Shell Shocked Veteran / Literature

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• In the Stephen King short story 1408, Enslin becomes totally paranoid after his experience.
• The Afterward: Sir Terriam was the most gravely wounded of the seven companions. Hers were mostly invisible though, as the Old God had attacked her mind, but worse as a result. She suffered from terrifying nightmares about it for a long time, and can no longer stand to live in a city, but has gotten a bit better through living on her country estates outside of cities. Further, she's unable to stand that much light, so Terriam always wears a hood which covers her eyes, whether inside or out. Her wounds had caused her blinding headaches that can now still occur if she's triggered or pushes herself over much.
• Alexis Carew becomes one of these over the course of the first three books due to a string of misadventures: losing several members of a prize crew she commanded when the Space Pirates they were riding herd on briefly retook the ship, sustained abuse by a sexist CO who meant to drive her out of the service altogether, and then losing almost her entire crew commanding a You Shall Not Pass! against a far superior ship. By HMS Nightingale she's developed recurring nightmares and a bit of a drinking problem. An Enforced Trope: the author's notes on the subject state that he didn't find it credible that other Military Science Fiction protagonists wouldn't develop issues dealing with their war experiences.
• In The Alice Network, Eve, Finn, Charlie’s brother James, and Captain Cameron are all former or current soldiers with PTSD. Eve and James panic in crowded places occasionally, Cameron and James shoot themselves because they can't cope with their memories, Finn and Eve have nightmares about it, and Finn has anger issues. Charlie, James' brother, notices that he and other soldiers often prefer seats in the corner, where they can see all the lines of fire, and in the epilogue, Eve chooses a corner seat.
• All the characters in All Quiet on the Western Front become Shell-Shocked Veterans to one extent or another. Remarque wrote a sequel of shorts, The Road Back, which describes the survivors trying to integrate back into society. The novels focus on young soldiers who are hit the hardest: older men can go back to their jobs and families, but the young know nothing besides the war.
• Animorphs:
  • The entire series is basically a case study in six teenagers becoming this trope. Once the war actually ends, Jake is the most obvious / classic form of this, while Sad Clown Marco is of the "successful life empty inside" kind.
  • Rachel doesn't feel anything like this, though — which gravely concerns her (and just about everybody) thanks to what it says about her.
  • Loren describes her father as a shell of his former self ever since he came home from Vietnam.
  • Jake's great-grandfather was a World War II vet who, while no details are given, clearly saw a lot and never fully recovered. Jake gives a lot of thought to the possibility of ending up like him over the course of book 31. Interestingly, he saw a lot of his "old soul" in Jake before the series even began.
  • The disgraced war-prince Alloran, aka Visser Three's Andalite host. He is already like this in The Andalite Chronicles and he even has a Pet the Dog moment with Loren when he defends her father from Chapman's insensitive remarks. In The Hork-Bajir Chronicles we see a younger Alloran become the disgraced veteran that Elfangor meets in The Andalite Chronicles. The image of Alloran painted in both books makes it clear that he's been deeply traumatized by the atrocities he witnessed and committed during the war against the Yeerks.
• Pat Barker's WWI trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road) deals extensively with shell-shock, among other war-induced psychiatric disorders.
• In the Biggles stories, Biggles himself becomes one towards the end of the First World War. At the start of the last story he's noted to be drinking heavily and flying recklessly and alone, to the point where his commanding officer conspires with his brother officers to try to find a way to ground him before he kills himself.
• Depending on which reality variant or which character iteration you're looking at, practically all the main characters in Hal Duncan's The Book of All Hours series are this at different points. Particularly Seamus/Prometheus (who is this in EVERY reality (unfortunately it's a core staple of his archetype) and Jack (Carter) (in the iterations where he plays The Captain). Phreedom would have been this except she chose the Screw Destiny route and went AWOL.
• In his autobiography Boy, Roald Dahl discusses his Sadist Teacher Captain Hardcastle, who had been a captain in the war. As Captain Hardcastle was never still, rumour had it that this was due to "shell shock", which the pupils took to mean that something had gone off with an enormous bang next to him, and he hadn't stopped jumping since.
• In Bubble World, as Todd Piloski makes his war games more real, they start to mess with people's health like real war would.
• Catwoman: Soulstealer: Luke was a Marine in Iraq, and lost many members of his unit to an IUD attack. Since then, he's developed PTSD and suffered traumatic flashbacks triggered by things like fireworks. He's taking medication and goes to therapy, but has panic attacks nonetheless at times.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses: Feyre's experiences Under the Mountain have left her wrestling with guilt, self-loathing, and nightmares during the second book. She's healed some in the third but notes that the wounds are still there.
