Word: panic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...valley, once penetrated, had to be abandoned. The Japs had the Marines at the mercy of well-placed mortars and the Marines could not bring their machine guns to bear. Before the order came to withdraw, the Marines were near panic: "This was a distressing sight, and though I myself was more than eager to be away from that spot, I had a helpless desire to do something to stop the flight. ... I couldn't do anything about it because I was caught up in the general feeling...
...their mark when a Jewish family is about to be "liquidated." Dialogue in a Polish concentration camp is smothered by the wails of an entire colony on its way to the Nazi form of final justice. A honeymoon through northern France loses its gayety when interrupted by streams of panic-stricken refugees...
...hysterical blindness, paralysis, stiff joints, which will genuinely disqualify him as a fighter (hysteria rarely occurs in newly wounded men-presumably because real wounds eliminate them from battle). Another common type of war breakdown is the hallucinatory reliving of terrifying scenes. A psychopath may quit fighting, give way to panic, or commit suicide. Still other men will brood over every step of a battle, with remorse for their own inadequacy, or for having participated in killing...
...Greatest Gift. Psychiatrists say that soldiers should be taught that fear is a normal reaction. On this subject, World War I Veteran Ernest Hemingway makes a layman's observation in Men at War: "Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire...
...learned that under the tension of an air raid some people become indecently ravenous, others, like herself, irrationally sleepy. She saw a woman's panic soothed by the mere act of counting her pay. She learned how, five minutes after planes have vanished and firing has ceased, the boomerang threat of anti-aircraft shrapnel comes hissing down like rain out of new sunlight.* She saw, for the first time, the "refugee look"-faces looking so stunned that they suggested that the brain's gyroscope had been removed...