Psychiatric casualties were unlike the wounded in that they became worse not better, as they moved further to the rear. Some were simply malingerers, conscious or unconscious, who discovered imaginary aliments, exaggerated the symptoms of real injuries, and developed pyschosomatic disorders long before they came within sound of the enemy's guns. But even genuine casualties resulting from the most intense combat might refuse to recover once they entered the chain of evacuation, for they could get further to the rear and closer to safety only by continuing to be percived as a bit mad.
Fighting for Life: American Military Medicine in World War II, Albert E. Cowdrey
...There are
so many things wrong with this paragraph. I mean, sure, it represents mainstream U.S. military thinking about PTSD during WWII pretty well, but.
Come on. Variable responses to stress as malingering, "conscious or unconscious"? You're a medical historian, Cowdrey, not an army psych charged with sending men back into the meat grinder as quickly as possibly.
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