How did people feel about killing hundreds of years ago compared

>>3299233

>Did PTSD or some kind of similar mental trauma exist in war

Absolutely. For example, Alexander displayed textbook symptoms of PTSD, as did Michel Ney and countless other generals. If they suffered from PTSD, so too did their troops.

PTSD as a formal mental disorder wasn't recognized until WW1; it was referred to as shell-shock. The poor souls who were suffering from PTSD were regarded as cowards looking for a way out of the frontline.

I read somwhere that PTSD is peobably a thing more related to modern war. In the old days you knew when you had to fight, yes it was brutal, but mostly you knew what and when it would take place.

In modern wars you are in constant danger. Which wrecks havoc on the brain.

PTSD occurs when you get shelled by artillery and your body endures constant stress over long periods of time. It wasnt much of a thing before WW1

>>3299249

You're describing shell-shock. That's a very specific form of PTSD. PTSD can be caused by almost anything -- war, rape, assault, mugging, car accident.

>>3299243
Nah, it's bullshit made by Americans to feel like special snowflakes
Past wars also had insurgencies and ambushes, that wasn't invented during the US interventions in Middle Eastern shitholes

The one difference however, is that your average dude wasn't as sheltered as current Westerners
So killing and facing death was less of a shock than it is for the recently enlisted US boy sent to the battlefield for the first time

>>3299249
See >>3299241

Constant stress happens regardless of you being shelled or not.

>>3299249
>It wasnt much of a thing before WW1

Siege warfare has seen artillery used to shell positions during long periods since the fucking Hundred Years War man
When dudes still wore plate armors and used bows

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>>3299241
>The poor souls who were suffering from PTSD were regarded as cowards looking for a way out of the frontline.
fuck

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>>3299258
I like your style
carry on

>>3299268

Some were even court marshalled and executed.

>>3299258
Unless you've actually fought in a war you can't have any idea what it's like

>>3299241

examples of alexander's ptsd?

>>3299281
And unless you fought in both current and past wars, you better stop with this "muh iraq war was the worst war ever" bullshit

Pretty sure your average Roman in Germania or your average Napoleonic soldier in Spain knew very well what counter-insurgency and constant danger are

>>3299259
You are not under constant stress in melee warfare

>>3299300
But in siege warfare you are
And siege warfare always existed

>>3299300
No, it's a walk in a park. What with all the people showing spears or swords or arrows at your face, and that you are exerting all the strength you posses only to stay alive, usually over a prolonged period of time on a campaign and you watch how people you come to know and regard as friends perish and die one by one, certainly no stress in that,ever

>>3299233
Tell me, sweet lord, what is't that takes from thee
Thy stomach, pleasure and thy golden sleep?
Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth,
And start so often when thou sit'st alone?
Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks;
And given my treasures and my rights of thee
To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy?
In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch'd,
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars;
Speak terms of manage to thy bounding steed;
Cry 'Courage! to the field!' And thou hast talk'd
Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
Of prisoners' ransom and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.
Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war
And thus hath so bestirr'd thee in thy sleep,
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow
Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream;
And in thy face strange motions have appear'd,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden hest.

- Henry IV, Shakespeare

PTSD has existed as long as war has. It may not have been as apparent a problem to people in past eras where warfare and violence was common, but the trauma of combat is a universal constant.

>>3299233
They had PTSD, but to a lesser extent. War back then was honoured by the population, and conditions were far better.

>>3299284

Alexander was noted to experience changes in personality affecting his judgment and began killing the leaders of his army during his drinking bouts. He was also described as being pathologically suspicious.

Then again, Alexander also seemed to have been bipolar. He thought himself a descendant of the gods and yet went through bouts of depression where he hid himself in his tent for days.

Dude was all around psychologically fucked.

>>3299258
It's not made up, it's over diagnosed in soldiers and underdiagnosed in civilians.

I displayed symptoms of PTSD, except for one major component, which is a specific incident that I kept "reliving" or thinking about all the time. I was nervous, aggressive, paranoid, and had insomnia. After trying about a dozen types of antidepressants, sleeping pills, and hours of banging-my-head-against-a-wall therapy, one doctor finally asked if I got migraines, which I did. He did a CAT scan and, lo and behold, I had 2 TBI's that had never been diagnosed, and were the cause of my symptoms. After treatment (of which involved literally one pill for emergency migraines) I know have none of those symptoms, and know how to live with the short term memory loss. I read a study (don't remember the source unfortunately) recently that suggests that a fair number of PTSD cases in soldiers from OIF/OEF are misdiagnosed brain injuries.

