Traumatic events that we deal with in life can change us as a person. It can have an affect on us for the rest of our lives.It can affect relationships, work, everyday life habits, and much more. Coming back from war or any other traumatic experience can change a person entirely. People who come back from duty are more than likely scarred and have a harder time reintegrating into society. Normal activities such as driving, going to the grocery store, trying to find a job, and many more becomes a difficult task to accomplish.
When distressing events happen it can create PTSD. Post traumatic stress disorder is when someone has flashbacks about a traumatic event that could have happened years ago. Their flashbacks are triggered by something that makes them think back to the event. This has an affect on them for the rest of their life. Most PTSD cases are people who are coming back from war. People who have seen death, had to kill others, and have seen the horrors of war. Having to experience and see theses things can turn us into a different person. We hide away the trauma and fear. For some, the trauma is too much and it consumes them. People back from war are still fighting a battle. This battle is just with what they have encountered when they were on duty. Their physical wounds might be all healed up but some scars of what they have seen stay with them.
In the book The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien explains about how Vietnam has an affect on Mary Anne in the chapter “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”. When Mary Anne first comes over to Vietnam, it’s to be with Mark Fossie. She is explained as a bubbly, innocent, teenage girl. But once she comes to the heart of the war she has a natural curiosity for how the land is, wants to know about the culture, and wants to know more about life during war. Once she begins to understand war and the life of it, she stops doing everyday things that she would have done back home. She stops wearing jewelry, she cuts her hair short, and she worries less about hygiene. She starts going into the ambush and learns the Vietnamese native culture. The war and the jungle began to consume her. She explains to her boyfriend Mark Fossie and Rat Kiley why she can’t return to her home, “You hide in this little fortress, behind wire and sandbags, and you don’t know… sometimes I want to eat this place. The whole country, the dirt, the death, I just want to swallow it and have it there inside me. That’s how I feel”(O’Brien 106).
When people come from war they bring home scars that cannot be seen. Their pain and trauma can run deep. This can affect them for the rest of their life. It can affect the little things in life that to us would seem like nothing. War changes people and some can never recover from their experiences.