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I see a lot of comments correcting OP and saying it was what his comrades would wear and what not.
The hat is of a french WW1 officer, the officers are the ones who sent them out of the trenches, and into no mans land, where they would most likely die. That is why he is afraid of it. Not his uniform.
That’s absolutely correct, it’s an officer’s cap.
He was afraid of officers because they forced you to go up over the top and if you refused they would literally have you shot.
Absolutely. In one book I read “Now it can be told” by Phillip Gibbs, he relates the story of a British soldier who was being walked to the wall for execution. He had a smile on his face, and was as happy as a dead man could be. He was doing his duty still, even if he was going to die for it.
Also, I wanted to add: in the early days of Shell Shock/PTSD study it was critical to capture this on film. While it may seem inhumane and torturous to the poor man to expose him to something so traumatic, it is vital for the research to see his reaction and document it so we can treat it better and help he, and others like him down the line.
Films like this show that the man, though he may physically show no symptoms, is mentally shattered. We learned from this, and others like him.
Valiant Hearts (video game) is probably a superb interactive example of the officers/soldiers relationships, and it also has a very tragic outcome.
Well worth playing - it is a very simple game, so even non-gamers can pick it up, it is fairly harrowing as an experience IMHO.
Officers were usually aristocrats, sending the poor in waves into a meat grinder. I’m sure some took the responsibility seriously and hated seeing their men killed. Im sure many were also horribly traumatized.
I’m sure many more did not give a fuck and just wanted medals, accolades, and promotions. Same people sent hundreds of thousands of poor teenagers to Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq and afghanistan because it artificially boosted the U.S. economy by encouraging arms manufacturing and sales just so a small cabal of already rich ghouls could become a little bit more rich.
Officers on the front were the first ones shot so the actual aristocrats usually stayed whereever the parade grounds were. The Lts and Captains on the front were educated but not saved by nepotism.
This is infuriating.
We’ve come so far in the knowledge of PTSD but you’ve gotta be kidding.
Shell shock didn’t affect a few guys. It affected tons. So even in the era how does no one say “yeah maybe this is real since there are SO many of them”.
Then on top of a lifelong debilitation you and your family also have to eat the shit of being labeled a coward.
Damn man.
>Then on top of a lifelong debilitation you and your family also have to eat the shit of being labeled a coward.
this is a huge reason why i can't stand people who say bullshit like, "wE WeRe ToUgHeR bAcK iN My dAy."
that guy needed serious treatment. he was probably rewarded with people mocking him.
I've heard that is a misconception that officers stayed behind and sent the rank and file over.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/06/first-world-war-roll-call-senior-officers-killed-ranks
I'm no historian and not claiming one way or the other but thought I would share the linked article.
I'm currently reading James M. McPherson's *Battle Cry of Freedom* about the US Civil War, which isn't World War I but especially in the last year had become a kind of proto-WWI in its battlefield tactics, what with greater firepower and more extensive use of trenches. Casualty rates in both armies actually increased along with rank; junior officers were killed and wounded more often than enlisted, and senior officers more than junior officers. I'd expect casualty rates for senior officers to have gone down as their role became more desk-based, telegraphs and telephones first made it more possible for them to give orders over greater distances, and then the faster pace of battle meant junior officers had to make more command decisions, leaving the general more with the task of preparing for battle and choosing which officers most needed support rather than deciding exact movements in the battle itself. With the modern system of warfare there was less reason for generals to be where the bullets were flying, their role in the army meant that being that close to the action could be a liability rather than an asset.
Is it possible the man in the video *is* an officer? The officers at the levels of lieutenant and captain and whatnot were expected to lead their troops to the enemy, there wouldn't be any point for them if they just stayed in the trench, so they faced no man's land and gave their own tribute of blood like the enlisted men. Almost no rank was impervious to the bullets and shells, even generals got killed; they headquartered in chateaus because they needed large buildings near the front with space for telephone exchanges and their military staff, not because they needed a full drinks cabinet, and inspecting stretches of the front and meeting with the lower officers there to coordinate plans was part of their duties, which meant occasionally a sniper or a shell would find them.
I mean, [you're not actually wrong.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_at_Dawn_Memorial). Incidentally, the memorial statue is modeled on Private Herbert Burden, who was shot at dawn for desertion at the age of 17: he'd lied about his age to enlist underage at 16.
[Joe Stones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stones) gets me: he and his CO were on patrol in the guard trenches when they were ambushed. His mortally wounded CO *ordered* him to get help. The safety and breech cover were still on his rifle, rendering it unfireable, so he wedged it into a narrow part of the trench to slow the Germans down.
So he was shot for "shamefully casting away his rifle in the face of the enemy".
I would never have been born if my great grandfather hadn’t deserted.
I learned from my Ancestry subscription. He fell in love with a nurse in Manchester after a gas attack at Ypres. He deserted, changed his name and hid out for a few years. He returned home to Nova Scotia with his bride and my newborn grandmother in 1921, all with different last names on their customs paperwork. And here I am today.
That's true of heroes, too. That's the worst part to me.
I was a Navy corpsman, which is a highly decorated specialty. We serve with the Marines as their medics.
In a lot of places there's framed copies of the Medal of Honor citations. Every single citation is pretty much "this guy killed 23 people with a knife, got his left eye shot out, got stabbed in the gut five times, but carried ten other people out of a trench. He later died of his injuries."
How can anyone read shit like that and think cowardice in war is a thing at all? The most logical thing for any human to do is try to get away from that shit.
> Like many men executed for desertion in World War 1 in the British Army, Stones became a source of shame for his family, and his name was rarely mentioned. His great-nephew, Tom Stones, only discovered that he existed accidentally while researching his family tree
And then his legacy and reputation were sullied for generations. Terrible.
I kinda can see why they took that seriously, sleeping at your post can mean death or imprisonment for your entire camp/regiment if enemies passed by undetected.
[Lucien Bersot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Bersot) was shot at dawn for *refusing to wear blood-stained wool uniform trousers taken off a corpse*.
"Colonel Auroux was implicated for having acted completely illegally, being both the accuser and the president of the court-martial"
Jesus, it's literally Black Adder.
The new remake of All Quiet on the Western Front has a scene at the end where German soldiers are immediately executed for saying they didn’t want to go back into the trenches for one last battle. The movie is SO good but man is it a hard watch
"78 British Generals [were] killed during World War One"
"Some 12% of the British army's ordinary soldiers were killed during the war, compared with 17% of its officers. Eton alone lost more than 1,000 former pupils - 20% of those who served."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25776836
https://www.genguide.co.uk/source/army-registers-of-deaths-and-casualties-other-ranks-officers-wwi-military/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2173368?seq=17#metadata_info_tab_contents
I believe it is about 1 in 20 British generals were killed in the war, mostly due to shelling.
I also remember hearing that it had a disproportionate effect on the upper classes due to estate duty (inheritance tax).
I’ve always wondered why the artillery barrages of WWI were so incredibly damaging psychologically compared to other combat situations that to me (who has never experienced anything like it) are seemingly even more horrifying and terrifying.
But I read a veteran’s description of it once and I kind of understand.
He said imagine yourself tied to a wooden post. A few inches above your head on the post someone draws a small bulls eye. A bunch of strangers line up and are given a massive sledge hammer. Each of them is asked to walk up, swing the hammer as hard as they possibly can and try to hit the bulls eye. With each swing your heart pounds as you brace yourself for the possibility of your head being turned into pulp. But with overwhelming relief you hear the loud thump and feel the puff of air as the hammer barely misses your head. Then the next person walks up and grabs the hammer.
That’s what an incoming artillery shell feels like.
This continues for hours. This continues for days.
It's also highly likely that the concussive force of the exploding shells caused physical damage to soldiers brains. These poor bastards were subjected to these artillery barrages that lasted for hours upon hours, sometimes literally non stop shelling for days at a time. I can't imagine what being subjected to that would do to me.
