Insane in the Membrane

Typicallly, a man or woman will go off to war and come back affected. The level at which these people are affected varies, but it is highly unlikely that a person will return unchanged.

"One afternoon he began firing his weapon into the air, yelling Strunk's name, just firing and yelling, and it didn't stop until he'd rattled off an entire magazine of ammunition (pg 63)."

This past school year, I did a project on PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) in psychology class. Ever since, I've been fascinated with the toll a war can take on a returning serviceman. You hear stories of people becoming mute and others of people just having a difficult time functioning normally after their return. I find myself reading this novel and asking myself how a person could ever come back from such an experience and not suffer some kind of PTSD. In this particular story, Dave Jensen is so paranoid that Lee Strunk will seek revenge that he goes on a crazy rampage, firing his gun off in the air. Soon after, he uses a gun to break his own nose. These are not the actions of a person unaffected by his experience in the wartorn nation of Vietnam. The paranoia Jensen displays is a sure sign of PTSD. Still, I can't imagine how one would escape war without a certain level of paranoia, for every second, there was a "Charlie" looking to kill a few American soldiers.