Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War.

By Eric T. Dean Jr. Harvard University Press, $35

Late in the Civil War, Sgt. Erastus Holmes, a quartermaster in the 5th Indiana Cavalry, was captured and held in the notorious Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia. After the war Sgt. Holmes returned home weighing 85 pounds, about half his normal weight, and ill both in body and mind. In his backyard he constructed a facsimile of the Andersonville prison, with "the stream of water and every hill and stump," his son-in-law later said. By night he ate incessantly. Finally he was committed to the Indiana Hospital for the Insane in 1885 and remained there until his death in 1910.

He was not alone. John Britton suffered chronic insomnia and would sometimes disappear into the woods. William Guile roamed his house at night Melding a hatchet. Raney Johns climbed up on his father's roof and cried that the Rebels were after him. Ellen McKinney took her children away from home every day at dusk, returning only at daylight, for fear of their father's violence. And so on, from crippling anxiety and crying spells to social numbing, paralyzing flashbacks, and violent outbursts.

The argument of this interesting but frustrating hook is that the Civil War veteran in fact suffered "a wide range of psychological and social problems" that generally haven't been recognized by historians or held in the national memory. The core of the book is data the author gleaned by examining the records of Indiana asylums from 1861 to 1919. The author concludes that "these men did indeed suffer from what we would today think of as PTSD" -- that is, the "post-traumatic stress disorder" frequently associated nowadays with troubled veterans of the Vietnam War.

Shook Over Hell makes a real contribution to our understanding of the Civil War, and that is no small achievement. But it isn't a very good book, for three reasons. First, the moving historical material is sometimes swamped in unreadable, jargon-laden discussions of methodology that should have been relegated to the internal exile of an appendix.

More importantly, its comparisons with the Vietnam veteran are tendentious, simplistic, and irritating. The author's empathetic portrayal of the Civil War vet is soured by his pissing on the Vietnam vet, who is depicted as a softie and a whiner. This violates one major rule laid down by veterans' counselor Jonathan Shay in his brilliant book Achilles in Vietnam, a compassionate study of how poor military leadership in that war increased the combat trauma of those who served. Don't get into comparative suffering, Dr. Shay insists: Combat trauma is painful, and all of it is far too genuine for one person's suffering to be denigrated as somehow less real than another's. I was surprised to find no indication in this book that Dean is even aware of Shay's important work.

But what I finally found most disappointing in Shook Over Hell was the lack of connection to American history. Nowhere does the author step back to try to trace the effects of Civil War trauma on American life after that war. How did this trauma shape the settlement of the West? How many gunslingers came out of the Civil War, still socially numbed and prone to violence? (A tantalizing hint of this comes late in this book when the author refers in passing to the sense of unsettledness that led some vets to lives of wandering, with one drifting across the high plains.) How was the behavior of the U.S. Army itself in the West -- its high suicide rate in that era, its treatment of the Native American population -- affected by the traumas that some of its people suffered? Perhaps Erie T Dean Jr. will address some of these questions in his next work.

THOMAS E. RICKS is author of Making the Corps, The Washington Monthly's 1997 "Political Book of the Year."