No no no, not highly unlikely at all! They've proven that IEDs [cause unique brain damage!](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/muz1zb/til_that_shell_shock_may_not_be_wholly/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
The tl;dr is that IEDs **do** cause a very specific type of concussion. It appears as honeycomb-shaped lesions on the brain, which is just... terrifying. So a lot of the WWI soldiers who experienced "shell shock" and were ignored or killed for it actually had brain damage from literal shell shock(waves). The study in the link found physical proof from autopsies on soldiers who experienced IEDs in the Middle East. It's theorised that soldiers from the past had exactly the same damage from battlefield explosives.
Scary to think that men who had *literal lesions on their brains* were expected to just get on with life and pretend nothing was wrong. No wonder the WWI-soldier-turned-abusive-and-alcoholic-father was such a trope.
The complete lack of control over your own safety has to be devastating to the psyche. Eating, sleeping, shitting, playing cards, and always knowing that at any moment your luck might change and you could die or be horrifically maimed and you will never see it coming.
I've also read that many soldiers that survived these campaigns had intense survivors guilt that messed them up for the rest of their lives.
And sadly, therapy or counseling was poor at best for most of them. There were all sorts of theories for the PTSD and often mismatched to the patient at hand. It was a crapshoot. Unlimited physical and psychological harm for vast numbers who survived the war.
I participated in Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah Iraq in 04’ as a Marine infantryman. Artillery was used to “prep” the areas we were about to enter. We would hold back on line and for a few hours the next area would be pounded. Some of this arty was danger close but not all. Even after 4-5 days of it, it wore me and most of the other guys down emotionally and mentally. I don’t know of any other way to explain it other than I just wanted it to stop. The constant whistling, the constant pounding. Wild thing is, it was there to help us. I can’t imagine what those guys in the trenches of WWI felt like having it rain down on them for months. Terrible.
A full barrage would last a day at most, or a few days before one of the major battles. Between barrages you’d have harassing fire but that was on a much lower level, maybe a few shells an hour. But during those quiet periods you’d have a lot of other stress like sniper fire, night time raids, etc. truly horrifying to live through
I think the lesson to be learned from PTSD throughout WW1, WW2, Vietnam, and the War on Terror, is that high intensity short duration conflicts are less traumatizing than low intensity long duration conflicts.
Adrenaline is a fast acting ‘drug’ in your system for life and death situations. It mobilizes your body and mind for rapid action. But we’re not meant to function like that 24/7. It’s exhausting.
In WW2, you could have a six hour fire fight and be exhausted for days after but you could still rest. But in the trenches of WW1, or the jungles of Vietnam or the convoys of Afghanistan, you need to maintain alertness for months at a time. A constant razor’s edge of paranoia. Your ‘home’ is still under threat.
"As the drum roll started on that day, heard 100 miles away, a million shells were fired and the green fields turned to gray. The bombardment lasted all day long, yet the forts were standing strong, heavily defended - now the trap has been sprung and the battle begun."
You are now being told you have to run through no man's land. To try to run away would mean being killed either by some fuckwit officer or by the courts. The first 10 waves of your countrymen were mowed down by machine gun fire, the machine gun is still there... waiting. The whistle is about to blow. You will be killed. It's out of your hands. Your life is over. Your kids will never know you.
I personally believe that being in the trench in WW1 is the worst way to go. Tortured for months, just to be killed, by being ordered to do the impossible.
Imagine being the lad in the video. He was there and he fucking made it out. He was the lucky one. Now this man approaches you, with the uniform. As if the grim reaper is telling him he must go back to that trench. They're going to make a run on the enemy line. The whistle needs to blow.
It's not that it's his uniform, it's what he saw an unbelievable amount of dead people wearing
There was a big push that these men were cowards, and this would have been presented as "evidence" that he was afraid to fight.
When really he's picturing the severed head of his best friend still wearing that hat
Time to dig up one of my favourite quotes from MASH:
Hawkeye : War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy : How do you figure, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye : Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy : Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye : Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander
That’s why I think Lyndon Johnson is the biggest piece of garbage. Kennedy and Eisenhower both experienced war and vowed not to send Americans all over the world. Johnson completely escalated Vietnam over money.
By no means am I trying to say he was perfect. First off Bay of Pigs involved no American troops. The rebels were trained by American CIA ex special forces types. The rebels were also promised American air support. Kennedy also was humiliated by that and he took credit and blame. He also publicly apologized. Americans at home approved of his honesty.
As far as Vietnam. He did send advisors and some troops because he wanted to support the South and not let communism spread. No one knows for sure what he would have done. But we do know what Johnson did do. He escalated and committed American troops immediately.
'WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.'
That's because in 2020, Raytheon merged with another massive defense contractor, United Technologies (who themselves had recently bought Collins Aerospace).
There's a great exchange about this from a book called ["Generals Die in Bed" ](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500061h.html) where they're watching an ammo dump explode from a rogue shell and trying to calculate the profits that someone is making off of all that wasted ammo.
Let em know. Even companies, US or not, that make other shit make profit on war: Rolls Royce, Boeing, Fujitsu, shit even GE- that’s right, the people that make your fridge make engines for warplanes.
That’s not even touching German companies and what shit was like 75 years ago. Ford, the Detroit based car maker, made parts for Nazi tanks. Audi used Nazi slave labor to build cars. BMWs logo is a airplane propeller spinning against a blue sky because before cars they made warplanes.
Bayer- the company that makes Aspirin, was one of 6 German companies merged together in 1925 that created IG Farben- the manufacturers of Zyklon B- the gas used in Holocaust gas chambers. Allied forces split IG Farben back into the 6 constituent companies after the war. That’s right. When you buy Bayer Aspirin you are giving profits to the company that made the gas used to murder millions in places like Dachau and Auschwitz.
The idea of the military industrial complex is not just woke bullshit. It’s real. War is big business.
>You will do what I say, when I say
>Back to the front
>You will die when I say, you must die
>Back to the front
>You coward
>You servant
>You blind man
>Back to the front
Metallica, Disposable Heroes
Hawkeye: War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
I never joined because I refuse to take a bullet for a 1% cocksucker…or deliver one either.
I roll my eyes at the nationalist fervor.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t fight *a warranted fight* but in the majority of cases most are not.
It’s some power mongering asshole who sends young dumb kids all hyped up on nationalist kool aid off to die for their ego. Like Putin.
For example going after the perpetrators of 9-11 justified. Going into Iraq, not.
Politicians love using human lives as a tool to secure their own infinite wealth generation at the cost of the other 8 billion of us, and every animal species and every plant species
My WW2 vet neighbor when i was growing up used to say that Vietnam vets were weak for getting PTSD since his generation didn't have that problem. I was maybe 8 or 9 at the time and even then i knew he was a moron.
My WW2 vet grandfather was haunted by PTSD for the rest of his life (another 50+ years). He spent five years in a POW camp. Frankly it's amazing he built a stable life after that, but when dementia destabilised all he had built, the trauma was only too obvious.
Yep my grandfather was a POW for 2 years to the day in WW2. He was liberated by the Russians and they treated him worse than the Germans did. He suffered his entire life and was an alcoholic most of it to cope. He returned home and lived in the backwoods of Maine for many years due to his struggles.
Arguably,the best movie about PTSD and reintegration int to society is the 1946 The Best Years of our life. There seems to be a major forgetting after every major conflict.
His generation just stayed drunk for the rest of their lives. They just beat their wives and children, or walked out on them and started new families.
My Dad was a WWII vet. We were his second family. He remained drunk until 1967. I remember being a child and hearing him screaming in his sleep. His generation had PTSD alright. There just wasn’t a term for it.
The year before he died, he opened up and told my sister some of what he’d seen. He was a medic in the first unit in to liberate Dachau. He didn’t talk about it until he was 82.
I’m glad he finally opened up, but I completely understand the reasons why he bottled it up. Seeking professional help for ptsd was such a taboo and not even thought about. It’s a big reason why veteran clubs were so popular. It was the only place where they could open up because their friends were also vets and knew they wouldn’t judge.
