The Brutality of War!

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#1

Killing people doesn’t come easy to the vast majority of people, that’s why many armies train their soldiers so hard, demonizing the enemy and brutalising their own people.

Some soldiers have to adopt the psyche of a brute in order to kill another human being. This in itself de-humanizes both the soldier and his victim. When it’s all over, most of the time, soldiers are rendered traumatised by their experiences.

A friend of mine was concussed by a mortar bomb. As he came around he saw one of the enemy stooping over him. As a reflex action, he immdiately stabbed the enemy with his combat knife. As it happened, the enemy in question was stooping over him to give him water to drink. My friend wasn’t traumatised by this, he just accepts that war is nasty.

#2

One of the problems with humans as clever dick upright primates is that we’re very good after millennia of war at training ourselves to overcome our instincts.

But we’re not too good at the reverse.

And, in the case of soldiers, usually we didn’t even try.

So that in Vietnam Australian and probably American troops were subjected to very good training to overcome the non-existent problem identified by that dickhead S.L.A. Marshall that hardly anybody ever shot at the enemy in combat. Then they were flown back after their tour and given a few weeks jerking around in camps before being unleashed on an unsuspecting and largely unsympathetic and completely uncomprehending public which had nothing in common with them.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the clever dick trick cyclists etc who devised the training programs were resigned to the fact that once they’d created the monster they couldn’t rehabilitate it. Or, equally likely, it was just too expensive.

So we’ve had a lot of poor damaged bastards living a nightmare for the past forty years, and fucking up their and others’ lives beyond all belief, which is their reward for serving their country.

BAH! :evil:

#3

Thank God, I have never been to an armed conflict as a soldier but an incident like this surely would haunt me for the rest of my life. A befriended psychologist told me if you once crossed that line (being trained and de-humanized to kill people) there’s no way back to re-become a completely “civilized” personality again.
32Bravo, may I ask in which conflict this occured to your friend?

#4

Sorry, I’ve already broken a trust by mentioning it. I wouldn’t go any further,
for the same reasons as I don’t speak of my own experiences.

It’s far too easy to judge and criticize and unless one has been there, it is simply hypothesy.

#5

Accepted.

#6

I’m only on my second beer, I really must catch up. :slight_smile:

#7

{So we’ve had a lot of poor damaged bastards living a nightmare for the past forty years, and fucking up their and others’ lives beyond all belief, which is their reward for serving their country.} Quoted Rising Sun

Some for sixty years. My dad had just turned seventeen and joined the US navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was honorably discharged in late '46 but has had problems ever since. PTSD. All kinds of meds and crap like that.:evil:

#8

I have ‘pictorial history’ book of my home town which is now a part of greater Manchester.

There is a group of mill workers sitting for a group shot outside the mill, taken circa 1922. One only has to look at the facial expressions (few smiles, except for those that were young) to recognize which of them had experienced the e trenches of the Western Front.

Naturally, they turned to drink to escape the horrors in their minds. How different the world may have been had a generation had not been slaughtered and the survivors traumatized to the point of alcoholism.

#9

Pay more attention.

I said BAH, not beer. :smiley:

Why is it that the English don’t understand English? :rolleyes:

#10

We only understand the spoken word and it usually begins with ‘F’ and ends with Off! :wink:

#11

In many respects worse for your father’s generation because there was less understanding then of the effects of war; less understanding of psychology and psychiatry; fewer medications; and, most of all, a general understanding that men didn’t show emotion.

Which is all rather odd as psychiatric casualties were at times greater than physical ones in combat because the human mind just isn’t designed to or capable of handling the many assaults on the senses and body that warfare, and especially post-US Civil War warfare, imposes on it.

Your, and my, father’s generation just soldiered on in peace as they did in war, apart from the ones like the WWI and Vietnam veterans who got on the grog or took a razor to the throat or disappeared into the bush.

Utterly stupid to think that a man could go through a war he started as a teenager and come back a few years later and take up job as a bank teller or whatever and be calm and reliable, but that’s what was expected and what many men did.

