Vietnamâs strong holdânot trauma, maybe, but closeâon Michael Herrâs psyche comes across in the final words of his legendary Dispatches: âAnd no moves for me but to write down some last few words and make the dispersion, Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, weâve all been there.â
David J. Morris, a U.S. Marine veteran who later embedded as a journalist in Iraq, âdispersesâ his own experiences in The Evil Hours, an eloquent âbiographyâ of post-traumatic stress disorder. Morrisâs style often recaptures the disorienting tone of Dispatchesâ stream-of-consciousness approach. But as with Herr, Morrisâs excellent book is deceptively controlled and carefully steady.
In recent war-related reporting, âPTSDâ has become a catch-all diagnosis for âbroken soldiers,â often an empty phrase that never answers the how and why. Leeched of any deeper meaning, the acronymâs key word, âtrauma,â remains in the background. The Evil Hours succeeds by examining the scientific background of the condition, conveyed with an elegiac grace. Morrisâs often surrealistic prose subtly captures the detached, âunmooredâ feeling that he ascribes to the PTSD experience.
The brain subconsciously helps us let go of events, Morris explains, but can hold on to our most painful experiences with a damaging relentlessness. Using the memories of a roadside bomb and an attack on a helicopter, Morris describes his own throes of PTSD as truly evil times, beset by second-guessing and obsessive paranoia, in which the victim battles his own brainâs perception of constant threatsâthe brain believes it is performing the vital job of self-preservation.

Morrisâ intense and necessary narrative combines his personal story with both present-day and historical research of this condition. The book will answer questions by those trying to make sense of their own brainâs inability to move past a trauma, and it will inform those familiar with the term âPTSDâ but who donât understand how trauma debilitates the brainâs capacity to distinguish between memory and active experience.
The Evil Hours is a pivotal addition to the growing war library of recent years, fiction and nonfiction, and it provides the necessary context to understand what is often unsaid or under-described.
As Morris writes, PTSD is a âdisease of time,â with the brain stuck in a past moment of trauma. Put simply, to the brain, the trauma isnât âpostâ at all.
The feeling can resemble fanciful nostalgiaââa shadowland of dream and reality,â Morris writes, quoting World War I writer Siegfried Sassoonâs description of a âqueer craving to revisit the past and give the modern world the slip.â It can explain epic, heroic, and strangely self-destructive behavior, like World War I veteran George Malloryâs doomed 1926 attempt to scale Mt. Everest. In the moments of war, âimmobility, powerlessness in the face of death, is often what vexes the psyche.â Is it any wonder that in the post-war years, men like Mallory, a veteran of the ghastly battle of the Somme, would try to take control over the most impossible situations?
Morris writes of mountain climber Steve House, who survived after hours trapped on a mountain ledge with a broken pelvis and ribs, and the writer Alice Sebold, who endured a sexual assault. Afterwards, both experienced the disorienting epiphany of âmy life was over, my life had just begun.â
In a small way, these testimonies reminded me of a sudden sensation I had experienced while departing Iraq in 2007, at the conclusion of a trip as a freelance photojournalist. As the C-130 lifted off from Tikrit, headed to Kuwait, I felt a gravity-defying tug, psychically different than the planeâs ascent. Years later, re-reading interviews with the soldiers I reported on, I recognized a common thread when they spoke of the brainâs relaxation at that moment of a hard timeâs conclusion. In that momentâs lightheaded euphoria, my brain was willing to tell me I was going to live. My brain could let go, at least for then.
But in the other extreme, as with accident victims or combat veterans or sexual assault survivors, the trauma creates a much more constant, in-between âliminalâ state where there is no capacity to move on. The mind is âalternating between now and then, between here and there.â The ânervous system reverts back to the traumatic stateâmobilized to confront an attacker,â creating âan observable physiological manifestation,â of sweat, fear, or action.
Morris has felt this sensationâand the book felt split into his personal âhow it happened,â using his own experiences, and the scientific âwhy itâs hard to fix.â
When he describes various therapies, Morris writes in a more objective style, a scientist neutrally observing a subject: himself. This deliberate, well-paced approach firmly grounds the reader as Morris explores a broad array of treatments and challenges. One therapist demands that a frustrated Morris recite, over and over, a sequence of events, âprolonged exposureâ to his trauma that Morris ultimately rejects. âI donât remember feeling this bad in Iraq,â he finally says.
Morris describes therapyâs ups and downs, alongside the struggle to navigate the ârecommended remedies ⌠a truly bewildering variety of choices that can seem like a psychological supermarket.â
Yogaâs simple focus on the here and now, Morris argues, is as good a treatment as any other: âYogaâs moronic, which is part of what makes it so great.â Part of recovery is also simply accepting the condition, even if the event does not rise to what one expects would be required.
A single mortar once exploded 15 feet from me, just on the other side of a concrete barrier. U.S. soldiers went out and found where it had been fired fromâlocating those telltale divots in the sand. The 15-foot gap is the difference between a divot dug in this way, instead of that way. Here instead of there. The mortarâs shotgun sound resonated even months later, replicated by a slamming door near my office. Iâve always felt self-loathing at the memory of those ridiculous, less-than-a-second beliefs that a mortar was landingâright thenâin the courtyard of Hamilton Smith Hall at the University of New Hampshire.
The subconscious brain, as The Evil Hours evidence explains, doesnât care when we consciously identify what something sounds like. In that moment, the brain reacts on what it decides the sound actually is; in the extreme, it defies rational arguments, appeals to âget over it,â and any deviation from the vital course of self-preservation.
The root of PTSD is that the brain is fighting a contradictory battle, pitting the illusion of old threats against the present dayâs safe reality. It disperses the worst experiences to infect everything we do and see.
âAmerica didnât look the same when I came back to it that first time,â Morris says, and I have to think his closing words are tied to Herrâs equally plaintive callback to Vietnam, as Morris tries to inform and educate those struggling with this debilitating, relentless condition, who have âlost more than they ever knew they had,â to let them know that âitâs okay, itâs okay, itâs okay.â