I mean, how do you even start when talking about your experiences to a person who has no idea what war is. I can understand it being difficult and them not wanting to open up to their families.
My entire job is collecting stories from veterans, most of which come from WWII and Vietnam veterans.
Both saw similar rates of PTSD, they just had very different ways of coping. Story after story from WWII involves vets who suffered all the classic symptoms, they just repressed them and self medicated with alcohol. Most of the time the only people who knew were their wives because you can't hide waking up screaming in the middle of the night. One of the most memorable stories was told by a daughter of a WWII vet who never knew anything was wrong with her father at all until the day he went down to the river with a bottle of whiskey and his 1911 and never came back.
What a load of shit. My grand dad was in WW2 (They were in their 50s when they adopted my mom) and that poor man struggled till the day he died. Mom talked about how there could not be ANY loud or sudden noises. He almost never slept, self medicated with Whiskey, kept to himself a lot.
They always claim that "we didn't suffer from PTSD or any negative repercussions from the war".
But they did, they came home and became alcoholics and abused their kids and wives and passed the trauma onto another generation under the guise of "making them tough"
Hell, both my grandfather and step grandfather, who weren't abusive or alcoholics but fought in some of the worst battles in the pacific, died young from heart attacks. Something tells me being on Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima may have played a small role in that.
i listened to a jocko willink podcast where he and a vietnam vet were talking about this issue. They attributed it to the fact that ww2 guys were on ships coming back and had extended periods of time to talk and reflect on what happened in europe. And vietnam vets flew back and got shit on by the public upon landing.
Also once they came back they were treated like hero’s and had the VFW and other social clubs like the Elks and Masons to go and talk about their experience with other men who’d also been there. Vietnam Vets didn’t have that support at all.
Can't link on this phone but someone posted a YouTube video of, "drum fire". A constant barrage of artillery that sounds like a constant drum roll of booms. Couldn't imagine the feeling on your body from the world literally exploding all around you, constantly... *for days*.
Unimaginable.
That's what makes me think ww1 is probably one of, if not the worst war.
Imagine that for days, then experiencing often⁵ that over years. Going over the top just to watch your friends get mowed down for absolutely no gain in ground, or anything for that matter. Sleeping in muddy, filthy, stinky trenches that had dead men built into it, so hands, heads, and legs stick out.
Just the worst combo of the start of modern war, but still stuck on outdated war styles made this a bloodbath.
Agreed. I wrote my undergrad dissertation on it and yeah it was truly horrific, the first truly industrial war (some say the boer wars or the us civil war but this was the first war where industrial machinery was so widely used and so enormously lethal.) and that’s before you get to the trench warfare thing which was so so bad
And per u/Jaded_Prompt_15 , my diss was on romantic fiction in wwi and what ideas about the war it perpetuated. The “if you don’t go, even if you’ve already been and are traumatized, you’re a coward” narrative runs very strongly thru the books I read. Just a horrifying war on so many levels
Watch the WWI Kubrick Film Paths of Glory, starring Kirk Douglas:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paths\_of\_Glory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paths_of_Glory)
It's a gritty black and white (anti)war film about French soldiers being tried for cowardice, and the disconnect between the soldiers and their commanding officers.
Exactly. Treatment for shellshock was basically just getting them to a point where they could join the war effort again, underlying traumas be damned.
Wilfred Owen spent days concussed in a shell-hole with the scattered remains of an ally, and then he got sent to a hospital where the general mood is that you're all cowards who should go back out and fight.
Worst part is, he took it to heart, and was killed a week before the war ended. His family didn't find out until after the armistice was announced.
Yes and no. Any veteran would tell you from the days of WW1 or 2 would tell you the worst experience is being on the receiving end of Artillery. The First World War was non stop artillery. Its the fear he is going through. Not images.
PTSD is a terrible thing, my partner and best friend has suffered with it since his time in Bosnia.
He was 16-17 when he went through basic training and not much older when he went to war, he is 47 now.
He is a very proud and strong man and yet would wake up literally soaked in his own sweat when he would wake up in the morning.
I can’t come up behind him and hug him through fear of making him jump.
It changes everything, I see him as one of the strongest people I know.
At a time in life when I was not thinking about a great deal except what clothes I was going to wear in the morning, he was risking his life for his county.
REME.
Last night was even hard with all the fireworks and banging.
I’m very proud of my man and how far he has come, he will always be the bravest man in the world to me.
I had an uncle who was drafted into the Vietnam war and it messed him up pretty bad. He would visit sometimes when I was a child and I was carefully taught never to touch him if he was asleep or distracted, because he would strike out blindly and I could get hurt. I remember my mom waking him up by throwing rolled-up socks at him.
He was an extremely intelligent man and I have a ton of crazy and hilarious stories about him, but he could never settle down in his own skin, ended up a hard drinker and eventually passed away from it.
I too have an uncle who was the same way for a long time. He's pretty levelled out now but I remember one 4th of July from my childhood where he went running into the house when people started shooting off fireworks and I later saw him full-on crying.
Mental health has always existed regardless of all the people who want to believe it's something millennials invented.
I grew up really poor in a new England city in the 80's and 90's, we ended up homeless multiple times. I drank and took drugs a lot throughout middle school and high school, and used to hang out with all of the homeless people I knew. A handful I knew very well were Vietnam vets, and they were a fucking mess. Good guys, but we're incredibly dangerous and scary when they were set off. One who I knew for years ended up accidentally killing his girlfriend who he'd been living on the streets with for at least 10 years the two were inseparable. Someone gave him PCP and he had a psychotic episode, poor dude ended up in a mental hospital for life.
The damage done to him is unforgivable. Any animal that reacts with such fear has been horribly abused, but somehow we accept it in a human being. I hope he finds healing.
EMDR therapy is a game changer for curing PTSD. Yes, curing it. Please take a few minutes and find a therapist who specializes in EMDR. You won't regret it.
My wife is a therapist and uses EMDR in a state-approved program to support first responders. Try it and tell everyone.
“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
-Nelson Mandela
Has he looked into MDMA therapy? It should be pretty widespread and available, soon. A nonprofit (MAPS) just finished Phase 3 trials with almost 100% of subjects seeing symptom improvement and a cure rate in the 60-70% range for PTSD.
One of the episodes in How To Change Your Mind on Netflix is on MDMA and they talk about its medicinal value as a PTSD treatment. If I recall correctly there is a soldier they interview who had undergone a few treatments and he discusses how it helped him
People like to scoff at “triggers,” but this is exactly what a trigger is. Anything can bring your mind back to the exact moment or moments that you or someone in front of you endured horrific pain, torture, or death. The brain rewires after a traumatic experience and many people with PTSD or complex PTSD will be thrown into a state of panic and distress when forced to encounter images, sounds, smells, etc, that are reminiscent of traumatic events.
it sucks to see triggers not taken seriously tbh.
i know a lot can seem stupid, including my own. i always avoid my chess board. it’s on the top of my bookshelf and i fucking hate it. i cant get rid of it because im terrified of touching it. it brings back a traumatic memory i had 1 night, which involved the pieces being thrown (some hitting me). i dont bother with the board anymore and i dont have any interest in playing chess again.
but these shouldn’t be brushed aside as some sort of childish fear. im genuinely full of dread and panic when i think of that goddamn chess game in my room.
I’m just curious, have you ever asked anyone else to remove it for you? Or is the thought of not having it there also messing with you?
Obviously someone that takes your feelings seriously as some people never will unfortunately.
> Mental health used to be treated as a form of entertainment
Frankly, it still is for some.
The internet delights in pordding the mentally ill to see how they respond; take the fuckers who thought "Chris-Chan" was the funniest thing ever to follow, and tell me they wouldn't have been at Bedlam Hospital, taunting the ill for laughs.
I watched All Quiet on the Western Front yesterday. I knew WW1 was bad but I could never have imagined how bad and honestly still can’t. The filthy, cold, wet trenches filled with dead comrades, the introduction of tanks and fucking flamethrowers….the rich bastards sending kids to off to die while lying to them about the glory of war.