• From Iain M. Bank's Culture novels, GSV Lasting Damage later the Masaq' Hub mind is a rather depressed veteran of the Culture-Idirian War.
  • GSV Sleeper Service claimed this as the reason it went Eccentric. Although we all know how that turned out.
• Sweeney Todd is one in Terry Pratchett's book Dodger, rather than being a (deliberate) murderer - he keeps seeing his customers as horribly wounded comrades-in-arms, so he gives them an unwanted Mercy Kill.
• Most of the soldier boys in The Drowned Cities are this to one extent or another, with viewpoint character Sergeant Ocho, being a prime example. Hiding his trauma and anger behind a wall of bitterness, Ocho is a deeply screwed up Type IV Sociopathic Soldier, who's just barely clinging to his humanity in the midst of the carnage. His troopers aren't much better, and tend to take out their problems on the civilian population.
• Ellie shows signs of this in The Ellie Chronicles, the sequel trilogy to The Tomorrow Series. She doesn't seem to have full-blown PTSD, but the war changed her, and not always for the better.
  • And it's mentioned in The Other Side of Dawn, the last book in The Tomorrow Series, that many of her neighbors show signs of having seen too much war.
• In Fallen Into the Pit by Ellis Peters, set shortly after World War II, schoolteacher Chad Wedderburn is the withdrawn loner type of shellshocked veteran. This being a murder mystery, the question of whether he's also the type that's retained an aptitude for killing is one that gets a lot of attention after the first body shows up.
• The protagonist of "For Esmé, With Love and Squalor" (in J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories). The viewpoint switches from first— to third-person during the time the WWII soldier is at his lowest ebb, emotionally. However, it's not difficult to guess "Sergeant X" is the narrator. In the paragraph preceding the POV shift, he writes, "I've disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me." (Unlike X, the other characters in this passage have names.)
• Guardians of the Flame: Even after they're freed, many former slaves are portrayed as traumatized. One, a dwarf, doesn't get that he's free, thinking that Karl now owns him (despite all his attempts at persuading him otherwise) after he'd been tortured for repeated escape attempts in the past. Walter's wife Kirah was gang-raped by the slavers who had captured her as well. She still can't stand to touch him at times, even years later, as a result when it reminds her of this.
• Several Harry Potter characters, including Harry and Snape. And Alastor Moody, who became badly scarred both physically and mentally during his career as an Auror, leading him to become Properly Paranoid to the point where his catchphrase is "CONSTANT VIGILANCE!"
• Most characters from The Hunger Games end up like this, especially ones who actually participated in the Games.
  • Katniss had this problem before she even set foot in the arena, as her father was killed in a mine explosion years ago. But the third novel in the trilogy, Mockingjay, shows a Katniss which is the full-blown embodiment of this trope. A good chunk of the novel could even be considered a psychological breakdown of the effects of war and PTSD, including Katniss' addiction to 'morphling' and frequent panic attacks. It all culminates in her eventual attempted suicide by nightlock.
  • Zigzagged with Finnick, who initially seems possibly the most well-adjusted person to come out of the games, and even deals with what happens to him after them quite well, but is severley depressed for a good chunk of Mockingjay when Annie is captured by the capitol. He seems to mostly be able to hold himself together, but its fragile and largely for other people's benefit.
• A well-known phenomenon in the Hurog duology. Trauma flashbacks are known as "soldier's dreams", and when Oreg gets the blank stare, Ward immediately correctly diagnoses him with PTSD, even though he doesn't know that name. It's a good thing he knows what it is, as Oreg's bouts of re-living past events tend to be physical — Ward can see wounds appearing on his body.
• Charles Todd's Inspector Ian Rutledge suffers from an unusual form of shell-shock: he constantly hallucinates the presence of another soldier whom he was forced to execute during the war.
• In Michael Flynn's The January Dancer, the advantage of fighting for a nobler cause is that a Shell-Shocked Veteran, waking cold and shaking from nightmares, can sometimes get back to sleep.
• The titular Knights of the Borrowed Dark refer to this as being "iron inside", and Denizen notes that all four of the older Knights show this to some extent: Vivian is hard-edged, driven and emotionally closed-off, Fuller Jack is a quiet, somewhat withdrawn Gentle Giant, D'Aubigny is slightly unsettlingly focused and intense, and Grey is a full-blown Stepford Smiler.
