8 ms·

I didn't fight in WW2 obviously, but I did fight in a war. For me, the reticence to describe every detail to people who weren't there boils down to this: I don

I didn't fight in WW2 obviously, but I did fight in a war. For me, the reticence to describe every detail to people who weren't there boils down to this: I don't want my wife, my children, or my neighbors to be burdened with thinking of something so horrible. I want them to be happy and safe, that's why I went. No need to bring it to their doorstep if I don't have to. I suspect many during and after WW2 felt this way.

yibberish 4y ago
talking about it does not quite bring it to their doorstep; but it surely takes you back there; it's understandable to not want to go back. your choice to shoulder this burden for all, is well your choice. but be advised that this choice may have unintended consequences in a longer term. consequences of your choice to witholding bad things "for them". I don't belive you're doing this (bearing the horrible things) only to shield your relatives from your past. it is important you recognize that it's something you do for yourself, you are the main person who doesn't want to remember whatever horrible events you had to experience; don't pin this choice on them.
- krrrh 4y ago
  He didn’t say anything about not revisiting those events personally or with other vets, he said by with “people who weren’t there”. Give a guy a break for choosing to not sit his kids down to hear all the gory details.
  - yibberish 4y ago
    I'm not telling him to go scare his kids. I'm pointing out some possible self-deceit. "I did it for them!".. sure, why not? but my point is that first and foremost he's making those choices for himself; which is pefrectly fine. what's not fine (IMO) is to pretend such choices aren't selfish.
    - jimbokun 4y ago
      Who gives you the authority to judge the morality and motivations behind this person's actions?
      - yibberish 4y ago
        I have de-subscribed from authority. I speak from my own experience, if it helps it helps, if it doesn't just leave it. maybe it wasn't meant for you
    - virtual_void 4y ago
      These things aren’t binary. They aren’t simply this or that. Both can be true or neither or some combination. Your claim of selfishness seems to be unwarranted (and perhaps a little mean spirited), how can you possibly tell?
  - standardUser 4y ago
    Perhaps if we were all a little more exposed to the horrors of war we wouldn't so eagerly vote for war-hungry leaders over and over and over.
pram 4y ago
Alternate perspective: I was in Iraq and Afghanistan, I don't talk about it because theres not much to say. I was either standing or sitting some place on guard duty, wired up on an insane amount of caffeine and nicotine, trying not to go insane for the 12 hour shifts. The only thing that punctuated the boredom was the daily mortar attack alarms lol
- warner25 4y ago
  I'm happy to talk to people about my experiences in Afghanistan, but yeah, I only have a few minutes worth of "war stories" to tell. One of the things that most non-veterans don't grasp is just how mundane day-to-day military life can be, even in a combat zone, like how people without a security clearance can't imagine how mundane most SECRET material really is. I find it hard to explain, but life is both different in quirky ways (various restrictions on freedoms, being judged professionally by your height/weight and 2-mile running time, random attacks by mortar fire, etc.) and dominated by many of the same experiences and concerns of civilian life (time spent just acquiring and eating food, dealing with traffic and bureaucracy, being frustrated by your assigned Windows machine on the enterprise network, etc.). One of my personal takeaways from my time in Afghanistan is just how widely variable everyone's "combat" experience can be. I flew helicopters, so I saw the whole range of living conditions on a daily basis: everything from the smallest observation posts where squads lived in filth and got attacked routinely by well-aimed direct fire, to the large airbases like Bagram where people worked 9-5 in a cubicle and had many amenities that were even nicer than what was back home at Fort Bragg. And where you ended up on that spectrum seemed quite arbitrary and luck-of-the-draw. Some otherwise interchangeable helicopter units just flew VIPs back and forth between Bagram and Kabul while others flew SEAL teams on very-high-risk raids every night. So when someone says they did a tour in Afghanistan (even if they earned a Bronze Star or a Combat Action Badge), that doesn't mean much to me, in itself. Edited to add: I think the variance among people who "served in WWII" is orders-of-magnitude greater. There were just so many millions of people in uniform in so many diverse places.
  - RalfWausE 4y ago
    I heard a similar story from a relative of me: He was in the Waffen SS and fought the war basically behind a typewriter in a depot.
gumby 4y ago
> I don't want my wife, my children, or my neighbors to be burdened with thinking of something so horrible. Interesting. Until very recently, as far as I could know, my mother's life began at 16. She refused to talk about anything from her childhood. I don't know if, like you, she didn't want to traumatize us or simply didn't want to think about it at all. But now, in her late 80s, she'll sometimes absent-mindedly relate some story from her childhood. They are all kid stories, but the perspective in them can be hair raising. (She was a child in an occupied country during WWII in the pacific; then immediately as the war ended the country became a different war zone, so she only knew living in that kind of environment until she left the country to go to university). Recently I've been thinking of this because of the Ukraine war. I have seen at close range the impact of a generation of kids (like my mother in law, and others in her village) who grew up in postwar Germany with essentially no adult men around. That whole generation is pretty screwed up, and their kids (my generation) also reflect that impact. While my personal opinion is that Germany is not doing anywhere near enough to help Ukraine, I think they should be preparing a for a huge postwar assistance, not just money for rebuilding, but psychological / therapy based on their experience to try to reduce the effects of wartime trauma on Ukraine.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "I think they should be preparing a for a huge postwar assistance, not just money for rebuilding, but psychological / therapy based on their experience to try to reduce the effects of wartime trauma on Ukraine. " We take lots of refugees. I would argue this is already a very effective way of preventing further traumatizing. But as far as I am aware, those who come do not easily get offered psychatric help, even if they already are traumatized. But the psychatric sector is pretty much operating on its limits anyway.
