131–140 of 172 posts
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Yes I really regret personally starting the war now, thanks.
Yet you've participated in it and got paid for that. Worth to mention paid very well and still receiving retirement plan benefits.
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I'm happy to talk to people about my experiences in Afghanistan, but yeah, I only have a few minutes worth of "war stories" to tell. One of the things that most non-veterans don't grasp is just how mundane day-to-day military life can be, even in a combat zone, like how people without a security clearance can't imagine how mundane most SECRET material really is. I find it hard to explain, but life is both different i…
I heard a similar story from a relative of me: He was in the Waffen SS and fought the war basically behind a typewriter in a depot.
So if you were drafted, even as a German you had a nearly 50% chance to be assigned a position where you weren't expected to see combat. And on top of that there's the combat troops defending targets that weren't attacked by the enemy.
But with some bad luck you might have ended up fighting at Stalingrad. War isn't fair, on so many levels.
The willingness of societies to sanitize the realities of war is easily understood in evolutionary terms: genes that build brains that are willing to suspend disbelief and engage in violence reproduce better than genes that build brains that are not willing to do so because the former can use a credible threat of violence to exploit the latter as resources. The sad fact of the matter is that the answer to Rodney King…
natural selection/Darwinism isn’t any sort of genius. from one angle, you outsmart it every time you use a condom. from another angle, if Darwinism leads to such an apparently contradictory behavior — one which popped into being suddenly, after millions of years without — how certain can we really be about the outcomes this mechanism will produce into the future?
I didn't fight in WW2 obviously, but I did fight in a war. For me, the reticence to describe every detail to people who weren't there boils down to this: I don't want my wife, my children, or my neighbors to be burdened with thinking of something so horrible. I want them to be happy and safe, that's why I went. No need to bring it to their doorstep if I don't have to. I suspect many during and after WW2 felt this way…
I haven't, my grandfather did. He was at Pearl Harbor, many battles in the Pacific (he was a submariner), in the end he was part of the occupation of Japan and earned many medals including the purple heart for almost dying in a sub accident. Only as an adult have I come to realize the gift he gave me. When I was a child, I spent a ton of time with him, he had a big hand in raising me. The picture he painted for the y…
Had another relative who was a Marine. Was present at many of the worst battles. Including Iwo Jima. I never heard his stories. He never talked about them. My mom pressured him into talking one day. She regretted that for the rest of her life because the stories were so traumatic and it left him in tears. He was a gentle man. Became a Methodist minister after the war. I never once heard him raise his voice in anger. One of the kindest men I've ever known.
This is a sample size of only two. So I'm not assuming combat, or the lack of, shaped these men into what they would later become. But it's a little interesting to me.
Since I myself am older, I have some relatives who go way back. My grandmother was once visited by her great-uncle when she was 6. He was a veteran of the Mexican War and the Civil War (on the Confederate side). He also wouldn't talk about combat. But he did tell this one story where he and some buddies snuck out of camp. Somewhere in northern Mexico. Found a bar and flirted a little with girls. Then the girls suddenly rushed the men out of the bar and hid them in a barn. Mexican soldiers heard there were Americans in town. The Americans hid under a bale of hay and were narrowly missed by a Mexican soldier who shoved a pitchfork into it. That great-uncle loved that story and would tell it often. Laughing every time.
I didn't fight in WW2 obviously, but I did fight in a war. For me, the reticence to describe every detail to people who weren't there boils down to this: I don't want my wife, my children, or my neighbors to be burdened with thinking of something so horrible. I want them to be happy and safe, that's why I went. No need to bring it to their doorstep if I don't have to. I suspect many during and after WW2 felt this way…
How do you explain that war is long periods of excruciating boredom punctuated by moments of heart pounding panic? Not well if you weren’t there.
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It was extremely boring. Boring, tedious, repetitive, much like this conversation.
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One of the things I love about https://old.reddit.com/r/army is you quickly see that soldiers ‘get it’ - good, bad and ugly - they don’t need civilians sniping at them about moral responsibility.
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I read the Chris Hedges book when it came out and it's left a lasting impression on me. I think it got rid of any academic notions of war I may have had. One part that I'll always remember was him saying the war criminals were the pundits on TV leading up to and during the Bulkan war, they held much guilt in leading the masses to the terrible outcomes. The other counter intuitive insight it gives is how wars have thi…
I've read an article long ago about war veteran that wanted to go back. They found life in society more dreadful than war. War brought them unrivaled intensity of bonds (life or death is unquestionable) and order. In society everything is muddy and mediocre. Even without going to the extent of war, I find "primitive life" is probably still healthiest for us existentially. Maybe using proxies like sports as symbolic w…
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Has it occurred to you that Soviet and Chinese primary sources are less readily available? Far less, almost to the point of impossibility. It's not like those governments were forthcoming about anything for decades afterward. Also what, exactly, would adding those change about his essential point regarding the horrors of war and how they're portrayed? Did Chinese or Soviet bodies blow up differently? Immediacy and au…
I know (and can see from this thread) that emotions run high around anything touching on the ex USSR but I don’t think the current war in Ukraine is at all germane to this article from 1989 about ww2 (or to the content of my posts on HN about it).
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"I think they should be preparing a for a huge postwar assistance, not just money for rebuilding, but psychological / therapy based on their experience to try to reduce the effects of wartime trauma on Ukraine. " We take lots of refugees. I would argue this is already a very effective way of preventing further traumatizing. But as far as I am aware, those who come do not easily get offered psychatric help, even if th…
Being a refugee is traumatic on its own. But Germany has a lot of lessons (including what not to do) that it could be providing for good.
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Pearl Harbor was US. The Philippines was US. We were literally invaded. They also bombed the West Coast.
US Navy ships in the territory of Hawaii were bombed but the island was not “invaded”. You are right that the Philippines was invaded, and was at the time a US territory. But it was at that point under a government intended to transition it to independence. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare–Hawes–Cutting_Act From what I can tell (this was decades before my birth and I have not extensively studied it, so I probab…