On the flip side
>mother gets t-boned at an intersection
>totals car, she's in the hospital for 2 months, takes another 6 before she can walk without a walker/crutches
>won't leave the house, has problems sleeping and is moody
>Take her for a drive one day after she gets a gift card for a mani/pedi
>she's nervous but does alright until we get to an intersection, then starts crying and shaking
>tell her I think she has PTSD from the wreck
>"No son, your father has PTSD, he was in Vietnam. I'm just a little jumpy, I'll be okay."
People seem to think that only soldiers in combat can get PTSD, and it's simply not true. We need to do a better job of educating the public about it, and quit assuming every soldier who's ever seen combat is a traumatised wreck.

To clarify, I saw plenty of combat and do not suffer from PTSD, my brain is rattled from getting blown up too many times (6).

>>3299287
But nobody's claiming that?

In earlier times not being in war was actually more miserable than being in war. People underestimate how fucking awful the life of a peasant used to be. Starvation and disease keeping population growth in check was normal. A 30 year old peasant probably already lost one or two children, several siblings, his parents, his wife was raped several times by plundering robbers or invaders, he and his family are batteling starvation more or less everyday, etc. Pp. Going to war was actually really, really attractive compared to that, which is also the main reason why there used to be so many wars in the first place.

>>3299316
This is true only to an extent. Knights were probably afforded a modicum of protection by their status, lifelong training and faith, which was repeatedly enforced by the ubiquitous presence of clergy on the battlefield.

>>3299233
People in the ancient world were more accustomed to death and killing than we are, so it didn't have quite the same impact. But there are certainly many examples of soldiers who dealt with mental issues due to stress. Off the top of my head, Herodotus describes a Athenian warrior at the battle of Marathon who went blind with no apparent injuries after observing the death of a fellow combatant. Herodotus also recorded Leonidas, the hero of Thermopylae, dismissing some of his troops after determining that because of previous combat stress they would be unable to perform at the level required. Gaius Marius seems to have suffered from flashbacks late in his life. According to Plutarch Marius, having gone into a fit of passion in which he announced a delusion that he was in command of the Mithridatic War, began to act as he would have on the field of battle.

>>3299233
Considering violent death was a stronger possibility back then, becoming hyper-vigilance wasn't so much a drawback as it was in more peaceful times.

The symptoms of PTSD can be found in a lot of historical epics like The Odyssey and An Táin Bó Cúailnge

I read an interesting essay once where the author noted that in these historical stories, the hero is more likely to exhibit symptoms of PTSD if the rules of warfare are somehow violated. For example, when Odysseus recalls the destruction of his ship by Zeus and begins to weep, or when Cú Chulainn faces a series of dishonorable duellists and has what seems to be a mental breakdown

It fits in with the theory that PTSD is more common in modern soldiers because they exist under high threat circumstances constantly

>>3299316
>conditions were far better
The stuff that happens in Mossul today was standard back when siege warfare was standard warfare.

>>3299233
PTSD would have probably just been the norm for most people although folks seemed to get it real bad after the Black Death.

Along with all the reason named here, one should note that wars between countries used to consist of two or three major battles, and then the war was normally over. There was also several months between each battle, and battles often wete over quickly because the side that looked like losing would often quickly flee the field. So yeah, while still very brutal, war was not so constant and intense as it is nowadays, let alone the hellish trench warfare in WW1 and 2.

>>3299233
If killing becomes part of your daily existence you probably become desensitized to it. Also violence was not viewed as much of a taboo as it is today.

>>3299311
Do you actually think that wars in the past were fought like they are today, but just with arrows instead of rifles?
Any commander would avoid battle whenever possible, unless they were absolutely certain they would win or had no other choice. Committing to a battle was always a huge risk because there always existed the chance of your force losing. Which meant that the opponent could do pretty much whatever he wanted for months. Battles were extremely rare and lasted for approximately half a day max in general.

>>3299444
No, I think that risking your life over and over over time fucks up your nerves and causes PTSD. And nice of you to mention how battle lasting half a day tops like it's some sort of picnic. You could die during any second of those conflicts. Have you ever been in a fight at all? Even the one where worst that could happen is to have your nose bloodied seems to last an eternity even when it's over in minutes, tops.

