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(Dr. Christopher Walsh). These sociologists in 1945,
"For almost 25 years we have striven to believe that war
"should not be our lot again.
"Our youth have been inculcated with the ideas of peace.
"In the breathing spell between the two wars,
"our educational system has become broadened
"and intensified.
"For 10 years social security and greater opportunities
"for all to enjoy have gradually replaced the aggressive, rugged
"individualism so characteristic of America's frontier days.
"Suddenly we asked our youth to release their lifelong repressed
"and sublimated aggressions.
"This cannot be done in a day or in a generation without
repercussions within the individual."
This is a book about war and neuroses and about
no wonder we're having so many problems of a psychiatric
nature given these forces, given the situation that
these young men who have grown up without.
Many of them have never slaughtered a chicken
much less seen a man die or caused him to die.
Well, Patton was having none of this.
You all know the story of his approaching a soldier in a
psychiatric casualty and saying you're not a psychiatric
casualty, you're just a coward, slapping him with his gloves.
There were actually two incidents like this and they
came out in the papers, through the New York Times actually,
and Patton was forced to apologize.
This is the beginning of a letter from the
National Archives he wrote his wife, "Darling B".
It's the end of the letter that is of interest to me.
"Kay says that you were all shrunk up, not her words
"but the idea, over the incident.
"I am sorry it hurt you but personally I know damned well
I did my duty."
The incident was the slapping.
"I know damned well I did my duty and if more people did it
"the same way, we would win a war instead of just fight one.
"My little dictionary [unclear audio] but
"every division now has.
"The war weariness will be fierce, more deadly
than the Huns."
The editor of the Patton Papers translates this word--I don't
have one of those cool laser things so I'll just jump--
as sychophant, and I don't think that's right.
One of his biographers translated it as psychiatrist,
and I think that's closer to the mark.
I actually think that, and I'm basically a close reader by
nature and so I get carried away, I think this is exactly
what he meant to write.
Patton was a very literate man, his letters are full of poems
and literary allusions.
I think he wanted something like succotash in there.
I think he wanted the reader to think psychiatrist,
and that's what he was talking about, but succotash,
sickit past...all of that.
So this was, although Patton apologized, he deep down didn't
believe that he had anything to apologize for, and in fact
that if the war had gotten fought the way he wanted to
fight it, it would be over by now.
How am I doing for time?
(female speaker). [unclear audio].
(Dr. Walsh). Measure not with the clock
but with your stomachs here.
[audience laughter].
I can wrap it up in five minutes, watch this, watch.
Here's what Patton said.
"The greatest weapon against the so-called
"battle fatigue is ridicule.
"If soldiers would realize that a large proportion of men
"allegedly suffering from battle fatigue are really using an easy
way out,"--sorry, typo--"they would be less sympathetic.
"Any man who says he has battle fatigue is avoiding danger and
"forcing those who have more heartihood than himself the
"obligation of meeting it.
"If soldiers would make fun of those who begin to show
"battle fatigue, they would prevent its spread and also
"save the man who allows himself to malinger by this means from
an afterlife of humiliation and regret."
I don't think I need to say more, I'll just
leave that for a second.
We can't say that it was the conditions of modern war that
caused military psychiatry to bloom, and it was inevitable
that because we had these more powerful weapons and
the soldiers were in a more constrained situation that
they would develop these psychiatric problems.
There's a German article about the problem of cowardice
in the Nazi army, and it said it isn't a problem,
we have abolished cowardice.
And the Japanese had abolished it, too.
Soldiers in the ranks in Japan were not even told
what a white flag meant.
And Guadalcanal proved a great testing ground for the fact
that the Japanese were not going to do anything
that could be construed as shameful.
But in the US there was, and also the German psychiatrist
had been in part blamed for the loss of World War I.
The German authorities and what was left of the German military
pyschiatric world, they were resolved that they would not
be blamed for the loss of World War II.
Meanwhile, in the States, World War II actually proved a great
boon to American psychiatry.
There is a huge study taken on under the direction of a
man named Samuel Stouffer, and the product of that was a
two-volume book called "The American Soldier" in which he
polled all sorts of soldiers about their ideas.
I've been carrying around these three things that I was
going to refer to, but I'm not.
Here's what some of the things that Stouffer
found about cowardice.
He found that "Approximately three-quarters of enlisted men
and officers surveyed by Stouffer agreed that"--as the
survey put it--"men who crack up in action, get shell shock,
"blow their tops, go haywire, should be treated as sick men.
"Fewer than 10% said such men should be
treated as cowards and punished."
So among the ranks there was an understanding that men
had their limits, that there was such a thing as shell shock,
although it went by different names in World War II.
"So the medical assessment of what otherwise might have been a
"moral matter, a question of cowardice, had become common to
"assessing battlefield behavior.
"More than 400,000 members of the American Armed Forces
"were admitted as psychiatric patients in World War II,
"compared to fewer than 70,000 in World War I and virtually
none in the Civil War."
Jones himself, and I am not an expert on this,
but my understanding is that his discharge was an
honorable discharge but it included the diagnosis of
some kind of war neuropsychosis.
"And yet tolerance of fearfulness and of medical
"explanations of it had definite limts, as we see in Patton,
"but also Stouffer's survey indicated that soldiers thought
"that men who did not at least try to overcome their
expressed fear and do their duty were cowards."
And that was not just Patton.
So what we get in Jones is kind of naturalism with a vengeance.
He was, like he said in that Paris Review interview,
he was resolved to not frame his depiction of war in
"The Thin Red Line" in terms of bravery or cowardice.
So what we get is, at least in this passage here, a kind of
naturalism with a vengeance where he takes the men's actions
down to the level of their physiologies.
"'Go in, go in,'"--this is halfway down--"Gaff cried,
"and then in a moment all of them were
"on their feet running.
"No longer did they have to fret and stew or worry about
"being brave or being cowardly, their systems pumped full of
"adrenaline to constrict the peripheral blood vessels,
"elevate the blood pressure, make the heart beat more
"rapidly and aid coagulation.
"They were about as near to automatons without courage
"or cowardice as flesh and blood can get.
Numbly, they did the necessary."
Skip that one.
I think one of the things that William E. Miller,
the man who thankfully didn't write his book about
cowardice, says is that the peridigmatic case for the
manifestation of courage or cowardice is battle.
Aristotle said the same thing.
And Miller goes further and says in fact it's hand-to-hand,
man-to-man combat.
What Jones gives us is a kind of grotesque inversion of that
in the scene, based on his own experience apparently, in which
Bead kills a man with his bare hands, kills a Japanese soldier.