Naked units?

[Watchman]

Pff, mainland European and British winters. They ain't that cold.

Anyways, I don't recall anyone ever implying them nekkid d00ds were even relatively common; certainly the Celtic ones seem to have been rather unusual (some kind of warrior cult presumably), and seem to drop off the radar after a few centuries for the most part so eh...

[Celtic_Punk]

You bitch about European winters! HAH!! I do the polar dip every year here in Canada. If I can last in below freezing waters, naked with nothing but swimming trunks. I'd have no problem with the cold if I was keeping myself warm with killing other men.

I'm quite doubtful about that. In antiquity you could actually SEE the enemy and you can DO something to avoid death. You could be succesful or not, but your destiny was influenced by your skills.

Today, death come from far away. You can do nothing against an hidden sniper, or even a good aiming enemy soldier with an assault rifle. Needless to talk about any form of artillery.

I think today a soldier is MUCH more subject to fear, because he knows that he could have nothing to do to avoid death.

I think seeing thousands of angry heavilly armed men rushing at you is much more frightening than a sniper. To fight on the ancient battlefield you must mentally prepare yourself. I am more inclined to believe the fear factor on both the modern battlefield and those of the classical era would be quite similar. The same way you stand on the line and prepare yourself to go toe to toe with the romans, or celts, or persians, or whathave you, is the SAME mental preparation you'd have done to take that step out of your C-47, to step off the landing craft onto France, to go over the top! It's all the same. Every soldier must prepare himself for the moment that is to come. To take that first step out the back of your LAV in an ambush, its the same feeling the boys felt when they went over the top.
You cannot make the assumption it's not. There is no way in Hell you could prove otherwise.

[Watchman]

I think seeing thousands of angry heavilly armed men rushing at you is much more frightening than a sniper. To fight on the ancient battlefield you must mentally prepare yourself. I am more inclined to believe the fear factor on both the modern battlefield and those of the classical era would be quite similar. The same way you stand on the line and prepare yourself to go toe to toe with the romans, or celts, or persians, or whathave you, is the SAME mental preparation you'd have done to take that step out of your C-47, to step off the landing craft onto France, to go over the top! It's all the same. Every soldier must prepare himself for the moment that is to come. To take that first step out the back of your LAV in an ambush, its the same feeling the boys felt when they went over the top.
You cannot make the assumption it's not. There is no way in Hell you could prove otherwise.

People don't seem to have been gettings PTSDs overmuch back in the day, though. One suspects the difference comes from the "dosage" of fear - in modern wars soldiers are under the threat of death, and hence considerable stress, more or less all the time they're in the war zone; and extended periods of stress are just plain unhealthy for anyone.
And they still get the same brief, intense bouts of sheer terror in actual combat that were all the soldiers of bygone ages normally had to deal with, too.

By the by, by all accounts hand-to-hand combat is also much more... viscerally scary than getting shot at. Back in the musket-and-bayonet days for example your average line infantry unit could get shot to shreds and still hold its position quite stubbornly (period observers speak of "closing lines towards the center" as the men shifted to close the gaps that appeared in the line) - but a single determined bayonet charge was wont to put even fresh ones into flight in one go.

[ARCHIPPOS]

one of my my granpas fought in the Big War, he served in a destroyer of an allied naval force ... he told me that in times of crisis with planes bombing and flying around ,torpedoes running through, men blown up in pieces or burnt alive or amputated or ships sinking taking their entire crew with them sailors performed their duties in a strange "panickless" almost mechanised way... stress and fear was an everyday companion but somehow it disapeared during the battle durin which training and the need to take immediate actions prevailed... i would have liked to ask him more abt the subject but sadly he's dead

[Watchman]

Far as I know the modern training paradigm is to drill the soldiers in their tasks thoroughly enough that under fire they don't "freeze up" but do something if only on "autopilot" - hopefully the correct thing, but I understand that generally doing almost anything is much better than doing nothing.

[Celtic_Punk]

Far as I know the modern training paradigm is to drill the soldiers in their tasks thoroughly enough that under fire they don't "freeze up" but do something if only on "autopilot" - hopefully the correct thing, but I understand that generally doing almost anything is much better than doing nothing.

this is true till the last part. Sometimes doing nothing is what you need to do. Training replaces instinct, which is what is going to get you killed in the firefight. You've got to shut down your brain and act on your aggression and training. Fear seizes up your instinct. all thats left is your training. Its the only thing that should be in your mind. "Clear your mind, your ass will follow."

You earlier said something about intense bouts of fear in firefights aswel, this doesn't happen in the war we fight today. A few of my buddy's in country right now send me back videos of firefights, arty strikes, airstrikes, all sorts of awesome stuff! one of my buds is a .50cal gunner on an HMMWV, hearing them scream "Wooohooo!" more than anything else tells me that their havin' the time of their lives.
"There's nothing in this whole world that makes you feel more alive than being shot at by a towelhead with an PKM", so he says. I bet you any warrior that fought under good old Vertingorix would tell you the same. "There's nothing in this world that makes you feel more alive than 10 000 romans running straight for you!", or something along those lines. Liquid courage probably went along way too for some of those battles.

