• “It’s kind of hard to understand Caleb’s injuries.”

-Evaluative Claim: Makes a judgement based on evidence.

• “the pictures in his brain disorienting him”

-Causal Claim: Claims the images he perceives cause disorientation.

• “Sometimes he starts yelling, and often he doesn’t remember anything about it later.”

-Factual Claim: Explains event based on a witness.

• “Some hypotheses for why PTSD only tortures some trauma victims blame it on unhappily coded proteins, or a misbehaving amygdala. Family history, or maybe previous trauma.”

-Causal Claim: Explains the causes of PTSD.

• “Whatever is happening to Caleb, it’s as old as war itself.”

-Comparative Claim: Claims PTSD has been present as long as the war.

• “The ancient historian Herodotus told of Greeks being honorably dismissed for being ‘out of heart’ and ‘unwilling to encounter danger.'”
• “Civil War doctors, who couldn’t think of any other thing that might be unpleasant about fighting the Civil War but homesickness, diagnosed thousands with ‘nostalgia.'”
• “Later, it was deemed ‘irritable heart.’ In World War I it was called ‘shell shock.’ In World War II, ‘battle fatigue.'”
• “It wasn’t an official diagnosis until 1980, when Post Traumatic Stress Disorder made its debut in psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, uniting a flood of Vietnam vets suffering persistent psych issues with traumatized civilians—previously assigned labels like ‘accident neurosis’ and ‘post-rape syndrome’—onto the same page of the DSM-III.”

-All Factual Claims: State quotes and evidence from history.

• “But whatever people have called it, they haven’t been likely to grasp or respect it.”

-Evaluative Claim: Makes a judgement about views based on evidence.

• “In 1943, when Lt. General George S. Patton met an American soldier at an Italian hospital recovering from ‘nerves,’ Patton slapped him and called him a coward.”
• “In 2006, the British Ministry of Defence pardoned some 300 soldiers who had been executed for cowardice and desertion during World War I, having concluded that many were probably just crippled by PTSD.”

-Factual Claims: State evidence from history.