I saw this movie the other day that had something about this. It was The Dawn Wall.

These four climbers went to Kyrgyzstan to climb and while there were taken hostage by rebels.

Eventually there was only one rebel left holding them and while way up in mountains the lead figure in the film, Tommy Caldwell (a legendary climber), grabbed him and threw him off a cliff. He thought for sure he killed him. It bothered him but he also said that he felt like when called upon to do something in a stressful situation he knew he could act.

It’s not too bad a movie if you like movies about climbing mountains.

Here’s what I mean. If you grew up in combat, and it was a part of your life from your first day on Earth, you’d become accustomed to it, I’d think. It would not stand out in your mind as a particularly horrible thing, or a “special” thing or experience that you should be particularly upset, traumatized, or worried about.

On the other hand, for people living in modern, western societies, combat is a very unique experience. It is an emphatic punctuation in the life experience of someone who grew up riding bikes with their buddies on summer break in suburbia. It is marked abnormal to that person’s experience.

Societal pressures aside, combat for almost any western man is going to fill a vanishingly small portion of the time he spends alive, and therefore he is not used to it.

I also think that there is an aspect of the unexpected. Most of our more recent wars have been asymmetrical, and so the combat in those wars generally came in the form of sudden, unexpected ambushes that had no prelude, no lead up, and no ability for the person in combat to “get his game face” on.

It would be interesting to see how those two factors effect rates of PTSD — essentially, a study on whether a man can get “used to” combat to a point to where it no longer bothers him as much as it used to, which would lead to a very interesting conclusion, when you think about it: that a possible cure for combat-induced PTSD could actually be more time spent in combat, paradoxically. Join that with a study that somehow determines the effect of unexpectedness in PTSD rates — ie, if you know it’s coming and you have time to prepare, does it effect you less than if you don’t?

This is NOT to deny trauma, PTSD, or even guilt at killing (it is repulsive) but to say…if we told them they were justified and right and should feel no shame they would indeed suffer less.

Catholics for millennia were told suicide is the unforgivable sin, Catholic suicide rates less.
Japanese told opposite, suicide rates higher.

Human nature being what it is, work with it as it is…

That heavily euphemises the hatred the old Venona Transript wing of the D party has for US troops.

The Turkana, I believe, live in the Afar Triangle — other than the polar regions perhaps the most inhospitable place on the planet to live.

German medical and legal students at the university level still get the schmiss dueling scar, demonstrating to young women their eligibility for marriage.

Some medical students in the USA wear green scrubs as an indication to young women also of eligibility for marriage.