The same men sometimes slept with a bayonet under the pillow and did other things to alarm the women who stuck with them in their night and day terrors. Those women showed as much, sometimes more and more sustained, courage than the men they loved.

But nobody spoke of it. It was just something they did, with bugger all support from counsellors or doctors or the government which sent them to war. The poor bastards. :frowning:

#12

Which is why you are known universally as the most welcoming people on the planet. :smiley:

#13

You hit the nail on the head RS. Instead of knowing ptsd, when he had problems, the veterans hospital docs just put him on psyche meds. And as a young guy, you just take what they give you not knowing any better. I always wonder if he’d have got treatment like they have today if he’d been much different instead of being poisoned by all the stuff given to him. Your right about the wives too. My mother’s been a trooper all these years with him. I’m glad to say they’ve managed to stay together 57 years. Whew!

#14

True! :slight_smile:

#15

The victims of war, and more mundane but equally devastating civilian incidents like car collisions and murders, are like the ripples on a pond.

The children of Holocaust victims often had a childhood very different to the rest of children in the same community (I say this as a resident of a city with an unusually large number of Holocaust victims, a very small number of whom I have known) because of their parents’ experience, as did the children of parents who were civilians ‘interned’ by the Japanese, and children of men and women who served in various wars.

We’d all like to believe that men go off to war and behave heroically and come home to become pillars of the community, but the reality is that about 80 to 90% of those who went to war either never left their country or spent most of their time feasting on good food and lying on cots meant for the starving front line troops sleeping in mud and that, depending on the unit and theatre, sometimes a very high percentage of those who actually went to the front were sent back fairly soon because they weren’t mentally able to cope with war.

If humans were about one per cent of the clever species we think we are, we’d eradicate war instead of continually engaging in it and expecting the impossible of the people who fight wars, and the women and children who have to cope with some of them when they come back.

#16

Here’s something personal, and I can tell you this as I’m exhaling a lot more BAH! :smiley:

When I was very young, I used to share a room with my grandfather, who had served in the trenches on the Western Front. He used to get up out of bed in the night and become stressed as he couldn’t find his rifle, helmet and gas mask.

Now, I occasionally have dreams where I too am back in the past and I have not only lost my rifle, but I am smoking again - a habit I kicked almost forty years ago…odd isn’t it? :slight_smile:

I also have other dreams which cause me to “Aaaaaggrh!” quite loudly in the night. This disturbs the missus and results in her punching me awake, at which point we both roll about laughing as it’s happened so often over the time we’ve been together.

Unlike the smoking and loss of rifle dreams, I never recall what it is I’ve been dreaming of to make me “Aaaaagrh” but it always ends with someone thumping me. My mother-in-law used to be very sympathetic and cooked extra special meals for me and buy me extra crates of Carib beer as a way of showing her concern. So, it isn’t all bad. :slight_smile:

#17

My dad never discussed anything about his experiences during the war. But during the first gulf war when news channels continually showed the bombing campaign we found him in the corner of the bedroom in fetal position one time. Needless to say we got him help. He said it reminded him of the past. After that he started talking about his experiences, maybe as a cathartic. But yeah, I remember growing up that he would jump out of bed and run down the hallways like going to general quarters. I’m with you BAH:evil:

#18

war is normal really…war has been going on since when men arrived
on earth …it will never stop until men die out

#19

Competing for resources and power is normal, war is a tool employed to gain them. Humans are social animals and tend to rely upon each other for survival rather than killing each other. The killing comes with mental conditioning.

As I see it, and I’m no trick-cyclist, there are several factors which come into play which together affect the minds of soldiers. One of these is that they are usually quite young and not equipped with the life experience which might enable to cope with the horrors of war; another is that it is unnatural for people to kill each other; and another is that they are usually suffering from the added mental stress of extreme sleep deprivation, which ought not be underestimated. I’m sure that there are other factors but it seems to me that those are among the more obvious.

#20

hey… r u a female like me…if youre not
no offence…one of the post is confussing me