this is the forward to Soldiers Heart. It's really interesting! War is always, in all ways, apalling. Lives are stopped in youth, worlds are ended, and for those who survive-and the vast majority of soldiers who do go to war survive-the mental damage done is permanent. What they have seen and what they have been forced to do is frequently so horrific and devastating that it simply cannot be tolerated by the human physche. Now, there is an attempt to understand this form of injury and deal with it. It is called post traumatic stress disorder, by those who try to cure it. They give it a technical name in the attempt to make something almost in comprehensible understandable, in the hope that, by doing this, they will make it curable. But in other times and wars, they used more descriptive terms. In the second world war the mental damage was called "battle fatigue" and there were rudimentary efforts to help the victims. These usually involved bedrest and the use of sedatives and other drugs. In the first world war it was called shell shock, based on the damage done by the overwhelming use, for the first time in modern war, of artillery fire against soldiers in stationary positions. (trenches). The concussion of exploding incoming rounds, thousands upon thousands of them, often left men deaf and dazed, many of them with a symptom called "Thousand yard stare". The afflicted were essentialy not helped at all and simply sent home for their families to care for. Most were irrational, many in a vegetative state. In the civil war the syndrome was generallu not recognized at all. While the same horrors existed as those in modern war, in some ways they were even worse because the technological aspect of war being born then, the wholesale killing of men using firepower, was so new and misunderstood. The same young men were fed into the madness. But in those days there was no scientific knowledge of mental disorders and no effort was made to help the men who were damaged. Some men come through combat unscathed. Most did not. These men were somehow different then other men. They were said to have soldier's heart. so yeah, sounds interesting.