How do sensible people manage to survive a war without becoming jaded nihilists and PTSD ridden drug addicts?

How do sensible people manage to survive a war without becoming jaded nihilists and PTSD ridden drug addicts?

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  1. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Purpose.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Pretty much. This army faced starvation, plague, several major battles, raids, siege, and a 70-80+% fatality rate, but they won in the end and had purpose. They saw the miracle of the Spear of Destiny at Antioch and saw a host of starving, diseases, besieged men with few horses rout an invincible steppe horse archers army twice its size out of pure piety and devotion.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        If God wills it, so be it.

        Deus Vult.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        If God wills it, so be it.

        Deus Vult.

        Crusades were concocted by the pope in order to get rid of warlords and stray armies in an overmilitarized Europe, sending them to die into the desert. It was also good to get rid of throne pretenders and other troublesome people

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Well yeah, it was your classic barbarian invasion. An insular economic and cultural backwater had developed better technologies of warfare and little else and ended up spilling over into the nearest wealthy, developed empire. It's a story as old as civilization.

          However, unlike most barbarian invasions, instead of just adopting to the more developed culture, they shipped a ton of books and knowledge back, resulting in a huge shift in learning and eventually the modern scientific revolution.

          A combination of lack of unity amongst the Latin states and aversion to adopting Islamic practices due to religious doctrine kept the Latins from just aping the Muslim empires, and they instead expanded on their knowledge. Fighting off the Mongols in Eastern/Central Europe also helped further solidify the trend. The first Mongol invasion was fairly successful, particularly in Hungary, although it was limited in Poland and Subatai was driven back at Bohemia. The later efforts for Poland were significantly larger and failed miserably while also failing in Hungary because the invasion threat had caused those states to unify more.

          You have the same sort of strong state formation in England and France due to them fighting it out forever. Meanwhile, Italy and Germany being basket cases of tiny states that ended up in countless wars also helped develop stronger and more centralized states in response to the needs of war.

          But the interesting thing to note is that both Seljuk and Mongol horse archers did not fair particularly well against heavy horse, due to larger, faster horses, and heavier armor, being a good counter to them. Not that they didn't have some successes, but more failures overall. Destroying the Crusaders kingdoms required shifting tactics.

  2. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Many don't

  3. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    the main cause of PTSD is having way too long of a deployment time combined with no one to talk to when you return

    WW1 had a surge in PTSD, its original name of shell shock came from WW1, due to a lot of fresh troops being thrown into a trench for months on end without break
    humans can take stressful situations very well for short bursts, but even the strongest mind can be worn down if exposed day after day

    another cause is alienation
    PTSD can be alleviated by having people be able to talk to other people and have them relate
    while this wont cure it, it helps keep the worst of it under control
    people didnt really understand PTSD for a long time, resulting in isolation and increased drug use

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      True
      During/after ww2, when people had finished their tour, or got sent home due to medical issues/injuries, they'd be transported by ship along with hundreds of people just like them. They'd have weeks or months to talk to people who understood their experience.

      Efter ww2, people would generally be sent home by the ones and twos by plane, resulting in a lack of time and space to decompress.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      It's a myth that PTSD "appeared," at any point, and a real barrier to treating it. There are descriptions of PTSD throughout ancient and medieval sources.

      What changed is that standards of behavior and work roles for returning men became way more cognitively demanding.

      Men returning from war could get away with more in earlier eras because they were mostly subsistence farmers. Beating your wife, children, or slaves wasn't even a crime. Men could frick up and just leave one town and show up in another or start an indenture.

      Homicide rates for even prosperous towns in the middle ages were twice that of the worst parts of Latin America today.

      >A study of the university town of Oxford in the 1340's showed an extraordinarily high annual rate of about 110 per 100,000 people.

      https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/23/us/historical-study-of-homicide-and-cities-surprises-the-experts.html#:~:text=A%20study%20o
      f%20the%20university,per%20100%2C000%20people%20per%20year.

      Baltimore's record, higher than most of Latin America, is what, 55.4?

      As hunter gatherers, humans had a homicide rate of around 1,800-2,200 per 100,0000, or 40 times the highest states today, far higher than many active war zones.

      https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19758

      Ancient warfare was incredibly brutal. Battles could have massive fatalities in a day followed by several days of sacks with massacres, rapes, looting, the taking of slaves. In early to mid antiquity this wasn't even excused in any way, it was just something armies did.

      Not to mention that life on the march, lugging your gear hundreds of miles by foot with no clean drinking water and poor nutrition was also very dangerous and campaigns could last years.

      It's just that, in an era where people watch torture for sport, the range of acceptable behaviors is so wide that it matters less.

      You don't hear much about PTSD in Anti-Balaka in CAR or Rwandans, etc. but it's just because they lack doctors.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >Ancient warfare was incredibly brutal. Battles could have massive fatalities in a day followed by several days of sacks with massacres, rapes, looting, the taking of slaves. In early to mid antiquity this wasn't even excused in any way, it was just something armies did.
        this is itself an exception, not the norm
        it was common for enemy combatants to simply be allowed home or to ransom them back

        >It's just that, in an era where people watch torture for sport, the range of acceptable behaviors is so wide that it matters less.
        this is also widely exaggerated
        even the roman colosseum was not stocked for blood sport 24/7, and they had access to entertainment we would consider normal, like music and sports
        medieval time as well, and so on and so forth

        the idea that the past was violent and barbaric is itself historiography that cherry picks certain parts of history to make a point about the past
        a lot of misconceptions about the medieval age being a time of uncivilization was created during the renaissance to make themselves look more advanced in comparison

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Right, it wasn't 24/7 bloodshed, but a higher % of populations used to die in warfare and homicide rates were 40-100 times higher than Western Europe today. Slavery was an endemic part of life as were public executions. The state couldn't rely on effective policing to stop crimes as today, so it relied on demonstrative punishments, which, while effecting a small share of the population, were quite brutal.

          The point isn't "people watched blood sport all day," chariot racing was far more popular, it's that the state has a huge bloodsport arena at all.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      Lack of control seems to be hugely aggravating.

      I was listening to an interview with Sledgehammer's son (Eugene Sledge, "With the old breed", what The Pacific was based on). The navy actually had to explain to his mother how to wake his father without getting instantly murdered. Their fridge had massive dents in it. Whenever people let off fireworks he'd smash the shit out of it, they show it in the series, when they were being shelled for hours they'd just pound the ground with their fists like a kind of autism thing almost.

      Anyhow, while I doubt standing there with a spear while a knight comes at you is a great place to be, its not the sustained helplessness of shelling day after day, night after night that really seems to mess with people. You can't punch a shell in the face, you just have to sit there.

  4. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Jesus

  5. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Don't be a pussy and don't do drugs.
    >Shrimple as

  6. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >sensible people
    Women wouldn't go to war.

  7. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    By being sensible people. Being a loner or having preexisting mental condition or antisocial tendencies put you at a much higher vulnerability for ptsd. If you have a healthy outlook on life and a strong support network you have a much better chance of being able to reenter society successfully.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Tell me one person who has a healthy outlook in life. Everybody has something screwed wrong, everybody.

  8. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    I just shrugged and accepted each moment the way it came.
    There were times when rockets or mortars would land near our outpost at night and instead of getting upset, I'd just roll over and go back to sleep.
    No sense stressing out trying to control things outside of my control.

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