What Post-Traumatic Stress?

There were only a couple of times when I almost passed out. One was when I saw a woman pick up a baby’s leg and put it in a plastic bag. That was pretty horrible. The other was one night when I hadn’t had much sleep, and I was at a little hospital near the front line, an area that was seeing a lot of action. They brought in a big black guy, very strong. I photographed everything that happened: The surgeons took a huge sort of hand drill and drilled a hole in the top of his head, and pulled out a chunk. The surgeon’s got his fingers inside the skull, and he’s feeling around, and he says, “I can’t find anything. I can’t find anything.” And then another doctor looks at the tag and says, “Oh shit, it’s not his head, it’s his arm.” At that moment I felt myself passing out. Considering all the sights I saw in Vietnam, this was a very minor point, but I think that’s the way human beings respond to things. So that’s the closest I came to post-traumatic stress syndrome.