[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]

The late George Carlin did not like the phrase"post-traumatic stress disorder." He famously said,

' I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't like words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I'll give you an example of that.

There's a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It's when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to it's absolute peak and maximum. Can't take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap.

In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves.

That was seventy years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn't seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock! Battle fatigue.

Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, we're up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It's totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.

Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it's no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we've added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder.

I'll bet you if we'd of still been calling it shell shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I'll betcha. I'll betcha.'

I have concluded that Carlin was right about that issue. Being traumatized by war is not a disorder. In fact, if you are not traumatized by the sight of body parts flying all around you as you are splattered with the blood of people you know, then you would have a disorder. Why not just say"war-traumatized"? Or better yet,"war-scarred"? The PTSD phrase has the unfortunate effect of making it seem abnormal for people to be negatively affected by wartime violence.

It is like the phrase"Vietnam syndrome," in which the understandable reluctance of the Baby Boom generation to launch big, long-lasting land wars in Asia was medicalized, as though there was something wrong with them that they were not warmongers. Why not say that they had 'learned the lessons of Vietnam,' or were 'Vietnam-scarred'? Why suggest that there is something wrong with them for it?

So below is a report from CBS on how the US networks have sanitized the Iraq War for viewers, and how we cannot understand the long-term trauma suffered by US troops who served in Iraq unless we understand what they've been through. Warning: her description of what she and others saw in Iraq is explicit and disturbing. Carlin would be proud of her:

"Army Times reporter Kelly Kennedy saw first hand the horrors of the war in Iraq. She spoke to CBS News about her experiences and about how post traumatic stress disorder is affecting the troops."

james joseph butler - 6/29/2008

Leave it to Carlin, the high school dropout, to tell the truth about war. Just last week Sec. Gates announced the Pentagon's: Big Brains meets Big Bucks = Better Wars program for America. Oh joy a smarter war.

PHDs are more expensive than dropouts so there's a bigger profit margin. The result the same, if America wants a war it gets a war.

Abraham Joseph Shragge - 6/28/2008

No matter how few or how many syllables one uses to describe it, combat profoundly traumatizes most all of of those who experience it. Does Professor Cole trivialize this in his blog comment? The effect of the trauma seems to last a lifetime, as I have found in the oral histories I have taken of former prisoners of war from World War II, Korea and Vietnam. I believe it is a credit to our society that our psychologists and psychiatrists have learned (only since the 1970s--see Nicosia, Home to War")to recognize this and deal with it as a real and permanent disorder. The endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will provide us with an embarrassment of wealth in terms of cases to study in this regard. Hate the wars, but do not scorn the men and women who pay its awful price.suffering

Edwin Moise - 6/27/2008

I cannot agree that what was called "post traumatic stress disorder" (PTSD) after the Vietnam War was the very same condition as what had been called "shell shock" during World War I.

In war, men suffer a wide variety of traumatic events, and react to them in a wide variety of ways. In World War I, people looked at those who displayed a certain range of symptoms and applied the term "shell shock" to them. During and especially after the Vietnam War, people looked at those who displayed a somewhat different range of symptoms and applied the term "post traumatic stress disorder" to them.

"Shell shock" was primarily defined in terms of symptoms making men unable to continue functioning as combat soldiers. PTSD was primarily defined in terms of symptoms making men unable to function well in a non-combat environment, after they left the war zone. There was some overlap, but by no means 100% overlap, between those who became unable to function in combat in Vietnam (which by World War I standards would have produced a diagnosis of shell shock), and those who were unable to function in civilian life years later in the United States.

It has been years since I read ACHILLES IN VIETNAM, by Dr. Jonathan Shay, but if I recall correctly, he wrote that when he was treating patients who were suffering from PTSD as a result of service in Vietnam, he questioned them about their past histories, and concluded that volunteering to remain in combat in Vietnam, at the end of one's original tour, had often been a sign that a soldier was beginning to suffer from what would later be diagnosed as PTSD. If you had tried to tell a World War I psychiatrist that volunteering to remain in the front lines should be considered a possible indicator of shell shock, he would have thought you were crazier than his patients.

On another matter, when Dr. Cole writes that being traumatized by war "is not a disorder", he is using a very strange definition of "disorder". "Disorder" does not mean moral failing.