Contemporary Connections: House Made of Dawn and Veterans Suffering with PTSD

PTSD and Me: True Stories From Military Veterans:

http://gawker.com/ptsd-and-me-true-stories-from-military-veterans-1167107848

       PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, is a major issue in our society today because it is disorder that is misunderstood and isn misrepresented with a lack of empathy for those who suffer from PTSD. Not all veterans face PTSD in the same way because each person has separate and individual experiences. War veterans have their different ways of dealing and coping with their disability.
     A prevalent theme from the novel, “A House Made of Dawn,” is the hardships that veterans struggle with post-war. Veterans have a very difficult time adjusting and assimilating back to society. The main character, Abel deeply struggles with adjusting after being given many opportunities to assimilate to his new surroundings. The priest, John Big Bluff Tosamah lacks an understanding and lacks empathy toward Abel, because Tosamah has been able to adjust back into the new life, whereas Abel seems to throw it back into everyone’s faces who has tried to help him. Abel lacks an ability to adjust.  All people cope in different ways and deal with their problems in their own way, but Abel is intensely detached from the people and atmosphere around him. Abel cannot adjust as well as Tosamah; Abel becomes an alcoholic and becomes a dysfunctional human to his surrounding world.

      From this article, I found various perspectives of veterans dealing with PTSD. They have all struggled with adjusting into a new environment with different levels of pain and conflict. This article showed how people who go to war don’t always come back as the same person they were before. One of the veterans from this article said that, “All men who go to war die kid, anybody who comes back, well they came back cheated.”
      These people’s stories were relatable to Abel from, “House Made of Dawn.” From the article, a veteran from modern day struggled with drinking and drugs, similar to Abel. The veterans story was that, “after leaving the military, I spent almost a decade fucking, fighting, and having random emotionally erratic episodes and just chalking it up to drinking (I became a drunk) and partying (my family and friends noticed a marked difference in me, but were too worried to mention it to me (temper issues).” This example further demonstrates how some people cope in a negative ways and how many veterans can often suffer through various degrees of PTSD. The veteran from the article almost ruined his family life because of his drinking problem and it took him to get to the bottom to pick himself up for his wife and new born baby. 
      I hope that by the end of the book, that Abel can have some clarity and resolution as a character because his actions can at times be frustrating. The reality of PTSD is that not all people can find a happy ending, but hopefully Abel can fight through his struggles to find some sort of peace. Maybe Abel can open up to the people surrounding him who have tried to show him support and he can realize that he is not alone.