On part 1/3: The Russian people are by and large machismo as shit via national culture. That's why they see Gorbachav as a weakling who let the Russia Empire collapse and become a victory lap for the west. This is the central cultural rage that drives Putin. He was in East Berlin at the KGB field office when there was a mob of protestors…
On part 1/3: The Russian people are by and large machismo as shit via national culture. That's why they see Gorbachav as a weakling who let the Russia Empire collapse and become a victory lap for the west. This is the central cultural rage that drives Putin. He was in East Berlin at the KGB field office when there was a mob of protestors outside of the building and the Kremlin hung up the phone on him. It was at that inflection point that Putin decided that he had had enough with weak Russian leadership and that someone like him would have to take charge of the country so as to not let that kind of cultural humiliation befall its people. That's when he started blowing up the Moscow apartments of his political competition in the 90's and blaming it on Chechen separatists. Just ask Anne Applebaum or Cathy Young. They'll tell ya.
On part 3/3: The moral injury paired with the lack of leadership accountability during the Afghan pullout is going to drive some of the AFG veterans *insane*. The part where the article talks about staying busy to keep from processing what you're going through, that's 100% the only way you cope out there. Repression. The problem is, that rage is going to come and find them as soon as their lives slow down post-service. I didn't start feeling my real anger until about 10 years after I had gotten out, mostly because I had kept busy. The psychological/emotional check is already in the mail for these dudes, and who knows what it will look like when they all finally start having to confront it. I worry about that often. This is the part that stuck out to me because it hit home so hard. Task & Purpose really has some terrific authors:
"Many of them spoke on condition of anonymity in order to talk candidly, *without fear of reprisal or being ostracized for sharing details about their mental health* (emphasis my own). While their experiences differed based on where they were and what they were doing during those two weeks, there were common threads throughout their stories: They felt the military wanted to move on as quickly and quietly as possible from the withdrawal. *Many said their commands brushed the trauma they brought home with them under the rug and were slow-rolling awards and recognition for the mission, for reasons they didn’t understand* (emphasis my own)."
This quote points to something sick I saw in the culture of our ground combat branches over and over, both while I served and what I saw in guys who served after me. The forced repression of some really heavy emotional shit because ground combat force culture views depression/anxiety in the aftermath of witnessing/participating in extreme violence as a sign of weakness--as a sign of the first guy in the squad who is going to drop his pack and force the others to carry his slack because he can't hack it at war emotionally-speaking. They fear that kind of weakness will spread to more squad members and that their squad will deteriorate in the field. It *really* fucks with your sense of self afterwards when you get back home and finally have to start dealing with the emotional baggage. It saddles you with an internal guilt for feeling emotionally-broken. A kind of feeling that you don't deserve to feel sad and that you need to just continuously "suck it the fuck up." That sticks with you for life. It's one of the reasons a lot of guys end up killing themselves in their 50's. They're too fucked in the head to maintain healthy relationships with others but too conditioned to repress emotions rather than seeking emotional support for them. It leaves you in a kind of fucked state where you can't maintain relationships successfully but are also conditioned to not seek help for fear of judgement (rather from peers or from the self). I feel so so terrible for the guys who went to Afghanistan. As defunct as Iraqi politics are, at least ISIS didn't win there and they had the opportunity to pursue *some* kind of democracy. Afghanistan is just absolutely fucked now, and so are so many of the men and women who came back from there are going to be shells of themselves by the time they process everything once their lives slow down.
I have felt for a long time that returned soldiers need access to as much counseling as they might need.
It's a lot to psychologically pivot someone so they are ok killing a person. It's also a lot to ask of a person to keep on keeping on when they see their friends blown up by an IED.
Our soldiers need the same lessons I teach my five year old: It is ok to be upset. It is ok to cry. It's up to you how long you need to wait before you are ok.
Yes, 100%. During the early 2000s a friend of mine worked at a VA, counseling returning vets. He had a huge heart for "his guys" and worked hard to help them, but there was a lot of help needed.
One of several things that he told me that stuck with me was that when he administered certain tests that tend to show pathology, their answers were logically and rationally "yes." (rational within the context of just having returned from Iraq or Afghanistan). "Are you surrounded by enemies?" "Are people plotting to hurt or kill you?" "Are the people around you a danger to you?"
Understandable and heartbreaking. Obviously, he worked with them to bring them back around to a more placid, trusting view of life.
