The Evil Hours by David J. Morris Page B

mortar attack taken in isolation from all the other stressors one finds in war, one where everything went right and no one was killed or wounded or tripped and kicked in the face by his buddy hitting the deck right in front of him. But tallied over the course of months and years, such small-t events can add up and become something entirely different.
    Big-T traumas can destroy the soul.Big-T traumas are the stuff of madness, permanent insomnia, and hallucination. Big-T traumas don’t merely trip the amygdala into a short-term survival response, they actually overload it, damaging its ability to respond in a predictable fashion, almost like a broken thermostat. If we imagine small-t traumas as setting up shop in the body, then Big-T traumas are like massively expanding multinational franchise chains, a series of big-box stores, each supported by a large invisible workforce that never sleeps. In time, this franchise can begin to crowd out other parts of the community. People with chronic, long-term PTSD are often described as having multiple personalities, as if the trauma hasn’t just fragmented their psyches but created separate identities within them.This is, in a manner of speaking, the franchise effect. Rape, physical assault, airplane crashes, extended military combat, natural disasters—hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and tornados—all qualify as Big-T traumatic events. The salient factor with these traumas is their ability to make you feel helpless and overwhelmed. When resistance and escape from terror are no longer possible, consciousness tends to become fragmented and disorganized, almost as if the mind, in order to effectively handle the spectacle of one’s own annihilation, has to slice or break up consciousness into smaller, more manageable pieces.This fragmentation, or in some cases dissociation, which happens in the moment of maximum terror, has big implications down the road.
    Terror, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. If, when confronting a three-hundred-pound assailant, a potential rape victim recalls a jiujitsu class she took, she will likely feel less helpless than one of her peers who went to Pilates instead. In essence, one’s perceived sense of control dictates the likelihood that one will develop a harmful traumatic reaction. This highly subjective sense of one’s predicament creates some odd juxtapositions. On average, combat units suffer one psychiatric casualty for every physical one. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, most frontline Israeli units conformed to this ratio.Yet, strangely, Israeli logistics units, who were exposed to far less danger, suffered three psychiatric casualties for every physical one.
    Major traumas are both a death and a rebirth, the end of one kind of consciousness and the beginning of another.As practically any survivor will tell you, the day of their rape or “their” IED serves not merely as the end of a chapter in their lives, such as the end of puberty or bachelorhood, but the actual disappearance of their previous identity and the emergence of something altogether new and unknown. After trauma, your mind works differently, and your body has been altered to the extent that an entire new understanding of it must be negotiated. In time, as people enter therapy or simply reflect back upon the course of their lives, on the turning points in the stories of their time on earth, such days grow in power and take on a totemic quality, seeming to contain not only some portion of the mystery of their new being but also some key to the structure of the universe. Cormac McCarthy, describing one such haunted survivor in his classic novel
The Crossing
, wrote that
    Â 
men spared their lives in great disasters often feel in their deliverance the workings of fate. The hand of Providence. This man saw in himself again what he’d perhaps forgot. That long ago he’d been elected out of the common lot of men. For what he was asked now to