The fact of the matter is there is something powerful when you have an army behind you... In this case you literally did have an army behind you. And though you might have pissed your pants thinking about being dizembowelled by a spear 20 minutes ago, Now that the lines are closing, its just like WWI when you went over the top, whether you were scared or not. You forgot about that fear, and you ran, and you ran, and you ran. And with 15, 20 000 men all smashing their shields together and yelling and screaming and being obscene, you couldn't help but become insatiably thirsty for the inevitable. After all, for a Celt, to die honourably in battle was the greatest thing a man could do. Same with the Spartans, and I'm sure many many other peoples from the books of history.
I guarantee you all the same goes for the professional class of warrior then as it does for now. Your time spent training gives you an eagerness. I myself am quite eager to fight a war. I've trained and trained, I've spent more than enough time shooting paper targets stabbing dummy's and clearing killhouses. We're all eager. Eager to kill, Eager to fight, Eager to test ourselves and our training. Its not that we're messed up in the head or anything. But its like when you learn CPR, you think about using it for real, you wonder, could you really save a life? Its the same thing, you train and train and train. You become eager to do your job. Your will to fight grows and grows. It will outweigh your fears 10 fold. I am 150% certain the same went for the professionals of antiquity.

[Mikhail Mengsk]

I don't think your buddy would be so adrenalinic under heavy artillery barrage. When you are FIGHTING, adrenaline can overwhelm fear. When you are under fire, and you could do nothing against the enemy, is much different. Snipers are the most fearsome threat in urban warfare, because you KNOW that if you make the wrong move, he will kill you. Artillery can kill you even if you are far from the battle field.

Ancient warfare was all about the single battle. A few hours or a day of adrenaline and fear. In modern warfare, you are ALWAYS in danger. In WW1 and WW2 soldiers fired to themselves trying to be evacuated. The stress accumulates day by day, always growing.

WW2 american military studies stated that a soldier would reach the best of his battle conditions in the first weeks, but after 90 days the risk of a mental collapse was almost sure. Much depends on training and individual "strenght", but after 90 days an "average" soldier is very near to collapse.

[Exosus]

There was a good point regarding PTSD in modern soldiers. I had always wondered what it was that changed things - whether modern men were simply more prone to mental difficulties or perhaps there was simply much lower reporting at the time, but the concept of a more limited scope of danger may have contributed greatly.

Do you have a reference where you got that concept from, or is it your original thinking? I would like to quote that in the future if it exists somewhere . . .

Regarding the penis size differential between Romans and Celts

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

the difference flaccid is considerably less than the difference erect. Romans and Greeks both, in general, fall into the category of men whose penises gain the vast majority of their size upon arousal, while many (not all) Celts maintain roughly the same size, give or take a couple inches, at all times. In modern terms, Celts are showers, Romans are growers. If we assume that combat would lead to a testosterone increase to a degree which would create a kind of false arousal, asexually, as it does in many or most men when faced with melee, and to a lesser extent ranged, combat, then the difference would be relatively slight.

I think I may have died a little inside having participated in that conversation at an intellectual level. Thanks for that /wrist O.o

[Watchman]

You earlier said something about intense bouts of fear in firefights aswel, this doesn't happen in the war we fight today. A few of my buddy's in country right now send me back videos of firefights, arty strikes, airstrikes, all sorts of awesome stuff! one of my buds is a .50cal gunner on an HMMWV, hearing them scream "Wooohooo!" more than anything else tells me that their havin' the time of their lives.
"There's nothing in this whole world that makes you feel more alive than being shot at by a towelhead with an PKM", so he says.

All this is because the "war we fight today" is so horrendously lopsided - ragged urban guerillas and angry hill tribes with shoelace budgets and virtually no heavy weaponry to speak of versus some of the most grossly potent and best-equipped space-age military forces on the whole planet.

I suggest reading witness descriptions on what kind of great fun it is to be at the receiving end of an artillery barrage or a massed armoured attack, of which kinds of experiences the World War memoirs for example are quite full of, to get a more realistic and balanced perspective regarding what modern war between at least reasonable equals is like psychologically.

[Owen Glyndwr]

There would definitely be a "brag factor". If you could go into battle without any sort of protection at all, and come out, not just alive, but also victorious, it definitely did something for your status as a brave man and a renowned warrior.

[Cute Wolf]

Don't forget the inferior fellings from the Romans and Hellenes...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Psst.... the Romans value large... thing.... and they are affraid to see a Celtic warrior with 33 cm or much more... on the other hand, all Hellenes naked statues seems to have a small... thing

[Watchman]

You know I heard adrenaline - notoriously copiously produced by assorted glands in combat - mainly just shrinks your "Tower of Power"...

[Rilder]

You know I heard adrenaline - notoriously copiously produced by assorted glands in combat - mainly just shrinks your "Tower of Power"...

If I'm in the heat of battle the last thing I'm worried about is my penis size.