Civilians said they were reluctant to bring up what the veterans had experienced in combat, for fear of reopening old wounds.
As a graduate student at the Hebrew University she showed that the kind of extreme stress experienced in combat can break down the physiological barriers that normally protect the brain.
"Add to this a very toxic mix of post-traumatic stress disorder and other traumatic events experienced in combat, and you have the very likely predisposition to sociopathies like military sexual trauma and other predatory antisocial behaviors".
He believes Labor's Rudd-Gillard-Rudd leadership moves cost him the seat and he speaks of the "trauma" he felt during those times of internal ALP treachery and subterfuge – equally traumatic, he says, as some of that which he experienced in combat.
He carries this vision home, but as the novel proceeds and the lives of Willard's mother, his uncle and especially his son carry forward, the Russell clan is beset on all sides by nightmares the equal of anything Willard experienced in combat.
He rejected the assumption that the comforts of home (including a warm bed and the absence of deadly threats) were in some way a suitable replacement for the camaraderie he experienced in combat.
