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The risk perhaps not so much moral injury, but that combat and war is almost like a drug. Imagine going back home to a toddler raging about the wrong color cup

by ty6853 1y ago

The risk perhaps not so much moral injury, but that combat and war is almost like a drug. Imagine going back home to a toddler raging about the wrong color cup, a narrow set of civil rules, and flipping burgers after living a life out the back of a pickup truck with nothing but a rifle and your buddies keeping you alive. Fucking boring. But I'm no killer, just a guy who spent a few months in a civil war, and met a lot of people who met the Hemingway quote: "Those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it never care for anything else thereafter."

vasco 1y ago
Whenever you have these feelings, go watch actual real life combat footage. A great recent one is a knife fight to the death where one soldier admits defeat and asks the first one to leave him to die https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/tAUwd2MWqT https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/tAUwd2MWqT Watch that and tell me if you think it's still cool and normal life is boring. I find that it snaps me right back out of "Hollywood war" thinking and makes my stomach turn.
- ty6853 1y ago
  A lot of the guys I met in the YPG had seen way more combat than that and still yearned for it. One of them was retired foreign legion that did this as his retirement. When we were getting shot at one of the older guys would get viscerally excited and joyful, and he had seen many dead. Junky is a good description of what they were. They wanted another taste. I can't imagine after 5+ years of that life how you would detox from that, not easily I imagine.
  - jwilber 1y ago
    See also My War Gone By, I Miss It So - a book about the author’s time as a war correspondent in Bosnia during the Yugoslavian War. After the war, he became addicted to heroin for lack of the excitement that the war brought. https://septemberpublishing.org/product/my-war-gone-by-i-miss-it-so-2/ https://septemberpublishing.org/product/my-war-gone-by-i-mis...
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    I think you have to distinguish between militant groups filled with highly motivated ideological volunteers and state militaries which are often primarily filled with people from poor families who have graduated high school and then don't know what to do with their lives. In war time it's an even uglier picture where you may have armies filled with people who were literally dragged kicking and screaming off the streets and then beat into obedience or death.
- foolfoolz 1y ago
  there are vets who return from a deployment and can’t adjust to life at home. and they re-deploy many times over. i’m not going to call one cool and one boring, you’ll have to ask those guys what their motivation is
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- runjake 1y ago
  It’s not about it being cool. It’s about it feeling “normal”. I’m not even sure this is caused by trauma so much as just living a whole other life in a whole other culture with completely different norms, even with combat aside. Going back into the civilian world is a pretty uneasy experience for a lot of veterans. It’s kind of a hard feeling to relay to civilians. A very strong culture shock for even many POGs. I think your advice is better suited to people who glorify war and play too much Call of Duty.
  - esseph 1y ago
    I remember going on leave from right outside Sadr City in 2008ish to a Midwest Walmart a few days later. A kid there was throwing a tantrum in the isle about his mom not picking the right color toy off the self for him. It was incredibly jarring for me. At that time events in my life were extremely visceral. If I ate a time or two that day, it was a good day. If I didn't get shot at that day it was a great day. If I didn't get blown up by an IED or RPG, it was an incredible day. I was eating breakfast one morning and a wild dog had drug the amputated arm from a surgery over from the incinerator that was currently broken, and decided to eat it next to me. The arm still had part of the camouflaged sleeve on it. The idea of being upset over the color toy your mother was buying you was the most insane thing to me.
    - runjake 1y ago
      Perspective. I guess that Reddit video mentioned above doesn’t seem so graphic after reading your comment. I try to rationalize it all by knowing that we, especially westerners, largely live in this seemingly safe facade we like to call “our lives”. But then, behind the curtain, the raw machinations of life happen to keep the facade going. The facade is nice. It tricks almost everyone into pacification and thus be less of a threat to us. On the other hand, the machinations behind the curtain keep churning along. We find it horrifying, but it’s just how things really work underneath the veneer. The facade is kept up by violence, or the threat thereof. You can’t resist following the facade’s rules (eg. laws and in many cases, human norms) without ultimately being the subject of violence, be it from the state or an angry mob. It’s best to find peace with that.