  • By the third book, events have ramped up Grey's PTSD to the point where he's pretty much crossed the Despair Event Horizon, and thirteen-year-old side character Simon has developed symptoms and triggers as well.
• In The Last Full Measure by Michael Shaara, the horror of the The American Civil War has turned several characters into this. Lee observes that General Pickett has lost his spirit after his division was shattered at Gettysburg. Chamberlain, though not despondent, is deeply affected by his experience and is startled when he meets a recently-recruited officer who is still eager about fighting.
• Lighter Than a Feather, a WWII Alternate History novel, features a US Marine who believes every Japanese he kills is the same one, and thinks they/he is playing some kind of trick on him.
• The Lord of the Rings: Written by a World War I veteran, and thus with personal experience with this trope. Those traumatized include all the Elves left in Middle-Earth (most of whom are thousands of years old, have fought in countless wars which all turned out to be pointless in the end, and have seen or are about to see everything they care about in Middle-Earth pass away). Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam, who all have scars from carrying the Ring. (Note: All the listed characters ultimately sail to Aman, the approximate equivalent of Heaven, where it is said anyone can heal from anything. The story really ends when Sam goes, on the very last ship, having lived a long, happy, full life, but never having entirely healed from the Ring.)
  • Aragorn also has shades of this, suffering what looks very much like a PTSD flashback when asked about the Nazgul.
• Lord Peter Wimsey, especially in the earlier books in the series. He suffered a nervous breakdown right after the war, and has two more Heroic BSODs during the series.
  • It's implied in Busman's Honeymoon that he's always vulnerable to relapse at the conclusion of a murder case — because in doing his duty, he's sending the murderer to his or her death.
  • In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, one of the suspects, George Fentiman, is prone to panic attacks and bouts of shell-shock where he has no idea what he's doing. He didn't do it. However, there are many veteran characters in the book, none of whom are so badly affected.
  • Many books (especially mysteries and romances) written by British authors in the immediately post-war years featured characters who are "not quite right" anymore, due to things they saw or did while in service. Probably Truth in Television, considering that most of a generation of young men were in active service, and the proper treatment for shell-shock was basically considered to be "We just don't talk about the War around Joe."
• In Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, Luke is subjected to a form of torture that amounts to mentally experiencing thousands of years alone in space watching the stars go out; it doesn't break him, but he's affected for the rest of the book with a kind of nihilism and creeping despair. He tells a companion that it's like he's been infected, that "All I know is that it makes me want to die. No. Not die. Just... stop." Being Luke Skywalker, though, he pushes on and tries to act like he would have before that happened in the hopes of Becoming the Mask.
• Seerdomin from the Malazan Book of the Fallen has been thoroughly broken by the things he witnessed and did as a commanding officer under the Seer's tyrannic holy war. While he still sometimes tries to talk sense into his superiors, he wilts at the slightest resistance and accepts his reality stoically. He considers his ideals devoured by the world he lives in.
• Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series has two of these characters, although neither of them got that way via war per se. Cadrach was a powerful sorcerer who fell into despair after reading Du Svardenvyrd and was subsequently tortured into revealing his knowledge to Evil Sorcerer Pryrates. Camaris was the greatest knight in Osten Ard, but suffered a Heroic BSoD after falling in love with King Prester John's wife, the wife of his dearest friend, and then seeing her die in childbirth — a child he sired, and later attempted suicide. Twenty years later, he is found witless in a backwater inn, but eventually recovers and becomes the page trope.
• Septimus of Mrs. Dalloway. He watched his friend die in an explosion. As a result, he lost his humanity, he can't feel anything, he has hallucinations of the aforementioned friend, he's possibly schizophrenic, and he eventually kills himself.
• In the short story "Nightcrawlers", by Robert R. McCammon, the main character is a Vietnam vet. The kicker: his nightmares have come to life and stalk him at a truck stop. The story was adapted into an episode of The Twilight Zone (1985).
• No Gods for Drowning: Captain Arcadia Myrn is haunted by her assignment to attack the village of Shah as part of a planned sacrifice to the goddess Logoi. She couldn't end up killing anyone, so instead now is wracked with guilt over what occurred that still continues to affect her in the present and is affecting her now.
• Swedish writer Simona Ahrnstedt gives us an example of this in her debut novel Överenskommelser. It has been several years since male protagonist Seth was in war, but he can still have nightmares about it.
