Tomorrow is the fifty-first anniversary of the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State. Each spring I'm reminded of this sad event and the heartache it caused so many. It is a central topic in my book, Surviving: A Kent State Memoir. But many events like this haunt those who witnessed themâthe assassination of John F. Kennedy, the many wars the U.S. has fought, 9/11. There are also individual traumas that many of us have endured. Most writers probably have some kind of trauma in their past. Most use it as a well from which to draw emotion. Back in 1970 when I stood thirty yards in front of the Ohio National Guard and watched them fire at me, there was no such term as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Before then, the concept existed as shell shock or combat fatigue among soldiers as long as two thousand years ago. During the 1970s research began on the reactions of Holocaust survivors, Vietnam veterans, and survivors of domestic abuse. In 1974, psychologist Ann Wolbert Burgess and sociologist Lynda Lytle Holmstrom coined the term, "Rape Trauma Syndrome." The idea that reactions to different kinds of trauma were similar evolved.