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"commonly-held idea that killing is an 'unnatural' act for humans" Say what? It may be one of the most natural acts for humans as far as history shows
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The risk perhaps not so much moral injury, but that combat and war is almost like a drug. Imagine going back home to a toddler raging about the wrong color cup, a narrow set of civil rules, and flipping burgers after living a life out the back of a pickup truck with nothing but a rifle and your buddies keeping you alive. Fucking boring. But I'm no killer, just a guy who spent a few months in a civil war, and met a lo…
Whenever you have these feelings, go watch actual real life combat footage. A great recent one is a knife fight to the death where one soldier admits defeat and asks the first one to leave him to die https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/tAUwd2MWqT Watch that and tell me if you think it's still cool and normal life is boring. I find that it snaps me right back out of "Hollywood war" thinking and makes my stomach t…
I didn't get the feeling that OP was saying it's cool. Rather, that it's intense, and that the intensity itself is addicting.
I was on jury duty for a murder case last year, and it was like living in a different reality. The weight of the responsibility bore down on me hard, it felt like the stakes of what I was doing were higher than anything else in my life. It took me a while afterwards to fully come back down to earth. OP is basically saying that war feels somewhat like that - you come back home and the stakes feel trivial.
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Whenever you have these feelings, go watch actual real life combat footage. A great recent one is a knife fight to the death where one soldier admits defeat and asks the first one to leave him to die https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/tAUwd2MWqT Watch that and tell me if you think it's still cool and normal life is boring. I find that it snaps me right back out of "Hollywood war" thinking and makes my stomach t…
A lot of the guys I met in the YPG had seen way more combat than that and still yearned for it. One of them was retired foreign legion that did this as his retirement. When we were getting shot at one of the older guys would get viscerally excited and joyful, and he had seen many dead. Junky is a good description of what they were. They wanted another taste. I can't imagine after 5+ years of that life how you would d…
https://septemberpublishing.org/product/my-war-gone-by-i-mis...
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Whenever you have these feelings, go watch actual real life combat footage. A great recent one is a knife fight to the death where one soldier admits defeat and asks the first one to leave him to die https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/tAUwd2MWqT Watch that and tell me if you think it's still cool and normal life is boring. I find that it snaps me right back out of "Hollywood war" thinking and makes my stomach t…
there are vets who return from a deployment and can’t adjust to life at home. and they re-deploy many times over. i’m not going to call one cool and one boring, you’ll have to ask those guys what their motivation is
The conclusion sounds reasonable and may well be correct. But I’d still be a bit worried about selection effects. The kind of person who signs up for a tour of duty to Afghanistan is probably a bit different than someone who signs up for a UN peacekeeping mission. So an alternative conclusion / title could be: “Moral injury more common among those with high moral standards”.
I have to agree. Evolution seems to have placed human empathy on a spectrum -- some have a lot of it and perform caregiver functions within a community, others have less of it and tend to perform defensive function. While we may not have physically differentiated castes as do ants, it would be unwise to assume that all healthy humans will have the same level of empathy. Layer on top of that, military training designe…
What makes you say the spectrum is caused evolution? I would say, based on what I've seen, it's caused by lifetime experience and parenting/mentoring.
> some have a lot of it and perform caregiver functions within a community, others have less of it and tend to perform defensive function.
Experts consider empathy an essential tool of conflict: it's required to understand the emotions of the enemy, which is necessary to anticipate and understand. Remember that humans evolved without literacy and possibly they wouldn't have understood their enemy's spoken language.
> military training designed to further attenuate empathy
I would guess that it's the opposite, for the reasons above. Also, afaik empathy for others is the same mechanism as empathy for oneself and that is essential for processing emotions, which is essential for handling traumatizing experiences. People with less empathy are much less functional under stress.
They talk tough, though.
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The risk perhaps not so much moral injury, but that combat and war is almost like a drug. Imagine going back home to a toddler raging about the wrong color cup, a narrow set of civil rules, and flipping burgers after living a life out the back of a pickup truck with nothing but a rifle and your buddies keeping you alive. Fucking boring. But I'm no killer, just a guy who spent a few months in a civil war, and met a lo…
Whenever you have these feelings, go watch actual real life combat footage. A great recent one is a knife fight to the death where one soldier admits defeat and asks the first one to leave him to die https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/tAUwd2MWqT Watch that and tell me if you think it's still cool and normal life is boring. I find that it snaps me right back out of "Hollywood war" thinking and makes my stomach t…
However the "combat addiction" among people who did go to war is still very real. There are countless stories of people who knowingly chose to go back.
I think it's important to recognize that the idea "if only people knew how awful the war is, no one would go there" doesn't really work.
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I agree with your points, and how I interpret "natural" has nothing to do with how often an individual does something. Many humans drive their cars every day. Does this make it a natural thing to do? I can see a definition of the word that makes it so. Still, the way I see it is that driving a car is something very unnatural to do, even if many people do it every day, but killing humans is something very natural, alt…
> Most people will absolutely kill another human if the circumstances call for it. It's in our nature to do so. What do you base that on? In one study of WWII soldiers on D-Day, half didn't shoot their weapons because they didn't want to kill someone (my memory of the study is vague). The military had to develop training to make soldiers more likely to kill.
> commonly-held idea that killing is an 'unnatural' act for humans People killing people is one of the better-documented aspects of human history. If it's really a commonly-held idea, it's a delusional one. I think what they mean is 'unethical' rather than 'unnatural'.
> People killing people is one of the better-documented aspects of human history. If it's really a commonly-held idea, it's a delusional one. Lots of things are well documented. Famine is too, but it has a big negative impact. Humans are social creatures that live exclusively in groups; they cannot survive alone psychologically or, usually, physically. Groups are effective when they are at peace; evolutionary psychol…
Exactly! It's taboo. It's morally wrong. It's unethical. But does it make it unnatural? It's taboo to talk about sex and what you do on the toilet, two of the most natural and human things there are.
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A lot of men have seen that video and rather than the repulsion that you feel, they wonder _would I have survived?_.
How do you know that? How do you know they don't think both things?
It's an open secret many people who experience raw conflict in which actions and not regulations decide outcomes like it. It's the reason why they often go back and it's an age old story.
The GP most likely has led a comfortable life safely ensconced in the bubble of order provided by society and when they are a glimse of the reality of the world, they assume that everyone feels like them that it's a horror to be avoided. It's incomprehensible to them that some see that video and I think I could have done better. Some will have seen that video or others like it and set off for Ukraine to see if they can.
The videos that horrify this cohort are the combat videos where the soldier has no influence over their fate: drones, mines, and artillery.
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Yep, fairly common to hear about old veterans who will not discuss what they did in combat, one could guess because they don't want to resurface those memories.
They won't talk to you about it because you can't understand, and talking to you about it would just make them feel more isolated and alone. Only others like them could understand.