This is a shit thread full of shit responses. This is like watching /k/ talk about melee combat and just spouting memes and disinformation.

>>3299461
I practice historical reenactment. I've done battles. Of course the fear of death is not present, but one thing you do realize is that most of the time you are not engaged in combat, but instead manouvre and try to gain an upper hand by positioning. You are fucking stupid if you think that any soldier has the stamina to stay locked in combat for any long period of time.

Also, as I mentioned, battles were rare, and your average soldier would see like 3 in his lifetime. See this list for some perspective of what wars were like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hundred_Years%27_War_battles

>>3299481
You are literally larping and consider that that experience is comparable to actual war? I hope it's all been a ruse and a bait, I really do.

As a civilian you probably had more reason to get PTSD than as a soldier. As a soldier you fought the battle, but as a civilian you then had to deal with the plundering, raping and murdering invaders. And since people used to have wars basically constantly, nobody had PTSD in the sense that anyone had it, so it was more a normal state of mind.

>>3299461
Only around 10% of combatants in ancient/medieval battles actually fought

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>>3299481
>this entire post

>>3299511
And they were the ones that would have been experiencing PTSD. It's not like everyhone who came back from Vietnam or Iraq or WW1 or 2 had PTSD

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>>3299481
>as a professional LARPer, let me tell you how battles were, cause I'm an expert
Holy fuck I'm dying

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>>3299490
I highly doubt it is, reenactors are fucking cancer.

>>3299313
>that quote
Definitely sounds like PTSD.

>>3299233
But isn't PTSD caused by being shot at, not for killing anyone?

>>3299241
Didn't Thucydides also describe Peloponnesian war vets with PTSD-style symptoms?

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>>3299481
>I practice historical reenactment. I've done battles.

>>3299258
They say another big part is we're not giving soldiers enough wind down time together after deployments. Pre-Vietnam US soldiers had months of downtime waiting to be mustered out. This gave them months of time to work through shit with people who they'd gone through it with. Now it's only a day or two before you're back at Dover or wherever.

>>3300415
It's caused by stress. Bad accidents can cause it, having close calls with bullets or bombs can cause it, witnessing the death of someone close can cause it, along with plenty of other things. Soldiers get PTSD from killing others when they kill, or believe their actions caused the death of women or children. Particularly if they were the same age or otherwise reminded them of women and children they know. Few soldiers get PTSD from killing enemies or people they just plain don't care about.

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>>3299481
>I practice historical reenactment. I've done battles.
Do you larp as a german or a russian during ww2 battles?

>>3299233
Life itself is a PTSD. Why do you think babies cry? Of course, having the guts of your friend sprayed all over you isn't funny, but come on, without modern sensibility there wouldn't be such "victims" of PTSD. Public torture was common during Middle Age, Ludi were open to children in Rome, and no one was PTSD'd.

>>3299463
desu its been a few centuries since melee combat was the norm. LARPers have taken the scene to that regard.

>>3299300
Nigger you're under constant stress if you have overbearing parents. Different people have different abilities to cope with stress. The mechanism by which people get PTSD isn't fully understood.

Imagine being forced to leave the place where you spent your entire life, given a spear and told that you'll be able to come home when the war ends. You're marched all over, your friends die of sickness and disease, you have no idea when and if you'll fight a battle. Is that not stressful?

>>3300603
What the fuck. Reason brainlets think PTSD is something new is that it used to be called nostalgia, and nostalgia could kill you.

>>3299233
You Un-American commie bastard. You're asking such a nonchalant question about PTSD? You are to be gutted you Osama Bin Laden lover. Outrageous that you ask such a stupid question about our army about our soldiers my soldiers my America my country. Typical lib trash.

>>3301126
I was pretty sure that nostalgia was depression

>>3301203
I choose to believe this post is unironic.

>>3299233
Morale used to be much, much more important in medieval and ancient times. In modern warfare there is this concept of "cannon fodder", where it really doesn't matter if the soldiers on the front line are highly motivated or not, because they are going to die anyway.

Medieval battles were completely different. In medieval battles soldiers were actually able to flee from the battle. If a couple of soldiers just start running away, there is not much you could do about it as the general. You could try to catch them with your cavalry, but that might just endanger your whole position even worse if you pull cavalry out of formation. But now other soldiers see this group that just ran to safety and they might do the same. In modern times fleeing from a battlefield is not really possible because the battle is everywhere. Often battles were decided simply by who starts fleeing first.

