EAN: 9781788738422

COMBAT TRAUMA - NADIA ABU EL-HAJ KARTONIERT (TB)

Americans have long been asked to support the troops and care for veterans' psychological
wounds. Who  though  does this injunction serve? As acclaimed scholar Nadia Abu El-Haj argues
here  in the American public's imagination  the traumatized soldier stands in for destructive
wars abroad  with decisive ramifications in the post-9 11 era. Across the political spectrum
the language of soldier trauma is used to discuss American warfare  producing a narrative in
which traumatized soldiers are the only acknowledged casualties of war  while those killed by
American firepower are largely sidelined and forgotten. In this wide-ranging and fascinating
study of the meshing of medicine  science  and politics  Abu El-Haj explores the concept of
post-traumatic stress disorder and the history of its medical diagnosis. While antiwar Vietnam
War veterans sought to address their psychological pain even as they maintained full awareness
of their guilt and responsibility for perpetrating atrocities on the killing fields of Vietnam
by the 1980s  a peculiar convergence of feminist activism against sexual violence and Reagan's
right-wing war on crime transformed the idea of PTSD into a condition of victimhood. In so
doing  the meaning of Vietnam veterans' trauma would also shift  moving away from a political
space of reckoning with guilt and complicity to one that cast them as blameless victims of a
hostile public upon their return home. This is how  in the post-9 11 era of the Wars on Terror
the injunction to support our troops  came to both sustain US militarism and also shields
American civilians from the reality of wars fought ostensibly in their name. In this compelling
and crucial account  Nadia Abu El-Haj challenges us to think anew about the devastations of the
post-9 11 era.

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