Furthermore, in environments that are highly conducive to trauma, such as war or a paramilitary educational institution that is predominantly filled with Caucasian males who are permitted to attack one another during a certain period in their careers, conventional morals can also become distorted .The differences of right and wrong that apply to the outside world, the world that was inhabited by people before they left it to take place in an environment highly dissimilar to the one that reality largely takes place in no longer apply. The following quotation from Mitchell in which he is describing this aspect of Vietnam demonstrates this fact. "The old rules riles are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong" (O'Brien, 276). Although O'Brien is making this statement about war, it applies into other realms conducive to trauma such as the Citadel, a traditionally all-male institution in which younger, weaker students were to take on the roles of women, as the following quotation shows. "The beaten knobs were the women, "stripped" and humiliated, and the predatory upperclassmen were the men, who bullied and pillaged" (Faludi, 90). The distortion of reality in such a situation is clear, particularly since both upperclassmen and lowerclassmen were males. However, in a situation such as this in which trauma regularly occurs,...

The difficulty that O'Brien describes in the accuracy of war stories, and which can be found in Faludi's interview of the students who pulled chest hair out of underclassmen (due to the inconsistence in the recollections of that event) alludes to this fact, as does the attempt to make underclassmen women and the difficulty in applying old rules of reality to situations of war.
1. With this quotation, O'Brien is expressing the profound effect that war, and the trauma it induces, has upon the one who has lived through it. By telling war stories, such people have to relive those effects, which become manifest in "sunlight" and the odd poetry of war, such as the spreading of dawn onto a river. Such beauty, of course, is contrasted with the awful deeds that take place in way. The sisters who never write back and the people who don't listen are the civilians who don't understand this weird duality.

2. Except for the auditory information in this quotation, it sounds a lot like Seth's description of what it is like to disassociate, to be drifting out at sea in a reality distinct from that of everyone else's.