So keeping morale up - having soldiers that actually want to fight - was very important. This is also the reason why european armies, despite sometimes already have populations of >10 million, rarely had armies larger than a couple of tenthousands or 100k max. You wouldn't just turn everyone you can into a soldier ("cannon fodder") but only those that can and want to fight. Normal peasants would just drag the moral of the army down and that was a huge disadvantage. This is also why there are so many battles where a heavily outnumbered army still was able to succeed: they had better morals, and the enemy army started fleeing en masse.

This is also why epic generals giving epic speeches before the battle was actually a thing. You wanted your men to be as highly motivated as possible, so you tried firing them up shortly before battle by giving an epic speech and fighting side by side with them.

Ancient battles was more like professional sports teams playing against each other, and not so much like the cannon fodder wars we have today.

Wounds from edged weapons are much worse than small arms fire, can you imagine how much blood there'd be an an ancient battlefield? Sounds like a traumatic experience to me. What's interesting to me is to think about how PTSD would have affected certain societies. Most Greek city States had militias so a pretty huge percentage of people in these societies would have seen combat, so there'd obviously be more PTSD.

>>3299325
Tbh he wasn't a very capable ruler. But alpha dog no doubt.

>>3299233
PTSD is an american thing

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>>3299706
What's your experience, by the way? You can dispute my knowledge of the matter any way you like, but do provide some counterarguments that do not attack me as a person.

>>3300490
Neither, not particularly interested in the era. I mostly do stuff like this.

>>3301887
Not him, but I would be curious to hear how you imagine to have someone from 1500s relate his experiences to you here, now?

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>>3301887
>my manchild roleplay is just like real life

Anon please

>>3299258
>Nah, it's bullshit made by Americans to feel like special snowflakes

Are you retarded? Not only soldiers experience PTSD. My close friend is an Iraqi and he had to see and experience all sorts of fucked up shit during the war.

He suffers from PTSD and depression and can hardly do anything most days

>>3301907
Probably completely differently, because I am a history student playing make believe for fun instead of a soldier risking his life out of necessity.

What I intended to convey, is that my experiences in simulating past battles pretty much the only feasible way we have today, and study of the subject in university (as well as my own actual military service) has taught me that 1) battles were rare 2) battles did not take that long on average 3) most of the time a unit in battle is maneuvering and looking for an opportunity to force the enemy into a shitty spot before committing to actual combat. Ergo, a soldier would spend very little time under immediate threat of life, whereas today modern weaponry and they way wars are fought is so different that constant threat is actually a thing in many operations.

I have not claimed to know what war and doing battle is like from the soldier's perspective because reenactment doesn't accurately represent that due to many psychological factors, but just from an observers perspective.

>>3301951
Are you saying that those moments of sheer terror once you do end up in a fight are mitigated that you would have weeks of marching and evading or chasing someone just for the privilege of experiencing another round of pant-shitting fear?

>>3301966
Marching is mainly boring, and fear is most intense when you're waiting for the battle to start. When the action starts, the fear goes away. This is something we studied in the army. The anticipation is what stresses you out, not the fight itself.

>>3302035
Dude, no just no. Studying something is nowhere near as actually living it. And besides, why are you so adamant that waiting to die in 1500s is a walk in a park compared to waiting to die today?

>>3302039
>Dude, no just no. Studying something is nowhere near as actually living it.
For these studies veterans were obviously interviewed, and lots of data has been collected from the Iraq and Afganistan wars. You think war and psychology are not subjects that can be studied?

>waiting to die in 1500s is a walk in a park compared to waiting to die today?
Never did I say that it is a walk in the park. But anyways, these days an artillery strike may come down at any moment, or an airstrike, or a missile. These are things that you cannot foresee, nor do anything about. And these situations may last for years with little to no respite (not counting leaves etc).
In the 1500's the danger was much more observable, and you only participated in a battle maybe a couple of times a year, in extremely turbulent times, if you were a professional soldier. Most of the time was spent in a camp or on the march, as battles were rarely sought out. An existing army is a deterrent. A beaten army is an invitation to fuck up everything it was protecting.

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>>3302365
>These are things that you cannot foresee, nor do anything about.