Meanwhile, he worried about the guys going into law enforcement with these premises, but that's another discussion.
I could talk all day about the veterans who went law enforcement. I know several and I tried to go law enforcement myself once (they psych DQ'd me). The mentality cops carry nowadays that gets them into shooting unarmed suspects so often is the same mentality carried by troops. You are conditioned to be hyper-vigilant. The expression painted to a sign at the gate of every outpost and base I was at in Iraq read "complacency kills." That's the mindset that got hammered into you. That you were safe nowhere and had to always be paying attention to every single miniscule detail of the operating environment you were swimming in or you were going to fucking die. It's the same reason we fucked with new guys so hard during the training workup cycle during field day where we made them methodically clean every square centimeter of their barracks room. It's so that their attention to detail was going to be so good that they wouldn't miss that small section of wire exposed in the dirt when they're 3.5 months into the deployment and are on the verge of mentally checking out from the exhaustion of always having to make sure you're not about to die before taking your next foot step. After a certain point, you start hoping you step on a victim-initiated IED just to be done with all the fucking attention to detail you have to force on yourself each day. The only reason that you don't check out is because if it's your buddy who steps on that pressure plate instead of you then you're going to feel like shit for the rest of your life and so you keep doing it until you're done counting down the days to that departure flight.
The single most significant leadership event I witnessed across my entire 9 years in service was when one of our oldest squad leaders--a corporal who was probably 24 at the time--who had come from a harsh upbringing in Detroit calmly shed tears in front of the entire platoon and told us that it was okay to mourn after we lost one of our youngest platoon members to a sniper's bullet in a situation that was entirely out of our control. That moment was a *rare* find in the military and I only found more appreciation for it the longer I had been out. The deployment before that I saw four kids get vaporized by mortars while setting up security for the constitution vote in October in '05 and nobody talked about it and none of us ever really processed it. If we had talked about it or been sad about it, our corporals would have told us to shut the fuck up about it and do our fucking jobs.
We all got introduced to the fine art of emotional repression at a very young age in front of very harsh shit. I struggle to imagine a doctor telling a nurse to bottle it the fuck up during the covid waves as a matter of hospital culture. I mean maybe(?), but I'm guessing not. Stupid teenage males are just so much easier to yell at and abuse when everyone is at the limits of their psychological/emotional stress in a ground combat culture that tolerates it.
On part 1/3: The Russian people are by and large machismo as shit via national culture. That's why they see Gorbachav as a weakling who let the Russia Empire collapse and become a victory lap for the west. This is the central cultural rage that drives Putin. He was in East Berlin at the KGB field office when there was a mob of protestors outside of the building and the Kremlin hung up the phone on him. It was at that inflection point that Putin decided that he had had enough with weak Russian leadership and that someone like him would have to take charge of the country so as to not let that kind of cultural humiliation befall its people. That's when he started blowing up the Moscow apartments of his political competition in the 90's and blaming it on Chechen separatists. Just ask Anne Applebaum or Cathy Young. They'll tell ya.
On part 3/3: The moral injury paired with the lack of leadership accountability during the Afghan pullout is going to drive some of the AFG veterans *insane*. The part where the article talks about staying busy to keep from processing what you're going through, that's 100% the only way you cope out there. Repression. The problem is, that rage is going to come and find them as soon as their lives slow down post-service. I didn't start feeling my real anger until about 10 years after I had gotten out, mostly because I had kept busy. The psychological/emotional check is already in the mail for these dudes, and who knows what it will look like when they all finally start having to confront it. I worry about that often. This is the part that stuck out to me because it hit home so hard. Task & Purpose really has some terrific authors:
"Many of them spoke on condition of anonymity in order to talk candidly, *without fear of reprisal or being ostracized for sharing details about their mental health* (emphasis my own). While their experiences differed based on where they were and what they were doing during those two weeks, there were common threads throughout their stories: They felt the military wanted to move on as quickly and quietly as possible from the withdrawal. *Many said their commands brushed the trauma they brought home with them under the rug and were slow-rolling awards and recognition for the mission, for reasons they didn’t understand* (emphasis my own)."
