From The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by David J Morris: In short, the more helpless the patient felt, the more likely he was to be traumatised. One unit I was with north of Fallujah had lost a guy who was killed while using a Port-a-John in the middle of the night. He’d gone out to take a s**t, and out of nowhere, a single mortar round came in and ended him. It was the only incoming they had taken in days. How do you go about telling a guy who is alive only because he didn’t use the sh*tter at the wrong time that he ought to go back home, go to school, get married and mortgaged, have kids and commit to the world when he knows for a fact that nothing in this world is real except chance? That his continued existence, his dreams, his plans, his hopes for the future are the product of invisible, ever-changing odds, odds that could shift and turn on him at any moment? What place did human reason have in this world really, after you had seen what war could do...
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