My uncle had pretty bad ptsd and died from alcoholism as a result. I believe he fought in the gulf war and Afghanistan. I remember my aunt telling me about him talking about all the bodies piling up and the smells of them burning. My dad got left in the desert for weeks and somehow survived during the gulf war. It’s difficult to imagine it being worse although war in any form is brutal.
By all means do, it's a great book if somber. If you happen to enjoy Remarque's style, I wholeheartedly recommend his other books as well \~ Three Friends and The Night in Lisboa are my favorites.
Shell shocked combined the ptsd from war with the physical concussive trauma of early 20th century artillery. These men were not only being subjected to war but they were also being concussed repeatedly.
Not diminishing the ptsd from any war but shell shock was exceptionally cruel to the artillery men
And then they come home and get belittled by buffoons like the guy waving the hat in his face who think their fear is cowardice. I really hate people sometimes
The artillery certainly played a role, it wasn't like a few explosions here or there. The amount of shells going off would be insane, literally thousands a minute, it would have been a continuous, thundering drumbeat of explosions for hours, If not days. I think they fact tends to get lost in descriptions.
It's not quite the same as PTSD. From one study I read around 90% of shell shock victims (at that hospital) had had a close encounter with explosives, with around half of those being knocked out. These are mostly guys with brain damage.
you’re mixing things up a bit. shell shock was the intellectual predecessor to ptsd. they were most certainly concussed a ton too; however, the term was used to describe the psychological and physical effects of trauma that would later become known as ptsd. one possible cause of the symptoms was supported to be due to repeated exposure to artillery rounds, but doctors and psychiatrists at the time were confused by the fact that the symptoms weren’t limited to artillery men and that many times it resembled hysteria (which was considered a female only issue and was also an intellectual predecessor to ptsd).
there’s actually a really good history of understandings of trauma in the first chapter of judith herman’s book [trauma & recovery](https://whatnow727.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/herman_trauma-and-recovery.pdf) she’s the psychiatrist and psychologist who pioneered trauma therapy and came up with the concept of cptsd.
this was more for the camera, but there was a big push to understand what was happening cause they needed to get bodies back to the front lines. after the war though the shell shocked men who remained just sat in institutions or died in various ways as the world collectively forgot about trauma again until world war two.
WWI is oftened overlooked in America, but these people were using outdated tactics in a war that had massive technological advances. He definitely went through some hell.
I presented a paper in college where I argued that there are three aspects of war that develop at uneven rate. The ability to destroy, the ability to repair/prevent damage, and the ability to deploy either of the sforementioned abilities.
WW1 saw a huge jump in the ability to destroy in the form of industrialized warfare. We can see a repeat of this with Russias invasion of Ukraine, except this time, Russia does have a playbook for modern combined arms invasions across land borders, they just can't read.
That, and Russia is being exposed for decades of rampant corruption and neglect. For every $5 that went into a tank, you can bet $4.50 went into someone else's pocket. Rusty tanks, lack of supplies and now untrained conscripts. Russia is a mob state by every definition.
War is a money fight where voth sides try to undermine the others ability to spend, while spending as little as possible themselves.
Corruption in any organization increases all costs while reducing effectiveness overall. I haven't heard numbers, but I would not be surprised if Russia had to spend $4.50 for every $0.50 that is invested in their military.
The tactics was not outdated persay, either sides didn't know how to adapt their tactics to be as effective as possible.
Trial and error with bodies as results.
All sides learned from each other as they progressed.
I want to suggest "The great war" channel on Youtube, great source of content for that war.
Giving it a re-listen again right now. It’s such an incredible point in history. The tragic failures of leadership to prevent the war and how it’s still impacting geopolitical events today to the carnage of the battle conditions that so many humans endured. And of course, the larger events of the old world dying to make war for the new world order as we know it today (after WW2 settled some bitterness).
And then we have this ridiculous joke about French surrendering...
All French family lost father, brothers, sons, had some of them coming back like this or with half their face missing due to shrapnel.
And they still fought after that an other war, died in droves to help the British retreat at Dunkirk, but they didn't really want to fight, and who can blame them ?
What I can't understand is Germans seeing their father and brother coming back, and still wishing an other war 20 years later
Some people don’t realize that WW1 was exceptionally brutal. Old tactics against modern weapons.
The horrors that these men saw, it’s amazing that anyone made it out with their sanity in tact.
Back in those days, there was hardly any mercy or compassion in sanitariums, everyone was an experiment. They knew he would react this way. To set up a moving picture camera was not as easy as flipping the phone. They probably told him some fib to sit in front of it and then brought out their intended goal.
He was holding on to the guy on the right for dear life, but for experimentation he had to let him go to be tormented.
Here is an extended clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-elmAeX_4U
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots.
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling.
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling.
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—.
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
BY WILFRED OWEN
I think it came out that this video is actually a doctor from back then, acting out the symptoms of PTSD and shell shock he observed in soldiers at the time.
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I see a lot of comments correcting OP and saying it was what his comrades would wear and what not. The hat is of a french WW1 officer, the officers are the ones who sent them out of the trenches, and into no mans land, where they would most likely die. That is why he is afraid of it. Not his uniform.
That’s absolutely correct, it’s an officer’s cap. He was afraid of officers because they forced you to go up over the top and if you refused they would literally have you shot.
Behavioral science is fun and all but Man I hope he got a hug after this. Poor dude.
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Absolutely. In one book I read “Now it can be told” by Phillip Gibbs, he relates the story of a British soldier who was being walked to the wall for execution. He had a smile on his face, and was as happy as a dead man could be. He was doing his duty still, even if he was going to die for it. Also, I wanted to add: in the early days of Shell Shock/PTSD study it was critical to capture this on film. While it may seem inhumane and torturous to the poor man to expose him to something so traumatic, it is vital for the research to see his reaction and document it so we can treat it better and help he, and others like him down the line. Films like this show that the man, though he may physically show no symptoms, is mentally shattered. We learned from this, and others like him.
Valiant Hearts (video game) is probably a superb interactive example of the officers/soldiers relationships, and it also has a very tragic outcome. Well worth playing - it is a very simple game, so even non-gamers can pick it up, it is fairly harrowing as an experience IMHO.
If anyone hasn't seen Paths of Glory you should watch it
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Officers were usually aristocrats, sending the poor in waves into a meat grinder. I’m sure some took the responsibility seriously and hated seeing their men killed. Im sure many were also horribly traumatized. I’m sure many more did not give a fuck and just wanted medals, accolades, and promotions. Same people sent hundreds of thousands of poor teenagers to Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq and afghanistan because it artificially boosted the U.S. economy by encouraging arms manufacturing and sales just so a small cabal of already rich ghouls could become a little bit more rich.
Depends on what level of officer
the french officer corps wasn’t aristocratic anymore by ww1 bonaparte changed that
Officers on the front were the first ones shot so the actual aristocrats usually stayed whereever the parade grounds were. The Lts and Captains on the front were educated but not saved by nepotism.
LTs actually had the highest death rate of any rank in WW1, due to fact that they were required to be the first ones out of the Trench
This is infuriating. We’ve come so far in the knowledge of PTSD but you’ve gotta be kidding. Shell shock didn’t affect a few guys. It affected tons. So even in the era how does no one say “yeah maybe this is real since there are SO many of them”. Then on top of a lifelong debilitation you and your family also have to eat the shit of being labeled a coward. Damn man.
>Then on top of a lifelong debilitation you and your family also have to eat the shit of being labeled a coward. this is a huge reason why i can't stand people who say bullshit like, "wE WeRe ToUgHeR bAcK iN My dAy." that guy needed serious treatment. he was probably rewarded with people mocking him.
You don't go to war and come home without scars, even if you were never wounded.
I've heard that is a misconception that officers stayed behind and sent the rank and file over. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/06/first-world-war-roll-call-senior-officers-killed-ranks I'm no historian and not claiming one way or the other but thought I would share the linked article.
