Shook over Hell

Vietnam still haunts the American conscience. Not only did nearly 58,000 Americans die there, but--by some estimates--1.5 million veterans returned with war-induced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This psychological syndrome, responsible for anxiety, depression, and a wide array of social pathologies, has never before been placed in historical context. Eric Dean does just that as he relates the psychological problems of veterans of the Vietnam War to the mental and readjustment problems experienced by veterans of the Civil War.Employing a multidisciplinary approach that merges military, medical, and social history, Dean draws on individual case analyses and quantitative methods to trace the reactions of Civil War veterans to combat and death. He seeks to determine whether exuberant parades in the North and sectional adulation in the South helped to wash away memories of violence for the Civil War veteran. His extensive study reveals that Civil War veterans experienced severe persistent psychological problems such as depression, anxiety, and flashbacks with resulting behaviors such as suicide, alcoholism, and domestic violence. By comparing Civil War and Vietnam veterans, Dean demonstrates that Vietnam vets did not suffer exceptionally in the number and degree of their psychiatric illnesses. The politics and culture of the times, Dean argues, were responsible for the claims of singularity for the suffering Vietnam veterans as well as for the development of the modern concept of PTSD.This remarkable and moving book uncovers a hidden chapter of Civil War history and gives new meaning to the Vietnam War.

Shook Over Hell is genuinely revisionist on two fronts: it changes our understanding of psychiatric casualties in both the Vietnam War and the Civil War; and it does so not by sleight of hand, redefining terms while leaving the substance unchanged, but by solid research, sound analysis, and lucid...writing. Eric Dean first challenges the myth of the troubled and scorned Vietnam veteran...[He] convincingly demolishes every part of this myth. Citing numerous surveys and studies, he demonstrates that in the 1970s and 1980s Vietnam veterans had higher median incomes than their nonveteran peers and were unemployed at the same rate, had similar rates of drug use and addiction, and, in percentage terms, used more GI Bill benefits to attend college than had veterans of the Second World War...The core of this book is an application of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder concept to Civil War soldiers. Part of the myth of the scorned and troubled Vietnam veteran is the implied contrast between his postwar treatment by a hostile or indifferent society and the hero's welcome given veterans of other wars. Although many studies of Civil War soldiers have appeared in recent years, they have focused mainly on the wartime experiences of these men; their postwar history has been relatively neglected...Dean's research in Civil War letters and memoirs, postwar newspapers, and pension files was thorough and exhaustive. It has yielded more information about the mental health of Union veterans than historians had previously realized was available...The most original and important feature of this book is Dean's analysis of 291 case studies of Civil War veterans committed to the Indiana Hospital for the Insane. Most of them exhibited symptoms that would today be diagnosed as PTSD...Of this book it can truly be said, as it is all too often falsely said of other historical studies, that it breaks new ground., Eric Dean's case studies of hundreds of veterans of the American Civil War committed to the Indiana Hospital for the Insane succeeds in adding to the understanding of the mental and social problems of many veterans of the Vietnam War, diagnosed as suffering from PTSD. The findings of Dean's scholarly research enrich our knowledge both of the Civil War and of American military history. Its comparative approach also lends it a welcome practical usefulness., A thoughtful and thought-provoking study of Civil War and Vietnam War veterans--and of the mental and emotional problems that unite them...What [Dean] has done--with careful and well-documented research, sensitively analyzed--is to reveal 'a wide range of psychological and social problems that have not heretofore been associated with the Civil War veteran.', Overall, Dean uncovered incontrovertible evidence that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was much more common among Civil War veterans than scholars previously reckoned. Concurrently, he set out to prove that, while very real, PTSD's incidence among Vietnam vets often has been greatly exaggerated...and to prove what a number of scholars already were suspecting--that PTSD always has existed in war. In doing so, he also helped rehabilitate the image of Vietnam vets., [This is] an important book which deserves careful and unbiased consideration. Well researched and documented, it challenges as fundamentally incorrect a number of popular beliefs about the combat experiences and postwar fates of American soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War...Questioning the uniqueness of both the combat experiences of those who served in Vietnam and the war-induced psychological syndrome suffered by, as conventional wisdom has it, exceptionally large numbers of that war's veterans, Eric T. Dean, Jr. argues that their problems have been largely overstated and exaggerated by several interest groups involved in ongoing debates on the Vietnam war...[Dean's] impassioned but lucid discussion in subsequent chapters of what distressed Civil War soldiers had to go through on the battlefield, in field hospitals, in asylums and in civilian life after the war leads to reversing the perspective from which he reexamines the Civil War veteran, so that, in the end, our attention shifts back to the Vietnam veteran again, but now he is seen in a complex and rich context of diverse factors which not only invite a reevaluation of his claim to be 'a uniquely troubled and scorned individual in American history,' but, more importantly, challenge many orthodox views about America's two most controversial wars. Highly recommended.

Eric T. Dean, Jr., is an attorney with a doctorate in history from Yale University.