Dr. James Vedder s Experience With Combat Fatigue

Dr. James Vedder, a combat surgeon who was stationed at Iwo Jima for his first experience with combat, describes the constant encounters he must have with horrible injuries and death, and ultimately concludes that â€Å"in all this horror, the job became routine,† such to say he become numb towards the tragedy he encountered so frequently. He lost his human quality of compassion and pain, and went through the motions of fixing mangled faces and missing limbs. While it is devastating for someone to see death and injury as routine, this aspect of dehumanization is likely necessary for someone like Dr. Vedder to mentally survive the war. If he were to fully absorb the death surrounding him, it is not likely he would be able to handle doing his job. Dehumanization obviously has negative effects on a soldier’s mind and psyche, a fact that the military almost always ignores. A neuropsychiatric disorder known as â€Å"combat fatigue† often plagues soldiers in the line o f an â€Å"unprecedented amount of indirect fire† but is almost never recognized. Many saw soldiers with the disorder as lesser, and â€Å"the Marine Corps official history failed to mention combat fatigue, even though it constituted 10 percent of the casualties and had a very negative effect on the fighting.† The trend of refusing to acknowledge that human soldiers also had human brains and hearts and feelings became accepted more and more as the war dragged on. It is discernable that dehumanization helps with the success of a