Free The Evil Hours by David J. Morris Page B

for several days. The surreal image of our house, the lone surviving structure on our street, still resonates. Nevertheless, I understood somehow that such a disaster was to be expected. My brother and I had grown up watching giant plumes of smoke rising from the hills surrounding our suburb, and the fact that this particular fire had simply gotten out of hand seemed perfectly reasonable to me.
    Not so with manmade trauma, especially if the perpetrators are well known to you, in which case the likelihood of lasting harm is even greater. In fact, the governing principle with social traumas seems to be that the greater the intimacy, the greater the “dose.” If, in our example, Linda is being mortared by friendly troops by mistake, an incident of so-called friendly fire, then the traumatic dose is generally regarded as being even greater than if the barrage were being inflicted by the enemy.Together, all of these various factors reveal a rarely acknowledged tension within the field of trauma studies: the tension between the logic of nature and the logic of culture. These crimes, which are in essence interpersonal crimes, reflect the degree to which post-traumatic stress, a disorder that is so often viewed as a problem of neuroscience, is perhaps better thought of as a social wound, a damaging of the intricate web of relations that keeps a person sane and tethered to the world.
    Perhaps the easiest way to understand how all these epidemiological factors play out in the lives of real people is to look at one of the most famous and thoroughly documented episodes in the field of trauma studies: the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp in North Vietnam, which held a group of 591 American servicemen, including the future senator and presidential candidate John McCain.This group of men, most of whom were pilots, was the longest-detained group of POWs in American history, with some men being interned for the better part of a decade. (McCain was held for five and a half years.) To say that the prisoners held at the Hanoi Hilton endured horrific conditions would be a vast understatement. Prisoners were routinely tortured and survived extended periods of solitary confinement, an unusually potent form of abuse. One of the methods favored by the North Vietnamese was a local variant of the
strappado
, a technique dating back to the Spanish Inquisition, which involved being hung from the ceiling by one’s arms for hours. Repeated application of the
strappado
is the reason why Senator McCain to this day cannot raise his arms above his shoulders.
    Unbelievably, the survivors of the Hanoi Hilton have one of the lowest lifetime PTSD rates ever recorded, a mere 4 percent. (By comparison, one study on the Americans held by the Japanese during World War II found that more than 85 percent developed PTSD.) More surprising is that a substantial number of these men consistently report that they actually benefited from the experience. Describing what he called his “transforming” time in the Hanoi Hilton, McCain wrote, “Surviving my imprisonment strengthened my self-confidence, and my refusal of early release taught me to trust my own judgment. I am
grateful
to Vietnam for those discoveries, as they have made a great difference in my life. I gained a seriousness of purpose that observers of my early life had found difficult to detect.”
    How do we explain such a response to barbarity? Were McCain and his comrades superheroes, blessed with a supernatural ability to transcend brutality? How, when confronted with circumstances that would have destroyed most men, did they not only endure, but also, in many cases, actually seem to grow as human beings?
    The story of John McCain’s survival has been told and retold so many times that it has become something of a secular American sermon, and it is tempting, on a certain level, to simply chalk up the entire Hanoi Hilton episode to the mysteries of heroism. The truth of