This quote points to something sick I saw in the culture of our ground combat branches over and over, both while I served and what I saw in guys who served after me. The forced repression of some really heavy emotional shit because ground combat force culture views depression/anxiety in the aftermath of witnessing/participating in extreme violence as a sign of weakness--as a sign of the first guy in the squad who is going to drop his pack and force the others to carry his slack because he can't hack it at war emotionally-speaking. They fear that kind of weakness will spread to more squad members and that their squad will deteriorate in the field. It *really* fucks with your sense of self afterwards when you get back home and finally have to start dealing with the emotional baggage. It saddles you with an internal guilt for feeling emotionally-broken. A kind of feeling that you don't deserve to feel sad and that you need to just continuously "suck it the fuck up." That sticks with you for life. It's one of the reasons a lot of guys end up killing themselves in their 50's. They're too fucked in the head to maintain healthy relationships with others but too conditioned to repress emotions rather than seeking emotional support for them. It leaves you in a kind of fucked state where you can't maintain relationships successfully but are also conditioned to not seek help for fear of judgement (rather from peers or from the self). I feel so so terrible for the guys who went to Afghanistan. As defunct as Iraqi politics are, at least ISIS didn't win there and they had the opportunity to pursue *some* kind of democracy. Afghanistan is just absolutely fucked now, and so are so many of the men and women who came back from there are going to be shells of themselves by the time they process everything once their lives slow down.
Thank you for sharing.
I have felt for a long time that returned soldiers need access to as much counseling as they might need.
It's a lot to psychologically pivot someone so they are ok killing a person. It's also a lot to ask of a person to keep on keeping on when they see their friends blown up by an IED.
Our soldiers need the same lessons I teach my five year old: It is ok to be upset. It is ok to cry. It's up to you how long you need to wait before you are ok.
Yes, 100%. During the early 2000s a friend of mine worked at a VA, counseling returning vets. He had a huge heart for "his guys" and worked hard to help them, but there was a lot of help needed.
One of several things that he told me that stuck with me was that when he administered certain tests that tend to show pathology, their answers were logically and rationally "yes." (rational within the context of just having returned from Iraq or Afghanistan). "Are you surrounded by enemies?" "Are people plotting to hurt or kill you?" "Are the people around you a danger to you?"
Understandable and heartbreaking. Obviously, he worked with them to bring them back around to a more placid, trusting view of life.
Meanwhile, he worried about the guys going into law enforcement with these premises, but that's another discussion.
I could talk all day about the veterans who went law enforcement. I know several and I tried to go law enforcement myself once (they psych DQ'd me). The mentality cops carry nowadays that gets them into shooting unarmed suspects so often is the same mentality carried by troops. You are conditioned to be hyper-vigilant. The expression painted to a sign at the gate of every outpost and base I was at in Iraq read "complacency kills." That's the mindset that got hammered into you. That you were safe nowhere and had to always be paying attention to every single miniscule detail of the operating environment you were swimming in or you were going to fucking die. It's the same reason we fucked with new guys so hard during the training workup cycle during field day where we made them methodically clean every square centimeter of their barracks room. It's so that their attention to detail was going to be so good that they wouldn't miss that small section of wire exposed in the dirt when they're 3.5 months into the deployment and are on the verge of mentally checking out from the exhaustion of always having to make sure you're not about to die before taking your next foot step. After a certain point, you start hoping you step on a victim-initiated IED just to be done with all the fucking attention to detail you have to force on yourself each day. The only reason that you don't check out is because if it's your buddy who steps on that pressure plate instead of you then you're going to feel like shit for the rest of your life and so you keep doing it until you're done counting down the days to that departure flight.
The single most significant leadership event I witnessed across my entire 9 years in service was when one of our oldest squad leaders--a corporal who was probably 24 at the time--who had come from a harsh upbringing in Detroit calmly shed tears in front of the entire platoon and told us that it was okay to mourn after we lost one of our youngest platoon members to a sniper's bullet in a situation that was entirely out of our control. That moment was a *rare* find in the military and I only found more appreciation for it the longer I had been out. The deployment before that I saw four kids get vaporized by mortars while setting up security for the constitution vote in October in '05 and nobody talked about it and none of us ever really processed it. If we had talked about it or been sad about it, our corporals would have told us to shut the fuck up about it and do our fucking jobs.
We all got introduced to the fine art of emotional repression at a very young age in front of very harsh shit. I struggle to imagine a doctor telling a nurse to bottle it the fuck up during the covid waves as a matter of hospital culture. I mean maybe(?), but I'm guessing not. Stupid teenage males are just so much easier to yell at and abuse when everyone is at the limits of their psychological/emotional stress in a ground combat culture that tolerates it.