  - gumby 4y ago
    Being a refugee is traumatic on its own. But Germany has a lot of lessons (including what not to do) that it could be providing for good.
    - 4y ago
iancmceachern 4y ago
I haven't, my grandfather did. He was at Pearl Harbor, many battles in the Pacific (he was a submariner), in the end he was part of the occupation of Japan and earned many medals including the purple heart for almost dying in a sub accident. Only as an adult have I come to realize the gift he gave me. When I was a child, I spent a ton of time with him, he had a big hand in raising me. The picture he painted for the young me formed the foundation of my world view. He chose to share with us the Japanese cooking he learned while living there, he taught us how to use chop sticks, one of my most prized possessions is a silk he brought back and gave me in his will. He never once spoke negatively about any group of people, especially those who were "enemies", he stood up for anyone who was being treated negatively and wouldn't stand for it. He harbored no ill will, and therefore didn't put it in me. It's only as an adult through research into his service that i have realized the full gravity of what he did during this service and the fact that he was a truly happy, blissful, and forgiving man after all that. I can say to you, having been one of the recipients of the kindness and forgiveness you are showing in your own life now, and sharing in this comment - thank you. This is how the world moves on.
- c-smile 4y ago
  My uncle (elder brother of my dad) died on Oder River offence. Two weeks before end of the war. 20 years old guy, sigh. And I also lost all my grandfathers there. Memories in our family are quite fresh.
- wishfish 4y ago
  I had two relatives who fought in WWII. The contrast between them is interesting. One was in an engineering unit and was a classic REMF. He had tons of stories about the war. Usually about how he and his buddies would get drunk and wreck jeeps and somehow escape any disciplinary action for it. He was present at many of the famous Pacific islands like Okinawa. But always after the main fight was over. Asked him once if he was ever shot at and he had to think. He thought it was only once. He was a loud blowhard in many ways and not always pleasant to be around. Had another relative who was a Marine. Was present at many of the worst battles. Including Iwo Jima. I never heard his stories. He never talked about them. My mom pressured him into talking one day. She regretted that for the rest of her life because the stories were so traumatic and it left him in tears. He was a gentle man. Became a Methodist minister after the war. I never once heard him raise his voice in anger. One of the kindest men I've ever known. This is a sample size of only two. So I'm not assuming combat, or the lack of, shaped these men into what they would later become. But it's a little interesting to me. Since I myself am older, I have some relatives who go way back. My grandmother was once visited by her great-uncle when she was 6. He was a veteran of the Mexican War and the Civil War (on the Confederate side). He also wouldn't talk about combat. But he did tell this one story where he and some buddies snuck out of camp. Somewhere in northern Mexico. Found a bar and flirted a little with girls. Then the girls suddenly rushed the men out of the bar and hid them in a barn. Mexican soldiers heard there were Americans in town. The Americans hid under a bale of hay and were narrowly missed by a Mexican soldier who shoved a pitchfork into it. That great-uncle loved that story and would tell it often. Laughing every time.
helloworld11 4y ago
Because war is so horrible, there's no reason why people who don't fight or unwillingly participate in them shouldn't be able to know just how horrible it can be. Implicitly rose-tinting awful realities by keeping silent about their nature is rarely a good thing for future generations. If anything, the world needs more people who have been in wars to make explicitly clear just how many grotesque reasons there are for avoiding them if at all possible.
standardUser 4y ago
The difference being that there was a legitimate and urgent fear of a foreign power invading our shores, as there were actively doing to other democracies at the time. I'm straining to think of one American adversary of the last 70 years that we fought half a world away that had any conceivable possibility of showing up at our doorstep. I can think of many, many wars we have fought, just not a single one that has made us safer at home.
- jacobolus 4y ago
  The US was not in any significant danger of being directly invaded during WWII. It would have been an incredibly costly logistical nightmare for the would-be invaders, very unlikely to succeed. US worries were legitimate (atrocities perpetrated against civilians, future control of Europe/Asia, the international economic order and security of global trade networks, etc.) but “urgent” invasion wasn’t one of them.
  - Nomentatus 4y ago
    The mainland you mean, not the U.S. as a whole - since part of Alaska was invaded and seized. One of the reasons that's not well-known is that I believe it was kept secret during the war as it was a tad embarrassing.
    - shepherdjerred 4y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleutian_Islands_campaign https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleutian_Islands_campaign It wasn’t a very successful invasion. They held a couple of islands for two months at the cost of 4000 of their 8000 men.
      - Nomentatus 4y ago
        However it's worth noting that the invasion caused at least tens of thousands of deaths and probably hundreds of thousands of deaths in North America - because the US and Canada built the Alaska highway to counter the Japanese; and that project spread illnesses to such as TB to native people who had never encountered them before; with a staggering deathtoll amongst them. Also not reported during the war.
master_crab 4y ago
Alternate take (although yours can also be correct): people who haven’t been in a conflict have no frame of reference. How do you explain that war is long periods of excruciating boredom punctuated by moments of heart pounding panic? Not well if you weren’t there.

