"If He Comes Home Nervous": U.S. World War II neuropsychiatric casualties and postwar masculinities

Journal of Men's Studies, The, Spring, 2009 by Christina Jarvis

The rebuilding of a war neurotic, sent home for treatment, must begin by convincing him that he is not a coward or a failure, but a battle casualty just as truly as the man who lost a leg. (Wecter, 1944, p. 547)

Having already signed into the law the most generous benefits package ever bestowed on a nation's veterans, President Roosevelt wrote to Secretary of War Henry Stimson that he was "deeply concerned over the physical and emotional condition of disabled men returning from the war. The "ultimate ought to be done for them," FDR told Stimson in his December 4, 1944 letter, "to return them as useful citizens--useful not alone to themselves but to the community." (1) Roosevelt's particular concern for America's physically and mentally wounded servicemen mirrored national sentiment during the late war and early postwar years. Indeed, between 1944 and 1946 the bevy of books on veterans' readjustments devoted special chapters to each group of wounded, and the popular press filled its pages with images of and stories about injured veterans. Sensing the symbolic importance of these veterans, Yale University Professor George Pratt (1944) remarked, "What is done wisely or unwisely for them will be a sign and measure of our times and a forecast of our future" (p. xi).

Although Pratt and many of his contemporaries saw veterans' rehabilitations as opportunities to repay the nation's debt to its citizen soldiers, historians, media critics, and gender studies scholars have viewed wounded veterans and their physical and emotional readjustments as privileged sites for exploring gender ideals and relations in the postwar period. Hartmann (1978) and Silverman (1992), for example, have examined women's central curative roles in restoring wounded veterans' masculinities and facilitating a return to a "normal" gender order. More recently, Gerber (1994, 2000), Serlin (2004), and Jarvis (2004) have analyzed the ways in which discourses surrounding the rebuilding of injured veterans' bodies via state-of-the-art prosthetic devices and medical procedures communicated the nation's strength and celebrated American triumphs in medicine, technology, and industry. Rather than damaging or threatening the wartime and postwar body politics, in fact, images of wounded veterans--especially amputees--became "powerful visual and rhetorical symbols through which war-related disability was unequivocally identified with heroism" (Serlin, p. 30).

Despite several decades of exciting scholarship on war and gender issues and an increased focus on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and war's other mental wounds in the post-Vietnam era, gender focused studies of injured U.S. World War II veterans continue to privilege physical wounds over mental ones. (2) Of course, it is impossible to separate the physical and emotional costs of war; many physically wounded veterans also developed psychological scars while numerous psychiatric casualties suffered real somatic symptoms or were haunted by memories of dead and maimed bodies. In an attempt to expand masculinity scholarship on the disabled veteran, this essay analyzes representations of the psychiatric casualty in advice literature and mainstream news periodicals of the late war and early postwar period. Although less visually prominent than the war amputee or otherwise physically injured soldier, the mentally wounded veteran, I argue, became an especially important subject for cultural rehabilitation and remasculinization (Jeffords, 1989).

In part, sheer numbers necessitated these rehabilitations. In contrast to the 671,000 men who received nonfatal combat injuries, between January 1942 and June 1945, there were approximately 1,000,000 hospital admissions, 1,750,000 Selective Service rejections, and 457,000 discharges for "neuropsychiatric disorders" (Appel, 1946, pp. 433,435)--an umbrella term that included a range of neurological and psychological conditions along with so-called "disorders of intelligence." (3) More importantly, by "breaking down" under the stress of military life or combat, the psychiatric casualty explicitly exposed the emotional side of men and challenged a warrior ideal predicated upon bravery, self-mastery, control, and courage under fire. The normalization and rehabilitation of the neuropsychiatric veteran or the "N.P. case" as he was frequently called in the popular press, then, was vital to the continuous operation of America's economic and war machines. Despite the unquestioned technological supremacy ushered in by the atomic bomb, the world's newest super power could neither afford a tarnished image of its military or the projected tax burden that a new crop of unproductive "shell shocked" veterans would create. Of course, not all "N.P. cases" could be "salvaged" for civilian reintegration, and, as Patton's July and August 1943 slappings of two psychiatric patients in Sicilian military hospitals reveal, many top military officers and indeed the military's culture itself did not readily recognize psychiatric cases as "real" casualties of war. Thus both military and civilian discourses drew distinctions between the vast majority of psychiatric casualties deemed worthy of rehabilitation and national support and a small minority who could be written off as social "misfits." The relational nature (Connell, 1995, 2000; Kimmel, 1996) and (re)constructions of these variously damaged models of manhood highlight the complexity of both the heroic and the abject masculinities created by war.