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Post Traumatic Stress Disorder In Long Halftime Walk By Billy Lynn

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War can have serious effects on a person’s mind, emotions, and impact their life style. War veterans tend to suffer from a condition called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) due to the fact that they have experienced traumatic events. PTSD is defined as a condition that a person can obtain after being affected by strong traumatic events such a sexual assault or even past war experiences. Billy Lynn who is a character in the book, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain is the main character who has his platoon and him praised right after they return from Iraq. Billy has some events that show that he has PTSD and he doesn’t consider his life to be “normal” anymore. Billy also talks about the death of one of his members, at one point he feels dread in returning to Iraq, and he even describes some side effects of the war. Ben provides a clear …show more content…

This is a condition that is known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Billy is subject to these events which in turn make him question what is “normal” to him. He lives his life remembering some of the events that have happened in Iraq. According to Gifford Billy has PTSD due to the events that Billy has experienced in war such as always being on your toes because your life is always in danger and even recalling events such as the death of his friend Shroom. The NDVA state that emotional effects can happen when a person remembers events that they have experienced throughout war and the USDVA describes how being stationed in another country can affect a soldier’s life back at home. Having to live a life where he is constantly being reminded of such events is not a normal way of living his life, and Billy even admits to not knowing what being normal is anymore when his sergeant asks him to think of it as a “normal day in America”. In a sense Billy does not even consider himself to be normal and the way he processes his thought to be

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Billy in no means was a rambo-esque type bloodthirsty killer, but more the awkward what am I doing here type instead. The innocent optometrist was once again forced into a stressful situation. He was the topic of deliberate bullying from other enlisted men, reasons being from his inability to sleep through the night, which could be linked directly to his traumatic experiences when he was younger, to the fact he couldn't keep up with the other men while participating in physical exercise. This lead to a group of men being killed which i’m sure didn't help bialys conscious. The stress only added up more when Billy had to experience the bombing of the beautiful city of dresden in a meat locker.

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Billy is to blame for that. In chapter 5 of the novel, Billy recalls his wedding night with Valencia after they got done making love Valencia asks Billy about war. Reluctant to talk Billy gets up and goes to the bathroom and finds himself living in the past once again. The slightest mention of war and Billy immediately cringes and checks himself out of reality. As an anti-war novel maybe war is to blame for the imbalance relationship that Billy has with his wife and I will explain more of that in a

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PTSD Affecting Soldiers He stood there, frozen, shocked, not knowing what to do when he saw a gun pointed at him. Thankfully, the trigger didn’t work, but he had to witness a scarring event, in which he had shot his enemy in the head. It is not surprising that soldiers returning from a stressful war often suffer from a psychological condition called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. For instance, in the book Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers, the principle character Perry unmistakably demonstrates how war troopers can be damaged and experience the ill effects of PTSD.

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In almost everything he does he is the odd man out. Billy seems like the weird person who just always seems out of place and like he doesn't belong. 1969 was the year that this book was published. PTSD was discovered in 1980, so therefore in the book they couldn't define Billy’s condition. As even in reality they didn't know what it was.

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Some experiences, like the sudden unexpected death of a loved one, can also cause PTSD” (National Institute of Mental Health, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”). PTSD, like many other diseases, can arise from a number of conditions, making it hard to pinpoint where it stems from. Vonnegut takes into account that PTSD can come from a number of sources, providing a plethora of possible explanations for Billy’s mental capacity throughout the novel. For instance, early in Billy’s life, Billy, along

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When these children grow up and live their lives they will never be able to completely shake off the effects of PTSD, but they can still find happiness and hope. Beah was able to find hope through music, and rehabilitation. He was exposed to violence and drugs at such a young age, which was all he really knew. That is why he was so mesmerized by New York City- it had everything Sierra Leone did not.

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Later in the novel, the readers are able to connect where Billy had gotten the idea of the world from when Billy read a book while recovering at the veterans’ hospital. The book was about a Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extraterrestrials on a planet called Zircon212 written by Kilgore Trout, which is he whole basis for Billy’s belief in the Traflamadorians. This proves that his PTSD made him believe the book was real and apart of his reality when in truth it was just a way for his mind to cope with the difficulty of living after the war. War caused Billy to lose a sense of what was real and

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Every soldier, despite how mentally stable they are, experiences some form of mental trauma from war. Like Murthy said, "War is hell... it has an impact on the people who take part that never heals" (Murthy). Paul Bäumer experiences a sense of depression on his regulated leave when “there is a distance” between his family and his past life (pg. 160). Despite being back at home and safe with his family, the war has destroyed that peacefulness that he experienced there in his childhood, and replaces it with numbing emotions.

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This disconnect makes it hard for the military men to explain their experience and how one small death or win out of thousands can be so significant to them, when people on the other side see it as one of a million casualties. The war is not personified as it is with the soldiers who actually lived through it. Another soldier who feels detached from reality is Adam Schumann, who was put on countless medications to fix him with no help. After the war, Schumann has “lost all hope” and can’t live with himself, feeling that “the end is near for (him), very, very near. Day by

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The wretched figure of Billy is mentioned several times in the story to enhance the effectiveness of the anti-war figure. There is one paragraph that plays as the repetition to describe the weakness of Billy as well as other American soldiers in the war is, "A German measured Billy's upper right arm with his thumb and forefinger, asked a companion what sort of an army would send a weakling like that to the front. They looked at other American bodies now, pointed out a lot more that were nearly as bad as Billy's (83). " The author intentionally pictured Billy and other Americans as weak and pathetic young boys to question our assumptions about who are actually fighting in these wars. Through portraying Billy as an incapable soldier, Vonnegut

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But, maybe Billy wasn’t aware that he was actually affected by his experience in war, where he might be hallucinating the world of Tralfamadorians in order to escape a world destroyed by war. “Slaughterhouse-Five is like a puppet-show where we can see both the puppet (Billy Pilgrim) and the puppeteer (Kurt Vonnegut). If Billy is just a puppet, then that makes Kurt Vonnegut our protagonist.” (The Cambridge companion to war writing) Kurt Vonnegut also served in the war, and suffered from depression not only due to the war, which was the cherry to the ice cream, but also because his mother committed suicide, his sister died a day after her husband died. I feel Vonnegut wrote this book which actually represents his life in the real world.

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Billy’s dilemma relates with a TED talk giving by Sebastian Junger, a journalist and a war veteran from 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team. He spent intensive time at Restrepo, which was an outpost in the Korengal Valley, in Afghanistan. In the TED talk, Junger explains the reason that veterans miss war. Junger goes to explain that the reason that veterans miss war times is because of the brotherhood and the bonds

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The connection of all events, past, present, and future, as well as the ability of the Tralfamadorians to observe them as a whole, prove that the idea that human actions can change the course of events is false. It is also related to the bombing of Dresden, Billy being involved with World War II, and the bombing of Dresden were extremely traumatic experiences for him, and they left a lasting impression. His psychological wounds due to the pain and horrors he witnessed during the war are still present. His distorted sense of time and battle with PTSD are both caused by the horrors of war and the absence of free will, which is connected to Billy's military experiences. Billy struggles with the idea that things

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