Whether “they” was a real threat or an imagined one, whether it reflected a specific situation or a more diffuse sense of jeopardy, is not answerable from the available evidence.
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*[End of Stage 2 — article continues in Stage 3]*
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## The Veteran Question: What the War Established
One of the recurring threads in coverage and analysis of the Robert Nichols case is the question of what his wartime service had to do with his later behavior. The question is raised because the chronology is striking: he served on a ship that was nearly destroyed by kamikaze attack, was wounded in the chaos of that attack, returned home, rebuilt a life over two decades — and then abandoned it entirely, beginning a decades-long sequence of concealment and apparent fear.
The prompt that frames this article explicitly prohibits inferring PTSD or psychological motive from veteran status or from reported acts concerning uniforms. This prohibition is appropriate and reflects a genuine epistemic limit: we cannot diagnose a man who is dead, from behavioral descriptions provided by people who knew him in limited ways, without professional evaluation or the man’s own account of his inner life. The burning of uniforms is a documented behavior, attributed to family memory. It is not a diagnosis.
What can be said, without speculation, is this: Robert Nichols was nineteen years old on May 3, 1945, when six kamikazes struck or crashed into or near the ship where he was fighting fires. He was wounded. A significant number of his shipmates were killed. The ship was burning and flooding and circling without power in hostile waters. He survived.