• Aimon Behaim, in Pact, was a Canadian chronomancer who served overseas against Nazi practitioners, losing the use of a limb to the bite of a ghoul which left a Wound That Will Not Heal. Returning home afterwards, he found himself disconnected from his old life, leading him to enter into a not quite friendship with local diabolist Rosalyn Thorburn. They and their heirs would go on to shape the politics of the local practitioner scene when the story proper begins, after each of their deaths.
  • John Stiles from the Spin-Off Pale is basically this all the time, due to being made up from dead soldiers.
• Paradise Rot: Oscar Pilson has been in so many wars and conflicts, as both a soldier and later a mercenary, that he can't seem to stop getting into even more.
• Featured heavily in Phoenix and Ashes by Mercedes Lackey, set in 1917 in an alternate universe identical to our own except that some individuals have magical powers. The protagonist's love interest has been severely wounded, mentally and physically, and after coming home to recover, spends a lot of time in the local pub that has been pretty much taken over by those in the same situation. Very realistic look at how PTSD (or "shell-shock") was viewed at the time.
• Scott from The Power of Five, With Good Reason. Poor guy.
• Presidential: Emily and Sutton still have lingering trauma due to the shooting which they survived, but their father didn't. Sutton and their mother had been wounded in it too.
• Taybard Jaekel in the later Rigante novels.
• Shatter the Sky: While in Aurati custody, Kaia was repeatedly beaten in an effort to make her supposed seer ability come out. As she had none, it didn't work. They had also kidnapped her to begin with. After she's freed by Maren, Kaia is withdrawn and easily triggered as a result.
• Marshal Teddy Daniels of Shutter Island has a lot of bad dreams and a drinking problem because of the things he saw at the liberation of Dachau.
• The Silmarillion: Beren is described as being like this in various ways in different versions of the story, at least when he arrives in Doriath — unsurprisingly, given that J. R. R. Tolkien was a WWI veteran, the disastrous Somme campaign in particular. Fortunately, Beren has a half-elf, half-goddess lover to help him heal.
  • Hurin also becomes this, especially after having to witness what happens to his son Turin.
  • And the gravestone of Tolkien and his wife have "Beren" and "Lúthien" written under their names.
• Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five. It's implied (though not explicit) throughout the text of the book that his claimed time-traveling and alien encounters are nothing more than a coping mechanism for severe PTSD.
• A Song of Ice and Fire has several examples.
  • Eddard Stark survived Robert's Rebellion with quite a few psychological scars. Seeing the bodies of Rhaegar Targaryen's murdered children was especially traumatic. He also has nightmares about his sister's death and the fight at the Tower of Joy.
  • Sandor Clegane eventually has a psychological break during the Battle of Blackwater and deserts the Lannister army.
  • Arya is implied to have PTSD; in any case, living through the War of Five Kings clearly did a number on her. For one thing, she has to recite the names of everyone she wants to kill in order to fall asleep.
  • Well, more like Shell Shocked Bodyguard but it still counts. While Jaime Lannister plays off killing the Mad King like it's nothing, it's clear that serving under the Mad King left some serious psychological scars on him. For instance, he's deeply uncomfortable when he smells burning flesh, remembering how Aerys liked to burn people alive when he was ruling.
  • Discussed at length by Septon Meribald in the fourth book (full version here).
    War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. Then they get a taste of battle. For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. [...] All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them... but he should pity them as well.
  • Sansa Stark gets a different version of PTSD thanks to being held as a political hostage in King's Landing. At the beginning of the war, she's a Spoiled Sweet thirteen-year-old already renowned for her beauty, raised by her loving parents Eddard/Ned and Catelyn Stark. Then her fiance Prince Joffrey executes Ned in front of her, which sparks the War of Five Kings as her brother Robb goes on a war campaign for revenge. She's nearly gang-raped after getting lost in a bread-riot, and as the war goes on, Joffrey orders his guards to hit her if she says something he doesn't agree with, publicly beat her for every victory Robb wins, and he gleefully talks about how once they're married, he can have sex with her whenever he wants. And then Robb and their mother are killed in a horrific breach of Sacred Hospitality called "The Red Wedding". Over the several books (and years in the show) that this happens, Sansa constantly Forgets to Eat and spends her time either trolling people with courtesy, crying in her room, or walking around in the godswood.
• Leia is this in Splinter of the Mind's Eye. Vader's torture of her in A New Hope left invisible scars. All the same, Luke admires her for holding up as well as she does most of the time.
