Now what follows after WW II is interesting. Journalist-soldier S. L. A. Marshall will do a controversial study on the fire participation of US troops during WW II. And he will conclude that during that conflict only 25% of US troops actually fired their weapons at the enemy. This will later be attributed to an "in born" tendency of human beings not to kill their fellow human beings. Empathic consciousness in full flower. So combat training will be changed to acclimate new soldiers to fire without hesitation. This new training will be used in Vietnam, and the fire participation will go up. But it will also be the war in which Post Traumatic Stress Disorder will get its name.
As far as I have been able to determine from what I know of the military men of the ancient eras who physically participated in battles, none of them ever seems to have developed what we would call PTSD. I think this observation makes for another argument that in the ancient world, sociopaths were the rule and not the exception.
I think that PTSD is what happens when empathic consciousness is forced back into sociopathic consciousness by the necessities of war. War virtually demands that you not think of your fellow human beings as being "real." This could go a long way towards explaining how troops from susposedly "civilized" countries can fall into a pattern of committing attrocities on the battlefield. They've slipped back into the sociopathic consciousness of the past. The dogs of war have indeed been let slip. And this would indicate that sociopathology is a consciousness that lies just below empathic consciousness, and never too deeply.
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