Fredric Jameson: Vietnam, the "first terrible postmodernist war [that] cannot be told in any of the traditional paradigms of the war novel or movie....the breakdown of any shared language through which the veteran might convey such experience" (Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 44)"

Freud, "Moses and Monotheism" (1939)
"It may happen that a man who has experienced some frightful accident - a railway collision, for instance - leaves the scene of the event apparently uninjured. In the course of the next few weeks, however, he develops a number of severe psychical and motor symptoms which can only be traced to his shock, the concussion or whatever else it was. He now has a 'traumatic neurosis.'"

Tim O'Brien, lecture at Brown University (1999): "War is horrible, yes, but the dirty truth about war is it's also beautiful and seducing. When you're out on an ambush late at night and you feel that quarter moon rising over the nighttime paddies, your whole body is alive with electricity. You're so close to death, you've never been more alive. And that's what proximity to death does to you - it makes you tingle with your own aliveness. You love things you never knew you loved because you're so close to losing it all. Things like a Big Mac and a cold beer and cold sheets and your mom and your dad and the Minnesota Vikings - things you'd always laughed at, you suddenly love them. What happens to her is what happened to all of us: you partly hate the thing, but you're seduced by it the way you'd be seduced by a forest fire, knowing how, knowing it's killing things and terrible, but nonetheless it's spectacular, and, in some ways, seductive. Uh, or the way cancer might be under a microscope-it's deadly, but as it multiplies and divides, it has a certain beauty to it."