HELL'S CAULDRON

A first person filibuster which gives vent to considerable feeling- and ill-feeling as Captain Wilkes' unwarranted, and unjust, detention as a psychoneurotic in Veterans' Hospitals after the war, exposed him to the malpractices of army psychiatrists as well as the betrayal of his wife (a shrike). Arrested, instead of retired, after bucking a Colonel and some Army brass, Captain Wilkes made the rounds of several V.A. hospitals where he was branded as a paranoid, where he witnessed other ""disciplinary"" cases in similar circumstances, where Camille- once"" a bundle of love and happiness"" started to work against him, where he refused to accept a ""mental diagnosis"" and even fought it, in an abortive legal action, until finally through the intercession of an uncle he secured his freedom.... If this is true, and Captain Wilkes goes to considerable pains to prove it, it is a sorry reflection on this branch of service and some of its personnel, but not the indiscriminate indictment he levels at all psychiatrists and psychiatry. And as for his ""insuppressive story"" which is to ""move your heart"", he's not the man to put it down on paper. This is not another Mind That Found Itself.