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  • Did I miss something, or do none of the Bloods have any reaction to returning to the Vietnamese jungle? In a fairly early scene, one of them states that they all have some form of PTSD. Their military service was traumatic, and they spent it tromping around a jungle getting shot at. When they return to the very same jungle, you'd think it would be extremely triggering, but I don't recall any of them having any sort of reaction, or even commenting on it. They all seem perfectly comfortable hiking around and camping outdoors, and they're even pretty blase about hearing movement around their camp. Was there really not a single line of dialogue acknowledging any of this, or did I miss it?
    • Only Paul has extreme PTSD upon returning to the jungle. Another major plotline alongside finding the buried gold and Stormin’ Norman’s remains is Paul’s Sanity Slippage as he comes back to Vietnam again, which culminated in him losing it in the climax. Meanwhile, the other Bloods are implied to have moved past their experiences in Vietnam and lead comparatively normal lives. They do have PTS Ds, but none of them have it as hard as Paul, who’s implied to have got it harder than others because of his personal guilt at accidentally killing Norman.
    • Different people have different triggers, even if they went through the exact same experience. Oftentimes triggers can seem like they're unconnected because of the way the brain connects them to the original incident, and things which "should" be triggers have no reaction while something apparently innocuous does. In real life there's no way to know what will be a trigger until it happens (An anecdote that helped me understand this was when somebody explained that their trigger was the sound of an automatic garage door opener, even though the inciting incident was domestic abuse. Because their abuser would park their car in the garage their arrival was always heralded by the garage opening, and now they associate that sound with their abuser getting home, and therefore with the abuse about to begin).

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