Warfare has always been about luck

>le dude impaling you with his sword from behind while you're fighting another enemy
>le arrow ending up in your head
>le cannonball going straight through your torso

>>3302365
As previously said, insurgencies and asymetrical warfare have always existed
When you werent fighting a pitched battle, you could always be attacked by bandits or butthurt civilians

I seriously doubt that soldiers who fought in the 30 Years War for exemple had easier time than US soldiers in Iraq

>>3301346
>In modern times fleeing from a battlefield is not really possible because the battle is everywhere. Often battles were decided simply by who starts fleeing first.

You're forgetting the part where the majority of losses inflicted upon an army were once the route started. Strength in numbers is everything and these people couldn't run for long enough to escape the winning army just like that. It was a massive gamble taken only once the alternative was real 100% chance of death.

>>3302379
>>le dude impaling you with his sword from behind while you're fighting another enemy
Why would you have your back to the enemy? Sounds like a really inefficient tactic.

>>3302387
Bandits attacking a military force? Sure.

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Official stats in France.
It doesn't seem that high, and I don't know why there's a sudden increase...
(there's about 30.000 soldiers in operation around the world)

>>3302424
>soldiers can never be detached in smaller forces when occupying a nation

Of course bandits wouldnt attack a stacked army heading to a battle
But soldiers had also other duties when in enemy lands, like occupying or foraging
And these smaller parties could often be attacked

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>>3299481

>>3300415
Nope. Check out Christopher Browning. Wehrmacht units committed to shooting unarmed civilians were ravaged by PTSD so badly it became a threat to unit cohesion.

>>3302387
The 30 year war was one of the most fucked up conflicts of all time, notable hundreds of years later for it. It's an outlier, not the norm.

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>>3299233
Well,in ww1 it was called shell shock,in the American civil war it was called Soldier's Heart and in the napoleonic era it was called Bullet's wind.
And back then,keep in mind that they whised to die for their country,god or king.

>>3299243
Don't forget the meme that Vietnam soldiers fought 400 days a month thanks to helicopter mobility while WW2 soldiers only fought two days a year

>>3303022
People actually being willing to die for something as nebulous as all that is highly debatable.

>>3299258
Clearly no anti-American bias in this post. Stop spreading blatantly incorrect information, PTSD has always been a thing.

>>3299311
He didn't say it wasn't stressful, he said you aren't under constant stress, which is true. The chances of you dying randomly outside of battle were low. You spent most of your time marching. Soldiers in the trenches were literally never safe, a shell could always land nearby and kill you.

>>3303022
>in the napoleonic era it was called Bullet's wind
The phrase "vent du boulet" as a depiction of the trauma is not that old. During the napoleonic period and even before, it only referred to an artillery problem.
Besides, no one cared about such silly things before WW1. I've read an interesting book about the topic (Les soldats de la honte, Jean Yves Le Naour), and if the phenomenon was known to the soldiers and their families, the medical corp only took it in account around the end of WW1. Remember psychiatry was almost inexistant at that time, let alone in the centuries before.

>>3301887
>what's your experience by the way?
I've done 1 tour in Iraq and 2 in Afghanistan as a Combat Engineer, operating in a Route Clearance capacity, which is a nice way to say drive (or walk in some places) around and look for bombs hidden on the road and ambushes.

I've been in contact plenty of times, and LARPing with blanks is nowhere near the real thing. I know, I've done both. Don't get me wrong, re-enacting is fun, and I always liked doing larger battles, but it's literally just a bunch of history nerds getting together, grilling and throwing back a few, then dressing up and showing normies stuff you think is cool, then at the end of the day you march around a field, make some loud smoke and maybe fall down. I in no way shape or form think I understand what a Union infantryman went through during a battle because I put on my Blues and walk around for a day or two, that would be asinine. It'd be like an airsoft player comparing his experience on the field to mine in the sandbox.

>>3303058
Good point

>>3299241
>>3299268
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_S._Patton_slapping_incidents

desu, I dont know if I feel rage, sorrow or simply empathy, poor guys

>>3299313

This is also immediately after he rants about one of his supporters not backing him and advising him against rebellion. He could be worrying about the coming battles, not reliving past ones.

PTSD doesn't come from killing people, it comes from being shot at or bombed, or more likely the disease and generally shitty conditions of warfare in the case of earlier warfare. If PTSD is more common now it's probably just because war is louder.

would people be forced to kill civilians in early wars? I know they killed/raped etc out of their own volition as long as warfare has been around, but i can't imagine a higher up telling a soilder "you HAVE to kill these non combatants" until relatively recent warfare, maybe around the large scale adoption of guns.