yibberish 4y ago

talking about it does not quite bring it to their doorstep; but it surely takes you back there; it's understandable to not want to go back. your choice to shoulder this burden for all, is well your choice. but be advised that this choice may have unintended consequences in a longer term. consequences of your choice to witholding bad things "for them". I don't belive you're doing this (bearing the horrible things) only to shield your relatives from your past. it is important you recognize that it's something you do for yourself, you are the main person who doesn't want to remember whatever horrible events you had to experience; don't pin this choice on them.

krrrh 4y ago
He didn’t say anything about not revisiting those events personally or with other vets, he said by with “people who weren’t there”. Give a guy a break for choosing to not sit his kids down to hear all the gory details.
- yibberish 4y ago
  I'm not telling him to go scare his kids. I'm pointing out some possible self-deceit. "I did it for them!".. sure, why not? but my point is that first and foremost he's making those choices for himself; which is pefrectly fine. what's not fine (IMO) is to pretend such choices aren't selfish.
  - jimbokun 4y ago
    Who gives you the authority to judge the morality and motivations behind this person's actions?
    - yibberish 4y ago
      I have de-subscribed from authority. I speak from my own experience, if it helps it helps, if it doesn't just leave it. maybe it wasn't meant for you
  - virtual_void 4y ago
    These things aren’t binary. They aren’t simply this or that. Both can be true or neither or some combination. Your claim of selfishness seems to be unwarranted (and perhaps a little mean spirited), how can you possibly tell?
- standardUser 4y ago
  Perhaps if we were all a little more exposed to the horrors of war we wouldn't so eagerly vote for war-hungry leaders over and over and over.

