The Evil Hours by David J. Morris Page A

fireflies. His left leg, which was poking outside of the Humvee he was riding in, suddenly felt like it was on fire, as if he’d been hit already, even though the rounds had yet to reach his vehicle. Instinctively, he pulled his leg inside the vehicle before the bullets zipped by. All of this happened in under a second.
    Dissociation can also take on more extreme forms that seem downright supernatural. One study conducted by the U.S. Navy on survival school trainees found that under extreme stress, more than half of them reported experiencing “unreal events that could not be accounted for rationally.”Stories of dissociation have a substantial place in the canon of war literature. Michael Herr, in
Dispatches
, his classic work of Vietnam reportage, describes the combat he experienced at Khe Sanh: “It came back the same way every time, dreaded and welcome, balls and bowels turning over together, your senses working like strobes, free-falling all the way down to the essences and then flying out again in a rush to focus, like the first strong twinge of tripping after an infusion of psilocybin . . . And every time, you were so weary afterward, so empty of everything but being alive that you couldn’t recall any of it.”Dissociation of this sort leads to some of the most intimate, deeply personal experiences that a person can undergo, and descriptions of it are filled with the language of the infinite, as if in moments of trauma the universe pulls back the curtain for a few moments. Herr’s
Dispatches
echoes with such glimpses of dark wonder: “the rapture of the deep,” “time outside of time,” and describing “stories you’d hear out of a remote but accessible space where there were no ideas, no emotions, no facts, no proper language, only clean information.”It is little wonder that such states of consciousness continue to haunt the minds of survivors of extreme events.
    Dissociation is not a bad thing in itself. People often “space out” in moments of stress, finding themselves obsessively staring at a wall calendar during a tense conversation or being captivated by thoughts of old lovers during a turbulent airplane ride. Psychiatrists think that dissociation may, in fact, have a protective, opiate-like effect on the brain, shielding consciousness from the pain of hideous events. (Herr seems to allude to this idea in the final pages of
Dispatches
: “Opium space, big round O, and time outside of time, a trip that happened in seconds and over years.”) But if the dissociation is profound enough and becomes chronic, it can create problems down the road. As the popular neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks observed in
Hallucinations
, “the dissociations of PTSD are of a more radical kind, for the unbearable sights, sounds, smells, and emotions of the hideous experience get locked away in a separate, subterranean chamber of the mind.”
    PTSD is often thought of as being a syndrome of remembering things too well, of the memory working itself into a kind of frenzy, overrecording events that are best left forgotten.In fact, in the case of peritraumatic dissociation, or dissociation during a traumatic event, the opposite may be true. It is almost as if the threatening event remains underexperienced or misremembered because it’s so toxic. Too hot for the brain to handle, the experiences get stashed in a dark corner of the warehouse, off on layaway, the mind seemingly oblivious to the interest that accrues. This inversion of the expected logic remains one of the paradoxes of survival—that which was unperceived returns to haunt, as if to reiterate Nature’s first commandment: Thou Shalt Attend to Danger. As Ben Helfgott, a concentration camp survivor, put it succinctly, “The ones who ‘forget,’ they suffer later.”
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    Sometimes I can remember the explosion, sometimes I cannot. When I think of it quickly, I can