Naked units?

[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.

[Exosus]

There are still significant numbers of PTSD sufferers coming out of the War On Terror though - much greater than those that came from, say, the Roman conquest of Gaul. How do you reconcile that?

[Watchman]

Me ? I was just pointing out that said friend's perspective was clearly skewed by the simple fact he wasn't on the receiving end of all the heavy ordinance and general ghastly firepower and junk modern wars involve. Lopsided, as it were.
Also machoBS psychological coping mechanism, but I figured that was too obvious to require pointing out; doesn't keep people from coming back all scarred inside either, far as I know.

[Ludens]

There are still significant numbers of PTSD sufferers coming out of the War On Terror though - much greater than those that came from, say, the Roman conquest of Gaul. How do you reconcile that?

How do you know that? We don't have statistics on that war, and the Romans may not have had a single term for PTSD. It could be a wide-spread problem that simply wasn't noticed by those in who left us records. After all, the writing of commentaries and histories is an upper-class activity; we have no records about how the Roman proletariat felt. Furthermore, our society as a whole is quite obsessed with health and performance, and our media far more able to report on it: just because we didn't hear about it previously doesn't mean it wasn't there.

On the other hand, there are psychological and physiological differences between acute stress and chronic stress. An ancient battle must have been a terrifying experience, but outside of the battlefield you were mostly safe. Modern warriors on the other hand have to be constantly on their guard, because even when in camp they can still be attacked by snipers or mortar fire. There is no sanctuary for them anymore. I think that must contribute too to problem.

[Reality=Chaos]

There are still significant numbers of PTSD sufferers coming out of the War On Terror though - much greater than those that came from, say, the Roman conquest of Gaul. How do you reconcile that?

You are talking about PTSD as if it were a recognized illness in antiquity.... It was not... I am sure a lot of people got severely twisted by the wars they fought, but without anyone even knowing what PTSD even was it would not be recognized as much.... I'm sure there were psychotic and traumatized soldiers though.... When Carthage was sacked the roman Commander rotated the kill squads that went into Carthage to make sure they wouldn't go mad with slaughter they were wreaking. So most probably they did know that battle did something to a man.....

Modern warfare has a different fear factor... especially in city warfare the enemy is virtually invisible, which I can imagine to be very very unnerving indeed... it also might bring a sense of being powerless to do anything about enemy snipers and whatnot.... Different times different wars different kind of fears....

[Watchman]

I would remind you that "shell shock", as what today's psychology calls PTSD was known back then, first turned up in large scale in the trenches of WW1. It should tell something that the problem was quite novel in spite of Europeans by that point having spent a round half millenia shooting each other to bits - and you get three guesses at what was the main functional difference between that and earlier wars...

[Celtic_Punk]

Nothing a few bursts of .50cal through a building can't deal with!
In all seriousness though. Look at the havoc the Fallujah sniper wrought. I can tell at least a few Marines were worried to strap their body armour on for patrol during those days.

Also I am sure that it was understood back in antiquity that battle changed a man, and not all men could deal with the change. They didn't understand it as we do today, but we don't even understand it today either. Shellshock was widely unheard of until The Great War. Soldiers unharmed by shrapnel were still coming off the line as casualties of war. This however is a totally different form of PTSD than what we're talking about.

I'm very sure Romans returning from Caesars conquest of Gaul were haunted by the massacre of the women and children and had many many many sleepless nights. I know I would.

[Reality=Chaos]

Nothing a few bursts of .50cal through a building can't deal with!
In all seriousness though. Look at the havoc the Fallujah sniper wrought. I can tell at least a few Marines were worried to strap their body armour on for patrol during those days.

Also I am sure that it was understood back in antiquity that battle changed a man, and not all men could deal with the change. They didn't understand it as we do today, but we don't even understand it today either. Shellshock was widely unheard of until The Great War. Soldiers unharmed by shrapnel were still coming off the line as casualties of war. This however is a totally different form of PTSD than what we're talking about.

I'm very sure Romans returning from Caesars conquest of Gaul were haunted by the massacre of the women and children and had many many many sleepless nights. I know I would.

indeed...

[Watchman]

Well I would imagine it didn't help make them very nice and well-socialised people anyway. Though from what I gather the Romans didn't appear to have particularly major problems with shell-shocked veterans no longer "fitting in" back in the civvie world, quite in spite of their longstanding Assyrian policies.

For that matter, the same seems to roughly be the case with the various more-or-less tribal warrior societies where perfectly regular Joes were commonly enough expected and called up to fight and kill and were rarely any nicer than anyone else in victory. And in some cases, at least if the Roman sources are to be believed, didn't even qualify as full adults before slaying a foeman...

No, assorted "war psychoses" don't appear to have been very common back in the day, inasmuch as can be gleaned from the sources. *Some* individuals do seem to display at least some of the symptoms of PTSD, but even among grizzled veterans it appears uncommon. Neither does it seem to have been much of a problem in the much better documented European armies of Middle Ages and later - before WW1, that is.

[Reality=Chaos]

No, assorted "war psychoses" don't appear to have been very common back in the day, inasmuch as can be gleaned from the sources. *Some* individuals do seem to display at least some of the symptoms of PTSD, but even among grizzled veterans it appears uncommon. Neither does it seem to have been much of a problem in the much better documented European armies of Middle Ages and later - before WW1, that is.[/QUOTE]

Very important bit that... Not much can be gleaned from the sources... I have a feeling that psychoses were not something generally known, and if known would probably be attributed to their being soldiers (as these would be the people most affected) even in this day PTSD is a very slippery thing, and we do not know a whole lot about it. we do know that many war veterans were not recognized as having PTSD. People in their environment will notice changes, but often enough they do not recognise the signals either. Also I think that modern armies take better care of their soldiers, with cooling down periods after tours of duty psychic evals etc. A soldier in the classic antiquity would probably have to bring his own weapons and armour, and after the war was done he was dismissed with maybe a nice sum if the war had gone well. Only the elitest of the elite would resemble something that can vaguely be decribed as a professional soldier... Rome after the marian reforms was of course the glaring exception to this rule.... There was not so much care for the soldiers nor such a close scrutiny as it is today... many people suffering from what we now call PTSD would simply not be recognised....