• The first Sherlock Holmes book, A Study in Scarlet: Dr. Watson, having just gotten back from war in Afghanistan. He is miserable, lost, and suffers from crushing boredom in the first chapter, wastes his money in an attempt to entertain himself, mentions that his nerves are so frayed he is temporarily unemployable and lists "cannot abide arguments" among his peculiarities when he moves in with Holmes. However, living with Holmes, and occupying himself with the adventures to be had there, appears to have done him good, as his shell-shock does not manifest itself in a noticeable way in the rest of the series, apart from occasional vociferous objections to war's stupidity and pointlessness.
• Harkins from The Tales of The Ketty Jay. Basically had his nerves shot to pieces by fighting as a Pilot in BOTH Aerium Wars, to the point that he is considered a burden on ground missions and gets 'really terrified' about a dozen times a week. But then, ask a certain someone to give him a few words of encouragement, and well....
• Tales of the Pack: Duane is left with trauma after seeing his friends mauled to death by wolves, and this triggers him multiple times.
• Talion: Revenant:
  • Nolan is left traumatized by his family's murder, and has nightmares about it when events trigger flashbacks.
  • Marana meanwhile is left completely unhinged after a traumatic encounter with her long-lost twin sister, becoming completely deluded and murderous afterward.
• Three Day Road: Xavier/Elijah has come home to die, bringing a crippling morphine addiction with him.
• Gregor at the end of The Underland Chronicles. He's twelve. Ripred is an older version of this.
• In Veil of Darkness, Sicarius thinks that his jumping at shadows and growing paranoia about Necrons being everywhere are signs that he has PTSD. While he may have it, the Necrons really did invade the Temple of Hera and hide in the shadows.
• Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels:
  • Sergeant Bothari's decidedly damaged personality is actually an improvement over his original post-incident situation; his original (politically motivated) therapy involved conditioning him to have violently agonizing migraines whenever he thought about his role in the war. He thought about it a lot.
  • His commanding officer Aral Vorkosigan is incapable of seeing enemy soldiers as actual enemies, having long ago reached a point where all soldiers looked like children to him.
  • Aral's son Miles realized how painful this trope could be during his first real adventure; at one point he looks upon an atrocity of his own devising and thinks, "so this is the crazy terror that prompts massacres in the night. I understand it now. I liked it better when I didn't."
  • And that's not even touching on how bad it was for the physically and emotionally crippled protagonist of Bujold's The Curse of Chalion.
• The entire cast of the Warhammer 40,000 Gaunt's Ghosts novels are gradually turning into these, for some fairly obvious reasons.
  • Any veteran of the Imperial Guard, who has undoubtedly had his or her nerves shredded by facing some of the worst horrors imaginable with nothing more than a flak jacket and a lasgun, as seen in Eisenhorn. Not to mention they'll have watched lots of living things in general get shredded.
  • Two words: "Gereon resists."
  • Exception: the 597th. Although Cain does quite frequently (and offhandedly) refer to them as sociopaths, which might go a ways towards explaining it.
• Eren dom Hasstrell from The Witchlands is still recovering from his time as a Hell-Bard and spends his time drowing his sorrows and flashbacks in drink. Or so he wants everyone to believe.
• In Wizard of the Pigeons, the titular amnesiac Homeless Pigeon Person, Wizard, is slowly revealed to be a veteran who was screwed over by the system and left to the streets. The conflict comes from the villain of the story reintroducing memories of his identity to him, including gruesome flashbacks of the war itself, as well as memories of the misery he caused his family when he returned.
• Basically everyone in World War Z.
• Several of the Wraiths from the X-Wing Series. They're all rather young — in their thirties at the most — but they've all screwed up somewhere, which is why they're in the Wraiths at all.
  • Donos was near the edge for most of the first book and went over it for a time until his friends dragged him back, only to relapse temporarily two books later.
  • Dia Passik has issues, too.
  • As does Ton Phanan, everybody's favorite homicidal cybernetic doctor.
  • Castin Donn, whose problems stem from witnessing firsthand the Empire's brutal crackdown post-Endor. He seems pretty normal on the surface, but underneath he has a very low-key but exceptionally powerful hatred for the Empire and its successors.
  • Lara Notsil, who had a bit of a mental problem as a result of her intelligence mission and her failure to save seventeen thousand crew aboard the Implacable from their own captain, although she had more of an identity crisis than anything else. (It's suggested that, ironically, her Intelligence training helped her here — since she was so used to totally assuming, and then totally discarding identities, she was more easily able to bury her past as Gara.)

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