pram 4y ago

Alternate perspective: I was in Iraq and Afghanistan, I don't talk about it because theres not much to say. I was either standing or sitting some place on guard duty, wired up on an insane amount of caffeine and nicotine, trying not to go insane for the 12 hour shifts. The only thing that punctuated the boredom was the daily mortar attack alarms lol

warner25 4y ago
I'm happy to talk to people about my experiences in Afghanistan, but yeah, I only have a few minutes worth of "war stories" to tell. One of the things that most non-veterans don't grasp is just how mundane day-to-day military life can be, even in a combat zone, like how people without a security clearance can't imagine how mundane most SECRET material really is. I find it hard to explain, but life is both different in quirky ways (various restrictions on freedoms, being judged professionally by your height/weight and 2-mile running time, random attacks by mortar fire, etc.) and dominated by many of the same experiences and concerns of civilian life (time spent just acquiring and eating food, dealing with traffic and bureaucracy, being frustrated by your assigned Windows machine on the enterprise network, etc.). One of my personal takeaways from my time in Afghanistan is just how widely variable everyone's "combat" experience can be. I flew helicopters, so I saw the whole range of living conditions on a daily basis: everything from the smallest observation posts where squads lived in filth and got attacked routinely by well-aimed direct fire, to the large airbases like Bagram where people worked 9-5 in a cubicle and had many amenities that were even nicer than what was back home at Fort Bragg. And where you ended up on that spectrum seemed quite arbitrary and luck-of-the-draw. Some otherwise interchangeable helicopter units just flew VIPs back and forth between Bagram and Kabul while others flew SEAL teams on very-high-risk raids every night. So when someone says they did a tour in Afghanistan (even if they earned a Bronze Star or a Combat Action Badge), that doesn't mean much to me, in itself. Edited to add: I think the variance among people who "served in WWII" is orders-of-magnitude greater. There were just so many millions of people in uniform in so many diverse places.
- RalfWausE 4y ago
  I heard a similar story from a relative of me: He was in the Waffen SS and fought the war basically behind a typewriter in a depot.

gumby 4y ago

> I don't want my wife, my children, or my neighbors to be burdened with thinking of something so horrible. Interesting. Until very recently, as far as I could know, my mother's life began at 16. She refused to talk about anything from her childhood. I don't know if, like you, she didn't want to traumatize us or simply didn't want to think about it at all. But now, in her late 80s, she'll sometimes absent-mindedly relate some story from her childhood. They are all kid stories, but the perspective in them can be hair raising. (She was a child in an occupied country during WWII in the pacific; then immediately as the war ended the country became a different war zone, so she only knew living in that kind of environment until she left the country to go to university). Recently I've been thinking of this because of the Ukraine war. I have seen at close range the impact of a generation of kids (like my mother in law, and others in her village) who grew up in postwar Germany with essentially no adult men around. That whole generation is pretty screwed up, and their kids (my generation) also reflect that impact. While my personal opinion is that Germany is not doing anywhere near enough to help Ukraine, I think they should be preparing a for a huge postwar assistance, not just money for rebuilding, but psychological / therapy based on their experience to try to reduce the effects of wartime trauma on Ukraine.

hutzlibu 4y ago
"I think they should be preparing a for a huge postwar assistance, not just money for rebuilding, but psychological / therapy based on their experience to try to reduce the effects of wartime trauma on Ukraine. " We take lots of refugees. I would argue this is already a very effective way of preventing further traumatizing. But as far as I am aware, those who come do not easily get offered psychatric help, even if they already are traumatized. But the psychatric sector is pretty much operating on its limits anyway.
- gumby 4y ago
  Being a refugee is traumatic on its own. But Germany has a lot of lessons (including what not to do) that it could be providing for good.
  - 4y ago

iancmceachern 4y ago

I haven't, my grandfather did. He was at Pearl Harbor, many battles in the Pacific (he was a submariner), in the end he was part of the occupation of Japan and earned many medals including the purple heart for almost dying in a sub accident. Only as an adult have I come to realize the gift he gave me. When I was a child, I spent a ton of time with him, he had a big hand in raising me. The picture he painted for the young me formed the foundation of my world view. He chose to share with us the Japanese cooking he learned while living there, he taught us how to use chop sticks, one of my most prized possessions is a silk he brought back and gave me in his will. He never once spoke negatively about any group of people, especially those who were "enemies", he stood up for anyone who was being treated negatively and wouldn't stand for it. He harbored no ill will, and therefore didn't put it in me. It's only as an adult through research into his service that i have realized the full gravity of what he did during this service and the fact that he was a truly happy, blissful, and forgiving man after all that. I can say to you, having been one of the recipients of the kindness and forgiveness you are showing in your own life now, and sharing in this comment - thank you. This is how the world moves on.

