Now, he’s rounder, heavier, bearded, and long-haired obviously tough even if he weren’t prone to wearing a COMBAT INFANTRYMAN cap…

• This is an evaluative claim because the author makes a judgement of the characteristics of Caleb by describing how he looks. From this, we can infer that the author is claiming he has gained weight and grew more hair.

Even doctors can’t say for sure exactly why he has flashbacks, why he could be standing in a bookstore when all of a sudden he’s in Ramadi…

• “Even doctors can’t say for sure…” is an evaluative claim because the author is claiming that doctors cannot figure out or understand Caleb’s injuries.

… the pictures in his brain disorienting him among the stacks, which could turn from stacks to rows of rooftops that need to be scanned for snipers.

• “the pictures in his brain” is a causal claim because this leads us to infer that the reason he is picturing himself back in Ramadi is because of his brain creating the pictures.

Sometimes he starts yelling, and often he doesn’t remember anything about it later.

• This is a quantitative claim because it uses words such as “sometimes”, “often”, and “later”. The word “sometimes” claims that his symptoms do not happen all the time, but they happen occasionally, and the word “often” claims that more times than not, he cannot remember what he has done.

Some hypotheses for why PTSD only tortures some trauma victims blame it on unhappily coded proteins, or a misbehaving amygdala. Family history, or maybe previous trauma.

• This is a factual claim because it is declaring the hypotheses for the reason why PTSD occurs in trauma victims.
• Saying “some trauma victims” or “some hypotheses” is a quantitative claim because it suggests how many victims get PTSD because of these reason and how many hypotheses there are. The word “some” suggests a few rather than many victims or many hypotheses.