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From swords to ploughshares.

 
 
Cheap. Easy. Cruel.
14:21 / 19.07.04
I came across this article this morning, and was intrigued by the points it raises. How can soldiers, who are trained to kill enemy combatants without compunction, be decompressed and integrated back into civilian life? Is the problem caused by training methods that don't allow soldiers to be human and agonize over the moral conundrums caused by kiling another human being?
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
09:47 / 21.07.04
Is the fact that this seems to be a largely 20th/21st century problem one caused by changes in the way people live their lives, poor reporting of cases of post-traumatic stress in the past or inevitable given the massive increase in people put into combast situations?

'The Trouble With Killing', a brilliant TV show that I've mentioned in other comversations on here, argues that the problem is, despite what you might think about our evolutionary history, killing is a deeply abnormal thing for a human being to do, the development of weapons is to develop something bad that we can invest with the value of killing, so it's 'not us'.

The obvious answer would seem to me to be an equal or possibly greater time to the time people got trained to be soldiers be spent before returning them to civilian life, especially if they've seen combat, on therapy and deprogramming them from military thinking. As this doesn't actually help in the blowing up of other people I doubt our political leaders would be that interested, despite the figures that ex-servicemen tend to be more likely than most to end up on the streets, battling various compulsive addictions or taking up posts on top of buildings and shotting at passers by.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:42 / 21.07.04
Well it's probably more to do with the recognition of the mind as something that can be treated for illness than any of those things. It's a tiny amount of time since the first world war and in the wake of that a lot of men who had shell shock were treated horribly.

What can we do about post-traumatic stress- stop sending people in to useless combat situations? How many of these wars are actually needed? I dread to think how many of our soldiers have actually been sacrificed over the last twelve months.

The obvious answer would seem to me to be an equal or possibly greater time to the time people got trained to be soldiers be spent before returning them to civilian life

But would keeping people away from reality really help and how are you going to retrain them? Set up a mock village that they have to stay in, go through intensive therapy? Who's going to give them this therapy? I hope you see what I mean with this.
 
 
Cheap. Easy. Cruel.
14:22 / 21.07.04
From the article:

Much of the military's research on killing and battle stress began after World War II, when studies revealed that only a small number of troops — as few as 15% — fired at their adversaries on the battlefield.

Military studies suggested that troops were unexpectedly reluctant to kill. Military training methods changed, Grossman and others say, to make killing a more automatic behavior.


I find it interesting that this has become a more widespread phenomenon since the advent of training methods that teach soldiers killing as an automatic behavior. It is almost as if the mind saves all of this up and lets it out when the tour is over, much the same way the fight or flight response leaves one feeling drained after the adrenaline has worn off.

I think that there should be a period of "cooling off", or deprogramming that is mandatory before soldiers who have seen combat are returned to society. Just tossing these people back on the street without so much as even a "How are you?" is a disservice.

But would keeping people away from reality really help and how are you going to retrain them? Set up a mock village that they have to stay in, go through intensive therapy? Who's going to give them this therapy?

I was hoping someone would know of some research on this subject, or perhaps have some ideas on how this could be accomplished.
 
 
Cat Chant
16:22 / 21.07.04
Not a very useful contribution, I know, but just for the sake of clarity - this seems to be talking specifically about killing within a certain range of proximity: soldiers who are using guns, but not, say, dropping bombs from a plane. Does anyone know, is it the case that soldiers who kill people only from a long distance do not go through equivalent levels of mental injury?
 
 
Cheap. Easy. Cruel.
19:04 / 21.07.04
I do not know for certain, but I would suppose that those who kill from afar would be much less likely to suffer the same damage. I think it would have something to do with not having to see the enemy combatants die. They just see the bombs drop, or hear the howitzer roar, or watch the tank explode as they fly past. Out of sight, out of mind.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
20:18 / 21.07.04
Certainly, there is attested evidence of helicopter pilots in the first Gulf War saying that the experience of blowing up Iraqi vehicles from a distance with night vision as "very realistic", which is really rather scary.
 
 
pointless and uncalled for
06:54 / 23.07.04
I can attest that soldiers using medium to long-range weapons do undergo a form of PTSD although this, in part, stems from not really knowing or understanding the full extent of their actions both before and after carrying them out.

In WWI and WWII propoganda taught soldiers that as far as x nationals were concerned there was no such thing as an innocent civillian. Take away that safety net and the fall is much harder.
 
 
Axolotl
15:32 / 26.07.04
I read a really good book on this subject but I'm damned if I can remember the name. It's going to annoy me as well.
It looked at the ways an army uses to convince it's troops that it is OK to kill, when they have been constantly told "thou shalt not kill". It was very interesting.
The other snippet of theory I can recall is the link between PTSD and the lack of decompression time. Before, say, the 1950's troops generally had weeks on a troop ship travelling back from the battlefields, time to make the transition from military to civilian. Now you get on a jet and you're back in 48 hours, no time to decompress and resultant rise in PTSD. If only I could remember the damn book's name.
 
  
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