c-smile 4y ago
My uncle (elder brother of my dad) died on Oder River offence. Two weeks before end of the war. 20 years old guy, sigh. And I also lost all my grandfathers there. Memories in our family are quite fresh.
wishfish 4y ago
I had two relatives who fought in WWII. The contrast between them is interesting. One was in an engineering unit and was a classic REMF. He had tons of stories about the war. Usually about how he and his buddies would get drunk and wreck jeeps and somehow escape any disciplinary action for it. He was present at many of the famous Pacific islands like Okinawa. But always after the main fight was over. Asked him once if he was ever shot at and he had to think. He thought it was only once. He was a loud blowhard in many ways and not always pleasant to be around. Had another relative who was a Marine. Was present at many of the worst battles. Including Iwo Jima. I never heard his stories. He never talked about them. My mom pressured him into talking one day. She regretted that for the rest of her life because the stories were so traumatic and it left him in tears. He was a gentle man. Became a Methodist minister after the war. I never once heard him raise his voice in anger. One of the kindest men I've ever known. This is a sample size of only two. So I'm not assuming combat, or the lack of, shaped these men into what they would later become. But it's a little interesting to me. Since I myself am older, I have some relatives who go way back. My grandmother was once visited by her great-uncle when she was 6. He was a veteran of the Mexican War and the Civil War (on the Confederate side). He also wouldn't talk about combat. But he did tell this one story where he and some buddies snuck out of camp. Somewhere in northern Mexico. Found a bar and flirted a little with girls. Then the girls suddenly rushed the men out of the bar and hid them in a barn. Mexican soldiers heard there were Americans in town. The Americans hid under a bale of hay and were narrowly missed by a Mexican soldier who shoved a pitchfork into it. That great-uncle loved that story and would tell it often. Laughing every time.

helloworld11 4y ago

Because war is so horrible, there's no reason why people who don't fight or unwillingly participate in them shouldn't be able to know just how horrible it can be. Implicitly rose-tinting awful realities by keeping silent about their nature is rarely a good thing for future generations. If anything, the world needs more people who have been in wars to make explicitly clear just how many grotesque reasons there are for avoiding them if at all possible.

standardUser 4y ago

The difference being that there was a legitimate and urgent fear of a foreign power invading our shores, as there were actively doing to other democracies at the time. I'm straining to think of one American adversary of the last 70 years that we fought half a world away that had any conceivable possibility of showing up at our doorstep. I can think of many, many wars we have fought, just not a single one that has made us safer at home.

jacobolus 4y ago
The US was not in any significant danger of being directly invaded during WWII. It would have been an incredibly costly logistical nightmare for the would-be invaders, very unlikely to succeed. US worries were legitimate (atrocities perpetrated against civilians, future control of Europe/Asia, the international economic order and security of global trade networks, etc.) but “urgent” invasion wasn’t one of them.
- Nomentatus 4y ago
  The mainland you mean, not the U.S. as a whole - since part of Alaska was invaded and seized. One of the reasons that's not well-known is that I believe it was kept secret during the war as it was a tad embarrassing.
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleutian_Islands_campaign https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleutian_Islands_campaign It wasn’t a very successful invasion. They held a couple of islands for two months at the cost of 4000 of their 8000 men.
    - Nomentatus 4y ago
      However it's worth noting that the invasion caused at least tens of thousands of deaths and probably hundreds of thousands of deaths in North America - because the US and Canada built the Alaska highway to counter the Japanese; and that project spread illnesses to such as TB to native people who had never encountered them before; with a staggering deathtoll amongst them. Also not reported during the war.

master_crab 4y ago

Alternate take (although yours can also be correct): people who haven’t been in a conflict have no frame of reference. How do you explain that war is long periods of excruciating boredom punctuated by moments of heart pounding panic? Not well if you weren’t there.