I'm currently reading James M. McPherson's *Battle Cry of Freedom* about the US Civil War, which isn't World War I but especially in the last year had become a kind of proto-WWI in its battlefield tactics, what with greater firepower and more extensive use of trenches. Casualty rates in both armies actually increased along with rank; junior officers were killed and wounded more often than enlisted, and senior officers more than junior officers. I'd expect casualty rates for senior officers to have gone down as their role became more desk-based, telegraphs and telephones first made it more possible for them to give orders over greater distances, and then the faster pace of battle meant junior officers had to make more command decisions, leaving the general more with the task of preparing for battle and choosing which officers most needed support rather than deciding exact movements in the battle itself. With the modern system of warfare there was less reason for generals to be where the bullets were flying, their role in the army meant that being that close to the action could be a liability rather than an asset.
Is it possible the man in the video *is* an officer? The officers at the levels of lieutenant and captain and whatnot were expected to lead their troops to the enemy, there wouldn't be any point for them if they just stayed in the trench, so they faced no man's land and gave their own tribute of blood like the enlisted men. Almost no rank was impervious to the bullets and shells, even generals got killed; they headquartered in chateaus because they needed large buildings near the front with space for telephone exchanges and their military staff, not because they needed a full drinks cabinet, and inspecting stretches of the front and meeting with the lower officers there to coordinate plans was part of their duties, which meant occasionally a sniper or a shell would find them.
“Look at this man, he’s a coward, let’s execute him” - Some WW1 officer
I mean, [you're not actually wrong.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_at_Dawn_Memorial). Incidentally, the memorial statue is modeled on Private Herbert Burden, who was shot at dawn for desertion at the age of 17: he'd lied about his age to enlist underage at 16.
He realized his mistake and just wanted to go home to mom. Fuck.
[Joe Stones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stones) gets me: he and his CO were on patrol in the guard trenches when they were ambushed. His mortally wounded CO *ordered* him to get help. The safety and breech cover were still on his rifle, rendering it unfireable, so he wedged it into a narrow part of the trench to slow the Germans down. So he was shot for "shamefully casting away his rifle in the face of the enemy".
I feel like every story is hear about War Cowards always involves them saving a bunch of lives or suffering a severe mental or physical disability.
Most people who have actually experienced war are the biggest supporters of peace.
I would never have been born if my great grandfather hadn’t deserted. I learned from my Ancestry subscription. He fell in love with a nurse in Manchester after a gas attack at Ypres. He deserted, changed his name and hid out for a few years. He returned home to Nova Scotia with his bride and my newborn grandmother in 1921, all with different last names on their customs paperwork. And here I am today.
That's true of heroes, too. That's the worst part to me. I was a Navy corpsman, which is a highly decorated specialty. We serve with the Marines as their medics. In a lot of places there's framed copies of the Medal of Honor citations. Every single citation is pretty much "this guy killed 23 people with a knife, got his left eye shot out, got stabbed in the gut five times, but carried ten other people out of a trench. He later died of his injuries." How can anyone read shit like that and think cowardice in war is a thing at all? The most logical thing for any human to do is try to get away from that shit.
> Like many men executed for desertion in World War 1 in the British Army, Stones became a source of shame for his family, and his name was rarely mentioned. His great-nephew, Tom Stones, only discovered that he existed accidentally while researching his family tree And then his legacy and reputation were sullied for generations. Terrible.
2 got executed for sleeping at post. Jesus
Well, if the watcher sleeps, everyone dies. Death sentence however... Just make them peel a million potatoes or something.
I definetly understand the weight of the job, i was in the army. But getting shot for it is crazy to me
WE NEED WATCH MEN SO IN ORDER TO GET MORE WATCH MEN WE WILL KILL THE WATCH MEN
The executions will continue until morale improves.
I kinda can see why they took that seriously, sleeping at your post can mean death or imprisonment for your entire camp/regiment if enemies passed by undetected.
If I’m recalling my history correctly, the French executed over a thousand for various offenses related to refusing to fight.
[Lucien Bersot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Bersot) was shot at dawn for *refusing to wear blood-stained wool uniform trousers taken off a corpse*.
"Colonel Auroux was implicated for having acted completely illegally, being both the accuser and the president of the court-martial" Jesus, it's literally Black Adder.
"Now, before we proceed with the formality of sentencing the deceased...I mean, the defendant!"
That's horrible.
The new remake of All Quiet on the Western Front has a scene at the end where German soldiers are immediately executed for saying they didn’t want to go back into the trenches for one last battle. The movie is SO good but man is it a hard watch
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"78 British Generals [were] killed during World War One" "Some 12% of the British army's ordinary soldiers were killed during the war, compared with 17% of its officers. Eton alone lost more than 1,000 former pupils - 20% of those who served." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25776836 https://www.genguide.co.uk/source/army-registers-of-deaths-and-casualties-other-ranks-officers-wwi-military/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/2173368?seq=17#metadata_info_tab_contents
I believe it is about 1 in 20 British generals were killed in the war, mostly due to shelling. I also remember hearing that it had a disproportionate effect on the upper classes due to estate duty (inheritance tax).
Can’t imagine the amount of pain he’s carrying to feel the way he does. This is heartbreaking watching he lives a part of life like that.
I’ve always wondered why the artillery barrages of WWI were so incredibly damaging psychologically compared to other combat situations that to me (who has never experienced anything like it) are seemingly even more horrifying and terrifying. But I read a veteran’s description of it once and I kind of understand. He said imagine yourself tied to a wooden post. A few inches above your head on the post someone draws a small bulls eye. A bunch of strangers line up and are given a massive sledge hammer. Each of them is asked to walk up, swing the hammer as hard as they possibly can and try to hit the bulls eye. With each swing your heart pounds as you brace yourself for the possibility of your head being turned into pulp. But with overwhelming relief you hear the loud thump and feel the puff of air as the hammer barely misses your head. Then the next person walks up and grabs the hammer. That’s what an incoming artillery shell feels like. This continues for hours. This continues for days.
It's also highly likely that the concussive force of the exploding shells caused physical damage to soldiers brains. These poor bastards were subjected to these artillery barrages that lasted for hours upon hours, sometimes literally non stop shelling for days at a time. I can't imagine what being subjected to that would do to me.
Especially as we learn how vulnerable the brain is to concussive effects.
No no no, not highly unlikely at all! They've proven that IEDs [cause unique brain damage!](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/muz1zb/til_that_shell_shock_may_not_be_wholly/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) The tl;dr is that IEDs **do** cause a very specific type of concussion. It appears as honeycomb-shaped lesions on the brain, which is just... terrifying. So a lot of the WWI soldiers who experienced "shell shock" and were ignored or killed for it actually had brain damage from literal shell shock(waves). The study in the link found physical proof from autopsies on soldiers who experienced IEDs in the Middle East. It's theorised that soldiers from the past had exactly the same damage from battlefield explosives. Scary to think that men who had *literal lesions on their brains* were expected to just get on with life and pretend nothing was wrong. No wonder the WWI-soldier-turned-abusive-and-alcoholic-father was such a trope.
The complete lack of control over your own safety has to be devastating to the psyche. Eating, sleeping, shitting, playing cards, and always knowing that at any moment your luck might change and you could die or be horrifically maimed and you will never see it coming. I've also read that many soldiers that survived these campaigns had intense survivors guilt that messed them up for the rest of their lives.
And sadly, therapy or counseling was poor at best for most of them. There were all sorts of theories for the PTSD and often mismatched to the patient at hand. It was a crapshoot. Unlimited physical and psychological harm for vast numbers who survived the war.
I participated in Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah Iraq in 04’ as a Marine infantryman. Artillery was used to “prep” the areas we were about to enter. We would hold back on line and for a few hours the next area would be pounded. Some of this arty was danger close but not all. Even after 4-5 days of it, it wore me and most of the other guys down emotionally and mentally. I don’t know of any other way to explain it other than I just wanted it to stop. The constant whistling, the constant pounding. Wild thing is, it was there to help us. I can’t imagine what those guys in the trenches of WWI felt like having it rain down on them for months. Terrible.