- closewith 1y ago
  A lot of men have seen that video and rather than the repulsion that you feel, they wonder _would I have survived?_.
  - mmooss 1y ago
    How do you know that? How do you know they don't think both things?
    - closewith 1y ago
      It's certainly not the same revulsion. In the world of men who have not lived their entire lives isolated from danger and conflict in a rules-based society, the Hollywood version of war isn't a consideration. It's no different to Marvel or Harry Potter movies. It's an open secret many people who experience raw conflict in which actions and not regulations decide outcomes like it. It's the reason why they often go back and it's an age old story. The GP most likely has led a comfortable life safely ensconced in the bubble of order provided by society and when they are a glimse of the reality of the world, they assume that everyone feels like them that it's a horror to be avoided. It's incomprehensible to them that some see that video and I think I could have done better. Some will have seen that video or others like it and set off for Ukraine to see if they can. The videos that horrify this cohort are the combat videos where the soldier has no influence over their fate: drones, mines, and artillery.
      - mmooss 1y ago
        You're making up a bunch of stuff, from the premise about some specific psychologies, to things about the GP, to assumptions about 'Hollywood' and what is the "reality of the world" (it's well-worn sophistry to depict the other person's version as fantasy and your own as reality), to your conclusions. There's no basis for it. It looks to me, without basis, like the current attempt to spread the fetishization of voilence and war by the same propaganda leaders have used for eternity. > It's no different to Marvel or Harry Potter movies. Indeed.
        1y ago
- pdpi 1y ago
  > Watch that and tell me if you think it's still cool and normal life is boring. I didn't get the feeling that OP was saying it's cool. Rather, that it's intense, and that the intensity itself is addicting. I was on jury duty for a murder case last year, and it was like living in a different reality. The weight of the responsibility bore down on me hard, it felt like the stakes of what I was doing were higher than anything else in my life. It took me a while afterwards to fully come back down to earth. OP is basically saying that war feels somewhat like that - you come back home and the stakes feel trivial.
- alexey-salmin 1y ago
  That can be applied to people who never went to real war and base their views on Hollywood films. However the "combat addiction" among people who did go to war is still very real. There are countless stories of people who knowingly chose to go back. I think it's important to recognize that the idea "if only people knew how awful the war is, no one would go there" doesn't really work.
defrost 1y ago
William George Murray came home from WWI, during that time In a letter to his parents, Murray described his participation in the battles at Gallipoli during August 1915. Murray wrote about how the advancing Turks were mowed down with machine gun and artillery fire and how it was "great fun and very exciting." He took up work in the Northern Territory of Australia in stock policing role: In April 1919, Murray joined the Northern Territory Police as a constable and was posted to the very remote Ranken River police station on the Barkly Tableland. Now, mixed race station workers, some white, some aboriginal, camped togther and in a dispute over a woman, an aboriginal man killed a white man over a rape. The rape violated both white and native law, as did the killing in revenge. There was a single known perpetrator and ways and means to bring them to justice under either of two bodies of law with the cooperation of both groups of people. Murray got involved .. Officially, 31 men, women and children were killed during this police operation, although analysis of the existing documentation and surviving Aboriginal testimonies indicate that somewhere between 100 and 200 people were shot dead. Coniston massacre (1928): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coniston_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coniston_massacre Such was the excess of a shell shocked man with a badge allowed free reign over civilians.
otikik 1y ago
I don't know, man. I am the kind of person who can't help but think "this 1.5-tons metal cage just moved 20 meters while I was blinking" while driving my car on a highway. Needless to say, I don't enjoy driving. On that truck I would be thinking "we are exposed, an enemy can shoot at us from that cliff" 90% of the time. To me "fun" is "not having to think those things".

