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 pai…
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.
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.