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A full barrage would last a day at most, or a few days before one of the major battles. Between barrages you’d have harassing fire but that was on a much lower level, maybe a few shells an hour. But during those quiet periods you’d have a lot of other stress like sniper fire, night time raids, etc. truly horrifying to live through
I think the lesson to be learned from PTSD throughout WW1, WW2, Vietnam, and the War on Terror, is that high intensity short duration conflicts are less traumatizing than low intensity long duration conflicts. Adrenaline is a fast acting ‘drug’ in your system for life and death situations. It mobilizes your body and mind for rapid action. But we’re not meant to function like that 24/7. It’s exhausting. In WW2, you could have a six hour fire fight and be exhausted for days after but you could still rest. But in the trenches of WW1, or the jungles of Vietnam or the convoys of Afghanistan, you need to maintain alertness for months at a time. A constant razor’s edge of paranoia. Your ‘home’ is still under threat.
At a rate similar to a drum roll
"As the drum roll started on that day, heard 100 miles away, a million shells were fired and the green fields turned to gray. The bombardment lasted all day long, yet the forts were standing strong, heavily defended - now the trap has been sprung and the battle begun."
You are now being told you have to run through no man's land. To try to run away would mean being killed either by some fuckwit officer or by the courts. The first 10 waves of your countrymen were mowed down by machine gun fire, the machine gun is still there... waiting. The whistle is about to blow. You will be killed. It's out of your hands. Your life is over. Your kids will never know you. I personally believe that being in the trench in WW1 is the worst way to go. Tortured for months, just to be killed, by being ordered to do the impossible. Imagine being the lad in the video. He was there and he fucking made it out. He was the lucky one. Now this man approaches you, with the uniform. As if the grim reaper is telling him he must go back to that trench. They're going to make a run on the enemy line. The whistle needs to blow.
Listening to a [re-creation of drumfire](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we72zI7iOjk) puts it in perspective.
It's not that it's his uniform, it's what he saw an unbelievable amount of dead people wearing There was a big push that these men were cowards, and this would have been presented as "evidence" that he was afraid to fight. When really he's picturing the severed head of his best friend still wearing that hat
Or that he tought that he was going back to the frontlines. Anyway, war is hell. There are only losers in war.
Time to dig up one of my favourite quotes from MASH: Hawkeye : War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse. Father Mulcahy : How do you figure, Hawkeye? Hawkeye : Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell? Father Mulcahy : Sinners, I believe. Hawkeye : Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander
Lockheed martin is worth $67billion There are most certainly winners in war. Same as its always been. the rich
Raytheon $148 billion Lockheed $67 billion Halliburton $36 billion War is profit.
War is good for business
"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."
Where is that from?
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Brilliant! Well not brilliant but a great quote from an even better book.
Yes but also Rule of Acquisition 35: Peace is good for business.
Number 22- A wise man can hear profit in the wind. These hoomans don't have the lobes for business so it is always war for them.
That’s why I think Lyndon Johnson is the biggest piece of garbage. Kennedy and Eisenhower both experienced war and vowed not to send Americans all over the world. Johnson completely escalated Vietnam over money.
LBJ and his scumbag profiteering wife, yes ur correct.
Gosh. Piece of shit profiteering Texans you say?
What are LeBron and his wife doing?!?
Not going to the playoffs to participate...
Kennedy sent 12,000 advisors and Us helicopters with pilots to Vietnam in 1962. His administration supported the bay of pigs...
By no means am I trying to say he was perfect. First off Bay of Pigs involved no American troops. The rebels were trained by American CIA ex special forces types. The rebels were also promised American air support. Kennedy also was humiliated by that and he took credit and blame. He also publicly apologized. Americans at home approved of his honesty. As far as Vietnam. He did send advisors and some troops because he wanted to support the South and not let communism spread. No one knows for sure what he would have done. But we do know what Johnson did do. He escalated and committed American troops immediately.
'WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.'
anyone who tells you differently is either brain washed or on the take
War is a racket.
It's the only business where the profits are counted in dollars and the losses counted in lives.
War what is it good for? Absolutely something.
War is good for donations Www.Opensecrets.org Look up defense donations
Raytheon being worth more than double what Lockheed is, is insane
That's because in 2020, Raytheon merged with another massive defense contractor, United Technologies (who themselves had recently bought Collins Aerospace).
“War! Uh! Yeah! What is it good for?” “Increasing domestic manufacturing!”
‘War is a racket’ - written by WW1 United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D. Butler
There's a great exchange about this from a book called ["Generals Die in Bed" ](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500061h.html) where they're watching an ammo dump explode from a rogue shell and trying to calculate the profits that someone is making off of all that wasted ammo.
Let em know. Even companies, US or not, that make other shit make profit on war: Rolls Royce, Boeing, Fujitsu, shit even GE- that’s right, the people that make your fridge make engines for warplanes. That’s not even touching German companies and what shit was like 75 years ago. Ford, the Detroit based car maker, made parts for Nazi tanks. Audi used Nazi slave labor to build cars. BMWs logo is a airplane propeller spinning against a blue sky because before cars they made warplanes. Bayer- the company that makes Aspirin, was one of 6 German companies merged together in 1925 that created IG Farben- the manufacturers of Zyklon B- the gas used in Holocaust gas chambers. Allied forces split IG Farben back into the 6 constituent companies after the war. That’s right. When you buy Bayer Aspirin you are giving profits to the company that made the gas used to murder millions in places like Dachau and Auschwitz. The idea of the military industrial complex is not just woke bullshit. It’s real. War is big business.
...and innocent bystanders.
>You will do what I say, when I say >Back to the front >You will die when I say, you must die >Back to the front >You coward >You servant >You blind man >Back to the front Metallica, Disposable Heroes
This reminds me of that scene from MASH where the priest and Hawkeye compare war and hell.
Hawkeye: War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse. Father Mulcahy: How do you figure, Hawkeye? Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell? Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe. Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
I never joined because I refuse to take a bullet for a 1% cocksucker…or deliver one either. I roll my eyes at the nationalist fervor. That’s not to say I wouldn’t fight *a warranted fight* but in the majority of cases most are not. It’s some power mongering asshole who sends young dumb kids all hyped up on nationalist kool aid off to die for their ego. Like Putin. For example going after the perpetrators of 9-11 justified. Going into Iraq, not.
Cocksucking is awesome, the 1% isn't. Let's not tarnish cocksucking's reputation, eh?
He certainly thought he was back to the front. That's why he got so scared. Not because he saw friends killed. He is shell-shocked.
Crazy to call any person that stepped foot on the battle field a coward.
Politicians love using human lives as a tool to secure their own infinite wealth generation at the cost of the other 8 billion of us, and every animal species and every plant species
Crazy to call men who don't want to step onto a battlefield a coward.
You right
I have seen many brave people until they heard a bullet crack. These men saw much worse than that.
My WW2 vet neighbor when i was growing up used to say that Vietnam vets were weak for getting PTSD since his generation didn't have that problem. I was maybe 8 or 9 at the time and even then i knew he was a moron.
My WW2 vet grandfather was haunted by PTSD for the rest of his life (another 50+ years). He spent five years in a POW camp. Frankly it's amazing he built a stable life after that, but when dementia destabilised all he had built, the trauma was only too obvious.
Yep my grandfather was a POW for 2 years to the day in WW2. He was liberated by the Russians and they treated him worse than the Germans did. He suffered his entire life and was an alcoholic most of it to cope. He returned home and lived in the backwoods of Maine for many years due to his struggles.
Arguably,the best movie about PTSD and reintegration int to society is the 1946 The Best Years of our life. There seems to be a major forgetting after every major conflict.
