Free The Evil Hours by David J. Morris

“dose” in this theory? Put another way, exactly how many cc’s of pain, loss, and moral vertigo can one fit into a laboratory beaker?
    There is also the challenge of how to factor in the identity of the person undergoing such a “dosage.” As one Vietnam vet turned advocate practically yelled at me one day, “Combat doesn’t happen to inert bodies, it happens to
people
.” In our falling-bookcase example, the question thus becomes:
Who is Linda exactly?
What sort of family does she come from? What sort of childhood did she have? A safe, protected one or one marked by sadism and abuse? Was she extroverted?Open to new experiences and sensations? Was she someone who was easily hypnotized?What happened to her immediately prior to the earthquake? To what degree was she exposed to the elements during her ordeal? Did she lose consciousness at any point? How did her friends and family, her social support system, respond after the temblor? And perhaps most importantly, what story did she tell herself in the wake of this seismic event? How did she incorporate the terror into the ongoing tale of her life? How did she go about creating a narrative from the disparate images of her actual experience, arranging them into a shape that she could recognize as uniquely her own?
    This quagmire of questions would seem to overwhelm the scientific mind and to a certain extent it does. Fundamentally, we do not know why some people are damaged by terror and some are not. Part of trauma’s power lies in its mystery, in the fact that it remains outside the range of normal human perception, like a distant galaxy beyond the reach of even the most powerful telescope. It remains an enigma because human beings are an enigma. Nevertheless, scientists have in recent years developed what amounts to a recipe for post-traumatic stress, for lack of a better word. If you surprise someone, trap them, physically violate them in some way (as with rape), and expose them to the elements for some period of time, you will soon see the hallmarks of what we call PTSD. According to the
Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry
, the common thread in psychological trauma is a feeling of “intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation.”
    Chief among the crimes that trauma commits against the mind is the distortions of memory it introduces. In the face of terror, the mind skips straight over some things and perversely overrecords others; one pattern that researchers see is that during terror the mind’s normal capacity to record novel visual stimuli tends to go into overdrive, creating what early psychologists called the
idée fixe
.One of the most unsettling features of trauma is the odd sense—which one gets when visiting war zones and automobile accidents—that the mind functions as a sort of mad curator of the grotesque and the bizarre, documenting in painstaking detail the most repulsive scenes of violence and human violation. The mind, which recoils at the thought of its own extinction, adheres to visions of the extinction of others, as if to collect clues to its own demise. Here one is reminded of the tragic cry of the overexperienced—“If I could just get that sight out of my head!” I cannot, for instance, get out of my head the sight of the soldier in Dora who’d been wounded in the groin. Nor can I unsee the red Igloo Beverage Container floating in a filthy canal next to an overturned Humvee north of Fallujah that contained the bodies of two dead Pennsylvania National Guardsmen. The sight of the bodies being loaded onto a medevac chopper is paradoxically less vivid, less real, than that of the red Igloo, an American symbol of portable leisure, floating in an eddy next to the Humvee, occasionally brushing against some bracken on the shore.
    It is almost as if certain types of events—the bloody, the melodramatic, the spectacular, the incongruous—are somehow