I had a chance (and privilege) to spend a few hours in conversation back in the early nineties with the man who was the ship’s doctor on the USS Indianapolis when she went down.
What struck me was he said he became a very religious man, but to that day so many years after the event, he couldn’t even say the Lord’s Prayer (because they had simply been saying it over and over again for days on end while in the water).
But what struck me even more was the intensity of his reaction nearly fifty years after the event. As he spoke, he became extremely emotional, his face became beet red, and he was extremely distressed. When I said “Please...don’t talk about it anymore” because I could see how upset he was, he insisted “No, I don’t talk about it much...never, really...”
I have seen emotional veterans, but the raw and powerful emotion was a shock to me.
Completely understandable, given his story.