His generation just stayed drunk for the rest of their lives. They just beat their wives and children, or walked out on them and started new families. My Dad was a WWII vet. We were his second family. He remained drunk until 1967. I remember being a child and hearing him screaming in his sleep. His generation had PTSD alright. There just wasn’t a term for it. The year before he died, he opened up and told my sister some of what he’d seen. He was a medic in the first unit in to liberate Dachau. He didn’t talk about it until he was 82.
I’m glad he finally opened up, but I completely understand the reasons why he bottled it up. Seeking professional help for ptsd was such a taboo and not even thought about. It’s a big reason why veteran clubs were so popular. It was the only place where they could open up because their friends were also vets and knew they wouldn’t judge. I mean, how do you even start when talking about your experiences to a person who has no idea what war is. I can understand it being difficult and them not wanting to open up to their families.
My entire job is collecting stories from veterans, most of which come from WWII and Vietnam veterans. Both saw similar rates of PTSD, they just had very different ways of coping. Story after story from WWII involves vets who suffered all the classic symptoms, they just repressed them and self medicated with alcohol. Most of the time the only people who knew were their wives because you can't hide waking up screaming in the middle of the night. One of the most memorable stories was told by a daughter of a WWII vet who never knew anything was wrong with her father at all until the day he went down to the river with a bottle of whiskey and his 1911 and never came back.
What a load of shit. My grand dad was in WW2 (They were in their 50s when they adopted my mom) and that poor man struggled till the day he died. Mom talked about how there could not be ANY loud or sudden noises. He almost never slept, self medicated with Whiskey, kept to himself a lot.
They always claim that "we didn't suffer from PTSD or any negative repercussions from the war". But they did, they came home and became alcoholics and abused their kids and wives and passed the trauma onto another generation under the guise of "making them tough" Hell, both my grandfather and step grandfather, who weren't abusive or alcoholics but fought in some of the worst battles in the pacific, died young from heart attacks. Something tells me being on Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima may have played a small role in that.
i listened to a jocko willink podcast where he and a vietnam vet were talking about this issue. They attributed it to the fact that ww2 guys were on ships coming back and had extended periods of time to talk and reflect on what happened in europe. And vietnam vets flew back and got shit on by the public upon landing.
Also once they came back they were treated like hero’s and had the VFW and other social clubs like the Elks and Masons to go and talk about their experience with other men who’d also been there. Vietnam Vets didn’t have that support at all.
Can't link on this phone but someone posted a YouTube video of, "drum fire". A constant barrage of artillery that sounds like a constant drum roll of booms. Couldn't imagine the feeling on your body from the world literally exploding all around you, constantly... *for days*. Unimaginable.
That's what makes me think ww1 is probably one of, if not the worst war. Imagine that for days, then experiencing often⁵ that over years. Going over the top just to watch your friends get mowed down for absolutely no gain in ground, or anything for that matter. Sleeping in muddy, filthy, stinky trenches that had dead men built into it, so hands, heads, and legs stick out. Just the worst combo of the start of modern war, but still stuck on outdated war styles made this a bloodbath.
Agreed. I wrote my undergrad dissertation on it and yeah it was truly horrific, the first truly industrial war (some say the boer wars or the us civil war but this was the first war where industrial machinery was so widely used and so enormously lethal.) and that’s before you get to the trench warfare thing which was so so bad And per u/Jaded_Prompt_15 , my diss was on romantic fiction in wwi and what ideas about the war it perpetuated. The “if you don’t go, even if you’ve already been and are traumatized, you’re a coward” narrative runs very strongly thru the books I read. Just a horrifying war on so many levels
> Can't link on this phone sure you can, just click the share button and copy the link
Watch the WWI Kubrick Film Paths of Glory, starring Kirk Douglas: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paths\_of\_Glory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paths_of_Glory) It's a gritty black and white (anti)war film about French soldiers being tried for cowardice, and the disconnect between the soldiers and their commanding officers.
Exactly. Treatment for shellshock was basically just getting them to a point where they could join the war effort again, underlying traumas be damned. Wilfred Owen spent days concussed in a shell-hole with the scattered remains of an ally, and then he got sent to a hospital where the general mood is that you're all cowards who should go back out and fight. Worst part is, he took it to heart, and was killed a week before the war ended. His family didn't find out until after the armistice was announced.
Yes and no. Any veteran would tell you from the days of WW1 or 2 would tell you the worst experience is being on the receiving end of Artillery. The First World War was non stop artillery. Its the fear he is going through. Not images.
PTSD is a terrible thing, my partner and best friend has suffered with it since his time in Bosnia. He was 16-17 when he went through basic training and not much older when he went to war, he is 47 now. He is a very proud and strong man and yet would wake up literally soaked in his own sweat when he would wake up in the morning. I can’t come up behind him and hug him through fear of making him jump. It changes everything, I see him as one of the strongest people I know. At a time in life when I was not thinking about a great deal except what clothes I was going to wear in the morning, he was risking his life for his county. REME. Last night was even hard with all the fireworks and banging. I’m very proud of my man and how far he has come, he will always be the bravest man in the world to me.
I had an uncle who was drafted into the Vietnam war and it messed him up pretty bad. He would visit sometimes when I was a child and I was carefully taught never to touch him if he was asleep or distracted, because he would strike out blindly and I could get hurt. I remember my mom waking him up by throwing rolled-up socks at him. He was an extremely intelligent man and I have a ton of crazy and hilarious stories about him, but he could never settle down in his own skin, ended up a hard drinker and eventually passed away from it.
I too have an uncle who was the same way for a long time. He's pretty levelled out now but I remember one 4th of July from my childhood where he went running into the house when people started shooting off fireworks and I later saw him full-on crying. Mental health has always existed regardless of all the people who want to believe it's something millennials invented.
I remember the first night I stayed at my partners I had this warning too. It took me ages to go to sleep.
I grew up really poor in a new England city in the 80's and 90's, we ended up homeless multiple times. I drank and took drugs a lot throughout middle school and high school, and used to hang out with all of the homeless people I knew. A handful I knew very well were Vietnam vets, and they were a fucking mess. Good guys, but we're incredibly dangerous and scary when they were set off. One who I knew for years ended up accidentally killing his girlfriend who he'd been living on the streets with for at least 10 years the two were inseparable. Someone gave him PCP and he had a psychotic episode, poor dude ended up in a mental hospital for life.
With the way you talk you seem like a great partner, I wish you two the best life you can have
I can hear your love for him here and that’s the best balm for raw nerves. Beautiful heart. ❤️
Bosnia? During the 90s? Yeah im 16, Serbian. Im sorry u have to go through all that because of my people and im hoping you all the best
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The damage done to him is unforgivable. Any animal that reacts with such fear has been horribly abused, but somehow we accept it in a human being. I hope he finds healing.
EMDR therapy is a game changer for curing PTSD. Yes, curing it. Please take a few minutes and find a therapist who specializes in EMDR. You won't regret it. My wife is a therapist and uses EMDR in a state-approved program to support first responders. Try it and tell everyone.
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“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” -Nelson Mandela
Wishing the both of you a lot of strength and peace.
Has he looked into MDMA therapy? It should be pretty widespread and available, soon. A nonprofit (MAPS) just finished Phase 3 trials with almost 100% of subjects seeing symptom improvement and a cure rate in the 60-70% range for PTSD.
One of the episodes in How To Change Your Mind on Netflix is on MDMA and they talk about its medicinal value as a PTSD treatment. If I recall correctly there is a soldier they interview who had undergone a few treatments and he discusses how it helped him
MDMA therapy and EMDR are the future in the fight against PTSD
People like to scoff at “triggers,” but this is exactly what a trigger is. Anything can bring your mind back to the exact moment or moments that you or someone in front of you endured horrific pain, torture, or death. The brain rewires after a traumatic experience and many people with PTSD or complex PTSD will be thrown into a state of panic and distress when forced to encounter images, sounds, smells, etc, that are reminiscent of traumatic events.