[Watchman]

We do however have any number of biographies written of men who often made their careers, and spent *decades*, as mercenaries and soldiers, often enough right in the front lines too. And I understand what can be tentatively identified as PTSD symptoms are uncommon even among such men; for example IIRC I've seen it theorised *one* of the senior officers of the Ten Thousand mercenaries who signed up for Cyrus the Younger's coup can be interpreted as showing signs, going by the description of Xenophon and maybe others, and THIS was after a few decades of intensive warfare in the Greek world...

Quite simply, also judging by the relatively well documented "gunpowder era" armies of later times, battles themselves, while usually bloody and frightening enough, don't cause much in the way of such problems. After all, few ever lasted longer than a day; the experience of battle might be terrifying, but it was also brief and thereafter the survivors returned to relatively peaceful and secure campaign routines (death by disease and hunger being something civilians already were familiar at most times and places, such would not have been particularly scarring). It is the endless gnawing fear and stress modern wars impose on soldiers at the front lines, day after day after day, that seems to slowly wear out most peoples' mental fortitude. This was in part noted also in practice in the form of grizzled veterans' relative reluctance to take the kinds of risks greenhorns and not-yet-burnt-out bloodied formations often seemed to greet with relish. The hardened veterans were quite *good* at fighting and staying alive, obviously; but they had also been through enough already to be through with heroics as well as the whole shit in general and just wanted to get home in one piece. "Someone else's turn to go first," I've seen it summed up.

[Celtic_Punk]

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.

Don't get me wrong, I was by no means belittling that war. Read the earlier posts I made. There is not a single day that I get up and don't think about what kind of courage it must have taken my grandfather to get up every day, sometimes multiple times in a day to get into the cockpit of his spitfire, and rise up to meet hundreds of german aircraft. with only 20 seconds of ammunition and still take it in stride. Hell, what I remember of the man you'd never be able to tell that more than half of his friends died when he was no older than I am now. That's courage.

What was it that Churchill said? "Never in the history of man has so much been owed by so many to so few."

[Watchman]

My grandfather was an infantry squad leader - and we fought the Soviets back then. Let's just say that reading firsthand accounts of what it's like to fight an enemy with vastly superior equipement and heavier weaponry, nevermind now general resources, helps put things in perspective.

[Macilrille]

My grandfather was an infantry squad leader - and we fought the Soviets back then. Let's just say that reading firsthand accounts of what it's like to fight an enemy with vastly superior equipement and heavier weaponry, nevermind now general resources, helps put things in perspective.

Simo Häyä...

SISU FTW!!!

But that is OT.

[Celtic_Punk]

My grandfather was an infantry squad leader - and we fought the Soviets back then. Let's just say that reading firsthand accounts of what it's like to fight an enemy with vastly superior equipement and heavier weaponry, nevermind now general resources, helps put things in perspective.

you guys gave birth to the greatest sniper of all time. And only because he was a legendary hunter. Skills of a battlefield sniper are one with a hunter, this much is true. 800 kills in 100 days. Amazing.

The winter war was a huge display of how a motivated individual can stand up to the many, in the face of all odds stacked against you. It also proves that moral is everything. Had your people been defeated in spirit you'd have been rolled over by the soviets.

[Watchman]

you guys gave birth to the greatest sniper of all time. And only because he was a legendary hunter. Skills of a battlefield sniper are one with a hunter, this much is true. 800 kills in 100 days. Amazing.

Speaking of snipers, a distant relative by marriage was one during the war. Unlike grandpa, who "wrote out" his war traumas like many vets did, he AFAIK *never* refers to those times...
Go fig.

The winter war was a huge display of how a motivated individual can stand up to the many, in the face of all odds stacked against you. It also proves that moral is everything. Had your people been defeated in spirit you'd have been rolled over by the soviets.

More like rank idiocy and institutionalised incompetence do wonders to negate advantages in resources and technology.

[Celtic_Punk]

The finnish defence is attributed to hardy soldiers fighting tired and demoralized massed infantry columns.


plus stalin killed like 90% of his officers because they weren't commies.

F#%in' retard, experienced officers especially at a platoon and company level are indispensable! The difference 1 company can make on a line can be the difference between breakthrough or counter attack. The movies got it right guys! the asshat straight outta westpoint who can't read a compass or doesn't trust his non-coms gets his men killed. Calls in arty short, or freezes up in the middle of an attack. Or just plain makes stupid calls in combat that end up with dead troopers.



By the way you know Simo used a Russian Mosin? the shorter version because he was a short arse himself! I still can't get over his kill count. His kills per day mean at 8 kills a day, taking into account he might not kill the same number of men each day, or he might not kill any? this means he must have averaged around 5-8 kills a day. Sometimes getting as many as 15 kills or so in a day. This means he probably took out a freakin platoon single handedly! He was a definite trooper. A true soldier, and a well motivated individual. He gets my handshake, thats for sure.

[Watchman]

I could write you a short article on the topic, thanks. Let's just say that gross Soviet stupidity, and the blunt fact the Red Army wasn't configured to fight in the terrain while the Finnish one was, played a rather major part.