Free Soldier's Heart by Gary Paulsen

FOREWORD

    W ar is always, in all ways, appalling. Lives are stopped in youth, worlds are ended, and even for those who survive—and the vast majority of soldiers who go to war
do
survive—the mental damage done is often permanent. What they have seen and been forced to do is frequently so horrific and devastating that it simply cannot be tolerated by the human psyche.
    Now there is an attempt to understand this form of injury and deal with it. It is called post-traumaticstress disorder by those who try to cure it. They give it a technical name in the attempt to make something almost incomprehensible understandable, in the hope that, by doing this, they will make it curable.
    But in other times and other 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 bed rest and the use of sedatives or 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 the thousand-yard stare. The afflicted were essentiallynot helped at all and simply sent home for their families to care for. Most were irrational; many were in a vegetative state.
    In the Civil War the syndrome was generally 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 by men using raw 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 came through combat unscathed. Most did not. These men were somehow different from other men.
    They were said to have soldier’s heart.

CHAPTER ONE
JUNE 1861
    H e heard it all, Charley did; heard the drums and songs and slogans and knew what everybody and his rooster was crowing.
    There was going to be a shooting war. They were having town meetings and nailing up posters all over Minnesota and the excitement was so high Charley had seen girls faint at the meetings, just faint from the noise and hullabaloo. It was better than a circus. Or what he thought a circus must be like. He’d never seen one. He’d never seen anything but Winona,Minnesota, and the river five miles each way from town.
    There would be a shooting war. There were rebels who had violated the law and fired on Fort Sumter and the only thing they’d respect was steel, it was said, and he knew they were right, and the Union was right, and one other thing they said as well—if a man didn’t hurry he’d miss it. The only shooting war to come in a man’s life and if a man didn’t step right along he’d miss the whole thing.
    Charley didn’t figure to miss it. The only problem was that Charley wasn’t rightly a man yet, at least not to the army. He was fifteen and while he worked as a man worked, in the fields all of a day and into night, and looked like a man standing tall and just a bit thin with hands so big they covered a stove lid, he didn’t make a beard yet and his voice had only just dropped enough so he could talk with men.
    If they knew, he thought, if they knew he was but fifteen they wouldn’t take him at all.
    But Charley watched and Charley listened and Charley learned.
    Minnesota was forming a volunteer regiment to go off and fight. It would have near on a thousand men when it was full, men from Winona and Taylor’s Falls and Mankato and as far north as Deerwood and from the capital, St. Paul, as well.
    A thousand men. And Charley had learned one thing about an