Broken Soldier

Another idea to consider throughout these stories is the reality of how soldiers, who are thought to be tough and fearless, reach a point when they’ve seen too much blood, too much death and personal loss that they experience a psychological mental break. This break is not positive like a breakthrough; this break changes a solder’s psychological well being and can make them a danger to themselves and to others.

In Night Life, we read about Kat Riley and how the war had changed him. He “sank inside himself, not saying a word, but then later on, after five or six days, it flipped the other way. He couldn’t stop talking. Wacky talk, too.” Kat Riley had served as a medic for his platoon and seen a lot of death and dismemberment. On page 210 we read that “Rat developed some peculiar habits. Constantly scratching himself. Clawing at the bug bites. He couldn’t quit digging at his skin, making big scabs and then ripping off the scabs and scratching the open sores.”

One night Rat Kiley went to Mitchell Sanders and said, “It’s not right. These pictures in my head, they won’t quit. I’ll see a guy’s liver. The actual fucking liver. And the thing is, it doesn’t scare me, it doesn’t even give me the willies. More like curiosity. The way a doctor feels when he looks at a patient, sort of mechanical, not seeing the real person, just a ruptured appendix or a clogged-up artery. Anyway, the day’s aren’t so bad, but at night the pictures get to be a bitch. I start seeing my own body. Chunks of myself. My own heart, my own kidneys.” He goes on like that for quite a while further revealing the severity of his psychological breakdown.  The next morning he shot himself in the foot. “I swear, it’s too much. I can’t keep seeing myself dead”, he’d said.

I believe When the Levee Breaks by Led Zepplin represents the idea that the body and the mind can only process and cope with a particular threshold of raw emotion, fear and stress before it comes crashing down. In a way the title and some of the lines in the song are representative of a psychological “levee” breaking but the music with this song is what I think captures the feeling of how this type of breakdown occurs. The lead in to the lyrics is long and drawn out, reminiscent of someone trying to keep some sense of whatever has happened to bring them to “the edge” in hopes it will save them from falling off the side. The music builds in intensity as it continues through with the lyrics, representing the very moment when a person loses their disconnected grasp on reality and folds under the pressures of their mind altering experiences.