Oh... Oh damn. Thats just... Wrong. It makes it seem so petty really... The american army lets people like that in? How sad...
Those people most likely like that when they got in. As I said earlier they most likely have severe mental health issues such as PTSD.
lolwut? You basically just said, "They were most likely crazy when they got in. They most likely got driven crazy by the war."
As to PTSD, it exists and I've seen it in friends firsthand. It's what the old-timers called "shellshock" -- when your brain absolutely, positively just can't deal with any more of the bullshit that goes on in a war. Incidentally, George Carlin had a gem of a bit back in the 80's about the transition in language from "shellshock" to "PTSD".
American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation.
For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I'll give you an example of that. There's a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It's when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to it's absolute peak and maximum. Can't take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap.
In the first world war, that condition was called Shell Shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, Shell Shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy years ago.
Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called Battle Fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn't seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell Shock! Battle Fatigue.
Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called Operational Exhaustion. Hey, were up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It's totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.
Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it's no surprise that the very same condition was called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Still eight syllables, but we've added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
I'll bet you if we'd of still been calling it Shell Shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time.
As to whether that was the cause here...no. PTSD is never a cause for actions like this. A contributing factor, certainly. But in order to do shit like this, you have to have a tiny bit of you that would be willing to do it in the first place. The PTSD just removes the inhibitions, the moral safeguards that are socially programmed into you from childhood. But the disturbing part is that the vast majority of us have that tiny little bit that could do this. We don't like to admit it, but experiments have shown that most people are utter bastards, if you give them the right circumstances.
And yes, the Army is trying to do a better job of dealing with the psychological damage, but the resources still aren't there, and the extended and repeated tours are really putting a drain on troops. My brother's between tours right now, but he's pulled three in Iraq and is probably looking at one more in Afghanistan when he's eligible again. That's a
lot of time deployed. His marriage is already a casualty of the war. And his daughter has spent most of her childhood talking to Daddy through late-night phone calls, or if they're lucky a couple of minutes on Skype.
And this isn't a new phenomenon. It's just better documented now. There's an excellent book by the military historian John Keegan called
The Face of Battle that discusses the change in warfare over the centuries, from the average soldier's point of view. He compares three major battles seperated by a few centuries each: Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815), and the Somme (1916). One of the salient points was that even as war became less personal and less visceral, it became more difficult for soldiers to cope with because they felt increasingly powerless. At Agincourt, you could see the enemy ran up in your face. At Waterloo, you could see their uniforms at musket range. By the Somme, you were getting machine-gunned by enemies you could barely make out, or blasted by artillery miles away, or killed by land mines that you never even saw.
Now, push-button death can come from hundreds of miles away. But for Coalition troops, it's coming mostly from IEDs, or from shoot-and-scoot sniper attacks. In either case, you're left with an injured or dead comrade, and no enemy available to fight back against. Over time, the psychological toll of being whittled down by an enemy that won't engage you in a fight leads to this sort of thing, where the population themselves become proxies for the enemy, even for well-trainined troops. We had the same types of incidents in Vietnam, even in Korea.
Author
Topic: Well, Here's Some Bad News (Read 3682 times)