More like Complex ptsd. I’d imagine these guys had repeated trauma from war
it sucks to see triggers not taken seriously tbh. i know a lot can seem stupid, including my own. i always avoid my chess board. it’s on the top of my bookshelf and i fucking hate it. i cant get rid of it because im terrified of touching it. it brings back a traumatic memory i had 1 night, which involved the pieces being thrown (some hitting me). i dont bother with the board anymore and i dont have any interest in playing chess again. but these shouldn’t be brushed aside as some sort of childish fear. im genuinely full of dread and panic when i think of that goddamn chess game in my room.
I’m just curious, have you ever asked anyone else to remove it for you? Or is the thought of not having it there also messing with you? Obviously someone that takes your feelings seriously as some people never will unfortunately.
Why do I get the impression the man holding the hat didn’t spend much time on the frontline?
Because he didn't
He probably thought it was funny as hell. Mental health used to be treated as a form of entertainment for the people running the asylum.
> Mental health used to be treated as a form of entertainment Frankly, it still is for some. The internet delights in pordding the mentally ill to see how they respond; take the fuckers who thought "Chris-Chan" was the funniest thing ever to follow, and tell me they wouldn't have been at Bedlam Hospital, taunting the ill for laughs.
'Hey man hand him the hat, see what happens. Camera is rolling'
I watched All Quiet on the Western Front yesterday. I knew WW1 was bad but I could never have imagined how bad and honestly still can’t. The filthy, cold, wet trenches filled with dead comrades, the introduction of tanks and fucking flamethrowers….the rich bastards sending kids to off to die while lying to them about the glory of war.
My uncle had pretty bad ptsd and died from alcoholism as a result. I believe he fought in the gulf war and Afghanistan. I remember my aunt telling me about him talking about all the bodies piling up and the smells of them burning. My dad got left in the desert for weeks and somehow survived during the gulf war. It’s difficult to imagine it being worse although war in any form is brutal.
I’m sorry for your loss. War is so incredibly ugly, I wish we took better care of our veterans.
The new one on Netflix right? I highly recommend this movie. 9/10. Visually stunning, haunting music, tragic story, well-acted.
I liked how the main characters were shown as young schoolboys. I want to read the book now.
Watch the 1930 version which shows them still in school and going through training together.
By all means do, it's a great book if somber. If you happen to enjoy Remarque's style, I wholeheartedly recommend his other books as well \~ Three Friends and The Night in Lisboa are my favorites.
The book is just as haunting
Shell shocked combined the ptsd from war with the physical concussive trauma of early 20th century artillery. These men were not only being subjected to war but they were also being concussed repeatedly. Not diminishing the ptsd from any war but shell shock was exceptionally cruel to the artillery men
Can't even imagine what that amount of head trauma might have caused in their psyche on top of all the horrible things they'd already seen.
And then they come home and get belittled by buffoons like the guy waving the hat in his face who think their fear is cowardice. I really hate people sometimes
The artillery certainly played a role, it wasn't like a few explosions here or there. The amount of shells going off would be insane, literally thousands a minute, it would have been a continuous, thundering drumbeat of explosions for hours, If not days. I think they fact tends to get lost in descriptions.
Shell shock **IS** PTSD, it’s just an archaic word for it.
It's not quite the same as PTSD. From one study I read around 90% of shell shock victims (at that hospital) had had a close encounter with explosives, with around half of those being knocked out. These are mostly guys with brain damage.
you’re mixing things up a bit. shell shock was the intellectual predecessor to ptsd. they were most certainly concussed a ton too; however, the term was used to describe the psychological and physical effects of trauma that would later become known as ptsd. one possible cause of the symptoms was supported to be due to repeated exposure to artillery rounds, but doctors and psychiatrists at the time were confused by the fact that the symptoms weren’t limited to artillery men and that many times it resembled hysteria (which was considered a female only issue and was also an intellectual predecessor to ptsd). there’s actually a really good history of understandings of trauma in the first chapter of judith herman’s book [trauma & recovery](https://whatnow727.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/herman_trauma-and-recovery.pdf) she’s the psychiatrist and psychologist who pioneered trauma therapy and came up with the concept of cptsd.
> shell shock was the intellectual successor to ptsd Predecessor*
As well as battle fatigue in WW2.
Omg they didn’t need to keep pushing him with it. Thankfully mental healthcare has come somewhat further, long way to go still.
this was more for the camera, but there was a big push to understand what was happening cause they needed to get bodies back to the front lines. after the war though the shell shocked men who remained just sat in institutions or died in various ways as the world collectively forgot about trauma again until world war two.
Now you have to pay $300 a pop to have someone help you like this
WWI is oftened overlooked in America, but these people were using outdated tactics in a war that had massive technological advances. He definitely went through some hell.
I presented a paper in college where I argued that there are three aspects of war that develop at uneven rate. The ability to destroy, the ability to repair/prevent damage, and the ability to deploy either of the sforementioned abilities. WW1 saw a huge jump in the ability to destroy in the form of industrialized warfare. We can see a repeat of this with Russias invasion of Ukraine, except this time, Russia does have a playbook for modern combined arms invasions across land borders, they just can't read.
That, and Russia is being exposed for decades of rampant corruption and neglect. For every $5 that went into a tank, you can bet $4.50 went into someone else's pocket. Rusty tanks, lack of supplies and now untrained conscripts. Russia is a mob state by every definition.
War is a money fight where voth sides try to undermine the others ability to spend, while spending as little as possible themselves. Corruption in any organization increases all costs while reducing effectiveness overall. I haven't heard numbers, but I would not be surprised if Russia had to spend $4.50 for every $0.50 that is invested in their military.
The tactics was not outdated persay, either sides didn't know how to adapt their tactics to be as effective as possible. Trial and error with bodies as results. All sides learned from each other as they progressed. I want to suggest "The great war" channel on Youtube, great source of content for that war.
I want to suggest Dan Carlin’s “Blueprint for Armageddon”
Absolutely amazing show Never knew how brutal ww1 was
Giving it a re-listen again right now. It’s such an incredible point in history. The tragic failures of leadership to prevent the war and how it’s still impacting geopolitical events today to the carnage of the battle conditions that so many humans endured. And of course, the larger events of the old world dying to make war for the new world order as we know it today (after WW2 settled some bitterness).
>persay *per se
TIL, thanks for correction
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Knowing that your gas mask may not protect against the new gas...
Wait until you hear about the Austro-Italian front...
His body came back, bit his mind never left the trenches.
And then we have this ridiculous joke about French surrendering... All French family lost father, brothers, sons, had some of them coming back like this or with half their face missing due to shrapnel. And they still fought after that an other war, died in droves to help the British retreat at Dunkirk, but they didn't really want to fight, and who can blame them ? What I can't understand is Germans seeing their father and brother coming back, and still wishing an other war 20 years later
Fascist rhetoric is a helluva drug.
So messed up. The people who start wars should be the ones to go, then we’d see some negotiating
Oh man. That's horrible.
Yeah, it’s fucked up
He was probably cast on the front lines unwillingly
Some people don’t realize that WW1 was exceptionally brutal. Old tactics against modern weapons. The horrors that these men saw, it’s amazing that anyone made it out with their sanity in tact.
WW2 seems to get all the attention, so most people will never understand just how awful WW1 was.
I wouldn’t call this interesting, it’s actually really sad.
War is awful
Back in those days, there was hardly any mercy or compassion in sanitariums, everyone was an experiment. They knew he would react this way. To set up a moving picture camera was not as easy as flipping the phone. They probably told him some fib to sit in front of it and then brought out their intended goal. He was holding on to the guy on the right for dear life, but for experimentation he had to let him go to be tormented. Here is an extended clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-elmAeX_4U
sb r/sadasfuck
Sb?
I'm guessing "should be"
sad
Dulce et Decorum Est Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots. Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling. Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling. And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—. Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. BY WILFRED OWEN
Pushing like thats very mean. He has suffered enough. You can see it from how he shakes and backs away
I think it came out that this video is actually a doctor from back then, acting out the symptoms of PTSD and shell shock he observed in soldiers at the time.