The Cooper tests for SF selection seem to work, but nobody can actually articulate how or why, just that it does, more or less.

There was a study done, in I think WWII by the Americans to try to determine what made a successful fighter ace. They couldn’t do it.

Other than being aggressive and having superior situational awareness, there was nothing that they could use to develop a test to select an ace out of the larger group of pilot candidates. There were a couple of things like eye colour and being a loner at school, or something like that, but not statistically significant enough to matter.

Frankly, I’d have looked at York, and said “Y’know… This guy has already overcome a bunch of stuff, and I’m afraid if we make him essentially “go back” because it’s convenient to us, we’re gonna break him…”. I like to think that I’d have never asked York to go back on his self-reform.

I knew a guy in the Army, and if you’d known him the way I did, you’d have been nothing but impressed with him because of the things he’d overcome in order to make himself a “good soldier” and a decent human being.

However, if you’d known him over the full arc of his life, you’d be horrified at the long-term effect of taking him to war, because he did not cope with the stress and strain of losing men in combat at all well. It broke him, fundamentally and organically, and that entire effort he put into making himself a better human being was expended on the altar of the Army’s cause. He showed strong signs of PTSD, and wound up eventually taking his own life after a series of denouements in his personal life that included a return to alcohol and drug abuse.

To my way of thinking, the Army should never have recruited him, and having done so, should have ensured he didn’t get put into a series of situations that resulted in his downfall.

America seems always to have a reserve of such ordinary men who come into their own when needed.

Although, looking at the wikipedia pages on both Murphy and York, I see neither was exactly mild-mannered in youth.

It’s all down to the human factor, whose very definition is “variable”.