by ty6853 1y ago

vasco 1y ago

Whenever you have these feelings, go watch actual real life combat footage. A great recent one is a knife fight to the death where one soldier admits defeat and asks the first one to leave him to die https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/tAUwd2MWqT https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/tAUwd2MWqT Watch that and tell me if you think it's still cool and normal life is boring. I find that it snaps me right back out of "Hollywood war" thinking and makes my stomach turn.

ty6853 1y ago
A lot of the guys I met in the YPG had seen way more combat than that and still yearned for it. One of them was retired foreign legion that did this as his retirement. When we were getting shot at one of the older guys would get viscerally excited and joyful, and he had seen many dead. Junky is a good description of what they were. They wanted another taste. I can't imagine after 5+ years of that life how you would detox from that, not easily I imagine.
- jwilber 1y ago
  See also My War Gone By, I Miss It So - a book about the author’s time as a war correspondent in Bosnia during the Yugoslavian War. After the war, he became addicted to heroin for lack of the excitement that the war brought. https://septemberpublishing.org/product/my-war-gone-by-i-miss-it-so-2/ https://septemberpublishing.org/product/my-war-gone-by-i-mis...
- somenameforme 1y ago
  I think you have to distinguish between militant groups filled with highly motivated ideological volunteers and state militaries which are often primarily filled with people from poor families who have graduated high school and then don't know what to do with their lives. In war time it's an even uglier picture where you may have armies filled with people who were literally dragged kicking and screaming off the streets and then beat into obedience or death.
foolfoolz 1y ago
there are vets who return from a deployment and can’t adjust to life at home. and they re-deploy many times over. i’m not going to call one cool and one boring, you’ll have to ask those guys what their motivation is
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
runjake 1y ago
It’s not about it being cool. It’s about it feeling “normal”. I’m not even sure this is caused by trauma so much as just living a whole other life in a whole other culture with completely different norms, even with combat aside. Going back into the civilian world is a pretty uneasy experience for a lot of veterans. It’s kind of a hard feeling to relay to civilians. A very strong culture shock for even many POGs. I think your advice is better suited to people who glorify war and play too much Call of Duty.
- esseph 1y ago
  I remember going on leave from right outside Sadr City in 2008ish to a Midwest Walmart a few days later. A kid there was throwing a tantrum in the isle about his mom not picking the right color toy off the self for him. It was incredibly jarring for me. At that time events in my life were extremely visceral. If I ate a time or two that day, it was a good day. If I didn't get shot at that day it was a great day. If I didn't get blown up by an IED or RPG, it was an incredible day. I was eating breakfast one morning and a wild dog had drug the amputated arm from a surgery over from the incinerator that was currently broken, and decided to eat it next to me. The arm still had part of the camouflaged sleeve on it. The idea of being upset over the color toy your mother was buying you was the most insane thing to me.
  - runjake 1y ago
    Perspective. I guess that Reddit video mentioned above doesn’t seem so graphic after reading your comment. I try to rationalize it all by knowing that we, especially westerners, largely live in this seemingly safe facade we like to call “our lives”. But then, behind the curtain, the raw machinations of life happen to keep the facade going. The facade is nice. It tricks almost everyone into pacification and thus be less of a threat to us. On the other hand, the machinations behind the curtain keep churning along. We find it horrifying, but it’s just how things really work underneath the veneer. The facade is kept up by violence, or the threat thereof. You can’t resist following the facade’s rules (eg. laws and in many cases, human norms) without ultimately being the subject of violence, be it from the state or an angry mob. It’s best to find peace with that.
closewith 1y ago
A lot of men have seen that video and rather than the repulsion that you feel, they wonder _would I have survived?_.
- mmooss 1y ago
  How do you know that? How do you know they don't think both things?
  - closewith 1y ago
    It's certainly not the same revulsion. In the world of men who have not lived their entire lives isolated from danger and conflict in a rules-based society, the Hollywood version of war isn't a consideration. It's no different to Marvel or Harry Potter movies. It's an open secret many people who experience raw conflict in which actions and not regulations decide outcomes like it. It's the reason why they often go back and it's an age old story. The GP most likely has led a comfortable life safely ensconced in the bubble of order provided by society and when they are a glimse of the reality of the world, they assume that everyone feels like them that it's a horror to be avoided. It's incomprehensible to them that some see that video and I think I could have done better. Some will have seen that video or others like it and set off for Ukraine to see if they can. The videos that horrify this cohort are the combat videos where the soldier has no influence over their fate: drones, mines, and artillery.
    - mmooss 1y ago
      You're making up a bunch of stuff, from the premise about some specific psychologies, to things about the GP, to assumptions about 'Hollywood' and what is the "reality of the world" (it's well-worn sophistry to depict the other person's version as fantasy and your own as reality), to your conclusions. There's no basis for it. It looks to me, without basis, like the current attempt to spread the fetishization of voilence and war by the same propaganda leaders have used for eternity. > It's no different to Marvel or Harry Potter movies. Indeed.
      - 1y ago
pdpi 1y ago
> Watch that and tell me if you think it's still cool and normal life is boring. I didn't get the feeling that OP was saying it's cool. Rather, that it's intense, and that the intensity itself is addicting. I was on jury duty for a murder case last year, and it was like living in a different reality. The weight of the responsibility bore down on me hard, it felt like the stakes of what I was doing were higher than anything else in my life. It took me a while afterwards to fully come back down to earth. OP is basically saying that war feels somewhat like that - you come back home and the stakes feel trivial.
alexey-salmin 1y ago
That can be applied to people who never went to real war and base their views on Hollywood films. However the "combat addiction" among people who did go to war is still very real. There are countless stories of people who knowingly chose to go back. I think it's important to recognize that the idea "if only people knew how awful the war is, no one would go there" doesn't really work.

defrost 1y ago

William George Murray came home from WWI, during that time In a letter to his parents, Murray described his participation in the battles at Gallipoli during August 1915. Murray wrote about how the advancing Turks were mowed down with machine gun and artillery fire and how it was "great fun and very exciting." He took up work in the Northern Territory of Australia in stock policing role: In April 1919, Murray joined the Northern Territory Police as a constable and was posted to the very remote Ranken River police station on the Barkly Tableland. Now, mixed race station workers, some white, some aboriginal, camped togther and in a dispute over a woman, an aboriginal man killed a white man over a rape. The rape violated both white and native law, as did the killing in revenge. There was a single known perpetrator and ways and means to bring them to justice under either of two bodies of law with the cooperation of both groups of people. Murray got involved .. Officially, 31 men, women and children were killed during this police operation, although analysis of the existing documentation and surviving Aboriginal testimonies indicate that somewhere between 100 and 200 people were shot dead. Coniston massacre (1928): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coniston_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coniston_massacre Such was the excess of a shell shocked man with a badge allowed free reign over civilians.

otikik 1y ago

I don't know, man. I am the kind of person who can't help but think "this 1.5-tons metal cage just moved 20 meters while I was blinking" while driving my car on a highway. Needless to say, I don't enjoy driving. On that truck I would be thinking "we are exposed, an enemy can shoot at us from that cliff" 90% of the time. To me "fun" is "not having to think those things".