Wounds of War
One need not to be killed or physically scarred in combat to be a casualty of war. Soldiers who lost their sanity during the Civil War were simply ejected from the ranks. Military leaders recognized then that a certain number of soldiers would become mentally damaged in battle, but not until the First World War was a phrase, shell shock, used to describe the mental breakdown of soldiers in the trenches. During the Second World War, combat fatigue or battle fatigue became the term for the mental malady of war. Today the term PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, describes the lingering effects of any extreme trauma, but has become shorthand for the psychological wounds of war.
After the Battle of Little Bighorn, Major Marcus Reno was called a coward, yet he had clearly suffered combat stress: he temporarily lost his sanity when the brains of his Indian scout splashed all over him.
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