Physical Characteristics -- The Journal Entries

At the beginning, Joe's entries were made in blue ink in a small, even script. A neat, straight, red line separated each day and, to define the left margin, he traced another straight red line over the existing first ledger column separation. At intervals of five to ten days, below that day's entry, Joe wrote in red ink how many days he'd been "out of the states" that year. Also, as they headed west from Pearl, Joe noted time changes in red ink.

On April 8, less than a week after they joined the bombardment of Okinawa, his writing began to lose some of its evenness. He crossed out words for the first time (though he did this rarely). On April 11th, he stopped retracing the left margin ledger line. On the 21st, a few days after an accident in his gun turret, he stopped separating the days with red lines. His handwriting became more of a scrawl.

During May, his grammar got worse and his word order often became confused. Since they were bombarding and fighting off air attacks twenty-four hours a day for weeks, this was likely the result of sleep deprivation.

Conversely, though, his entries regarding the ship's activities during the Okinawa operation became more and more detailed. Notations included times written in both military and civilian format. Accompanying ships were noted nearly every day.

Yet, on May 22, his entries suddenly became very terse. When they left Okinawa he began adding a bit more detail for a few weeks, but from the end of June through early August, he said very little.

September through December's writings are again more detailed, except when there was, as he put it, "not much doing" on board. After Okinawa, Joe wrote almost nothing about what he did when given liberty or recreation. His main pastime seems to have been watching the other ships.

WHAT IS POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (PTSD)?

In 1945, Joe Chicco came home from the South Pacific with a chronic case of PTSD, though he wasn't officially diagnosed until after 1980, when the disorder was finally given a name. The next week's blogs will give information about PTSD.

All of us can remember an incident in our lives--a car accident perhaps--that set our hearts pounding and shortened our breath. At such times, our "fight or flight" mechanisms kick into gear, raising adrenaline levels, to help us deal with the sudden stress. Some people experience this fright reaction for a more extended period, for instance, the minutes it takes to escape a house fire, or hours of sitting through a bad hurricane, or perhaps over and over, during weeks spent as a 24/7 caregiver to a loved one.

This stress reaction is normal, and we need it to handle emergencies. But even after the incident is over, most of us don't sleep easy for a night or more. Many of us still feel remnants of that sudden adrenaline surge in our limbs and our guts, making us a little shaky and queasy, for days or weeks after. Some folks eat more as result ("I had a bad day and I deserve chocolate"), or drink an extra beer, or smoke a few extra cigarettes each day. After a while, we return to normal.

But when people go through a particularly horrendous trauma, especially if the trauma of its aftermath lasts more than a day--or when people are asked to work in situations such as combat where the fight-or-flight response is sustained at a high level over months or even years, the body's chemistry can actually change. This is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, now called PTSD.


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Information taken from the National Center for PTSD website. Highly recommended.
http://ncptsd.va.gov/ncmain/information/

More information is also available from the Military Veterans PTSD Reference Manual,
http://www.ptsdmanual.com/