Sue,

That's a fair question. I did not fight during a war. I served in the United States Army between 1957 and 1959 as a Radioteleype Operator and Radio Procedure Instructor in Fort Richardson, Alaska. During that time and the four years following, I was on call, in a ready reserve, to go anywhere on this globe to fight a war and possibly lose my life. That always hangs over every soldier's when he is in the army, whether he is under fire or not. But my knowledge of the psychology of fighting men was obtained through research about warfighting and through my contact with veteran U.S. Army officers for seventeen years as the Senior Editor of Combat Studies Institute (the history department) and the CGSC Press at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC). But my principal insights were derived from PROFESSIONAL psychologists in books about the effects of posttraumatic stress disorder on soldiers. Soldiers experience PSD, but phychologists understand it much better. I used the following sources among many others:

Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Jonathan Shay, Achilles In Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994). Dr. Shay worked with numerous patients suffering from posttraumatic stress disorders.

Personal e-mail communication between Donald L. Gilmore and Tony Swindell, July 31, August 29, 2001; Swindell was in the thick of it in Vietnam. Herbert Hendin and Ann Pollinger, Wounds of War: The Psychological Aftermath of Combat in Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1984),

I am aware that we have historians like Michael Fellman pronouncing on the manichaean attributes of the Missouri guerrillas, the devilish aspects of ALL THESE YOUNG MEN, but I have never taken my guidance from amateurs about Persian religious philosophy. I prefer modern medical professionals. And I would suggest to anyone else that if they want to know about posttraumatic stress disorder, the best information on it, that that's the best place to get it. But histoians have to deal with these issues, not ignore them, so I have used psychological studies to base some of my arguments.

Thanks very much for your question and your politeness.

Don Gilmore