Man, I thought I was the only one who got a little creeped out by Sydney over the years.
Yeah and what was the deal with his treatment of "Getting them back on the line as soon as possible?" No wonder that kid hated him. I love it when he says, "Don't come near me, butcher!" Butcher. What a great insult. But seriously, why would any psychologist put a shell shocked soldier back on the line ASAP? That never made sense. Send them to Tokyo for a little R & R and some Geisha action first, then get them back to the line. Or how about making that soldier with amnesia relive his own brother's death by hypnotizing him and then reenacting the battle that killed him? That dude was whack.
This was actually SOP for the latter part of the Vietnam War, albeit not for WWII (and probably not for the Korean War, either). In WWI, "shell shocked" soldiers were simply ordered back into the lines and shot as cowards or deserters if they freaked out and ran.
In WWII, it was called "combat fatigue" and they would hospitalize them and basically not let them go back out onto the front line. A few soldiers were able to get back with their units, but it didn't always end well because the treatment they'd received made them feel weak and as if they had let down their comrades, had something to prove. There was also a fair amount of Freud.
By Vietnam, there was some recognition that, for example, the many African American soldiers were affected more harshly by combat conditions because they were also victims of institutional racism. By this time, the thinking was coming into effect that a lot of a soldier's self-worth and what we would now call his support system came from his unit. Take him away from his unit and put him in a hospital for too long, and you risked removing his support system permanently. So, there was the thought that a soldier needed to be put back with his unit as soon as possible to maintain that support system. After Vietnam is when we start seeing it called PTSD.
Of course, there were still plenty of commanders of the WWI attitude throughout, but the above may explain where the writers were coming from with Sydney.
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