same page of the DSM-III.

This is a factual claim. It states things that actually happened and can not be refuted and is used to hit the hammer on the nail in regards to just how quickly PTSD became a serious thing in our society.

But whatever people have called it, they haven’t been likely to grasp or respect it. In 1943, when Lt. General George S. Patton met an American soldier at an Italian hospital recovering from “nerves,” Patton slapped him and called him a coward. In 2006, the British Ministry of Defence pardoned some 300 soldiers who had been executed for cowardice and desertion during World War I, having concluded that many were probably just crippled by PTSD.

I believe this to be a comparative claim. The author is comparing how the disease of PTSD is viewed today in contrast to how it was viewed throughout history. This stark contrast paints a picture of how far we have come and how long it took us to get that far.