Chicken or Killing Machine?

A few nights ago I was telling to a friend about hypnotherapy. After explaining to him how a therapist might put someone in a trance state he fell strangely quiet. Luckily we both realised what was happening before I might have humorously suggested he was a chicken. Strangely a trance state isn’t something one is aware of, probably because most people are in mild trance states a lot of the time. You’re relaxed and possibly making an exquisite pass to Wayne Rooney for Man U’s fifth goal when a colleague breaks in with some mundane reality. So in a sense hypnosis allows one to talk directly to the inner footballer while his manager is out to lunch. Used for entertainment this can cause people to do all manner of silly things and used beneficially it can stop people doing silly things, like smoking. Imagine then the hypnotic effect of the trauma of military training or a gruesome battlefield situation. It can be too terrible for the conscious mind to deal with but the inner footballer has no alternative. He’s injured and out for the rest of the season. This is the truly terrible penalty we ask of those who fight for us: to lay down their lives or, if they survive, carry a hidden injury to their humanity. It is estimated that more civilians have been harmed by the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in Northern Ireland than by the IRA during the conflict. It is the inner footballer making an instinctive professional tackle in response to some apparently innocuous event. His socialised conscious mind is bypassed as his trained and traumatised instincts take over. As I sit here in my comfortable, protected home I find it hard to place the blame. My throw arcs like a boomerang back to me, the peaceful, innocent protected. Those millions of us who protested against beginning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan knew something our politicians had the hubris to forget; that conflict, however far away, comes home and walks like a ghost amongst us.