>>3301887
>What's your experience, by the way? You can dispute my knowledge of the matter any way you like, but do provide some counterarguments that do not attack me as a person.
look dude, not even the guy you responded to, but you need some truth

I reespect and like re-enactements, for their historical and recreational value, but you are vastly closer to the experiences of somebody who has never heard of the concept of war than to the experiences of somebody that fought in a war

>>3304412
fucking rome intentionally wiped out entire cities if it needed to be done

Just in a documentarie I watched recently

Some celts stood in a fortress, sorrounded by romans and caesar, and they expelled the woman and the children, so the romans would feed them for humanitarian reasons and lose provisions for that

The roman army left the women and children to slowly starve, right in front of them, between the fortress and the army

Romans were pretty brutal by themselves

>>3304453
That's called Alesia and that's the most famous Roman battle

>>3299233
Its not from killing people but the Greeks had a word for it...don't remember.

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It seems that old battles were generally (>muh cannae) more about posturing than today's. Who would run first etc. The ability to kill was something to be proud of, because most men would fail.

"Author of the Civil War Collector's encyclopedia F. A. Lord tells us that after the Batde of Gettysburg, 27,574 muskets were recovered from the battlefield. Of these, nearly 90 percent (twenty-four thousand) were loaded. Twelve thousand of these loaded muskets were found to be loaded more than once, and six thousand of the multiply loaded weapons had from three to ten rounds loaded in the barrel." Why? (Grossman, 1995)

I like the theory that exposure to the idea of killing other people is the most PTSD inducing experience of all. The level of dissociation required fucks the human psyche. Thing is, even with technology, people still kill others up close.

>>3305463
You could explain the multiple loads as retards (or maybe it works i dunno) trying to shoot multiple balls at once.

>>3305475
you are the retard

>>3299300
>people actively trying to kill you doesn't cause stress
are you actually retarded?

>>3305463
Hey, could link some more related reading, if you have any. That's fascinating

>>3305541
He's going to link you "On Killing," by LT. COL Grossman, which is shit and has been debunked as drivel more than once because it's largely based on research that is basically pure speculation.

Long story short an Army officer who has never been anywhere near a combat zone writes a book about fighting in combat and based most of his research on a book written by another officer who had never been in combat and basically pulled numbers out of his ass.

>>3299233
1. PTSD was a thing since ancient times, there are numerous writings about warriors coming home, shaking all the time, waking up screaming etc.

2. Modern warfare causes PTSD more often because it is very unpredictable, you are constantly in danger, you could be targeted by an airstrike or artillery and have to be on alert all the time. It is also extremely loud and we are instinctively shocked by loud sounds. Prolonged anxiety+sleep depravation = more cases of PTSD.

3. As for killing: in ancient times it was less of a taboo, people saw death all the time and got desensitized to it early. Also killing wasn't considered as morally wrong as in modern times.

>>3299352
>>3299370
>>3301346
>>3305463
Most interesting posts.

>>3305606
>>3305606

Yup, I'm the fag that quoted him in the first place. Long parts of the book are trash, but the overall posturing argument is compelling. You gotta read it very critically.

If the author himself has been in combat or not makes difference in coolness, but not in logic. It's like saying that Corbett's writings are useless. Still, doesn't mean I'm defending the parts where the author goes full retard.

I'd say that reading the first parts of On Killing plus Gat's War in Human Civilization (which is the opposite, saying why people kill a lot in the first place) is a nice starting point.

I remember reading something that stated the reason PTSD is so much more prevalent in modern times is because of how quickly a soldier can go from actively fighting in war, seeing his companions die, etc. to being shipped home in a matter of days.

In pre-modern war, soldiers would be at home for years at a time. They would live with their fellow troops, fight with their fellow troops, and march home with their fellow troops across many miles which would take much time. These marches home and the constant time spent with one another with absolutely no breaks would naturally reinforce a support system where they'd talk about what happened.

In modern times, it takes a few days to go from fighting for your life and being mortally wounded to laying in a bed stateside staring out a window into an idyllic neighborhood where somewhere off in the distance kids are playing and someone is mowing their lawn.

>>3305752
*In pre-modern war, soldiers would be away for years at a time.

>>3305745
As an enlisted soldier myself, the way he writes tells me exactly the type of officer he is and the type of person he is, which probably affects the way I read his book. He's the type who thinks he'd be an outstanding combat leader and would probably do some cool shit and win medals. You get a lot of privates with that attitude too, but they're pretty quickly disillusioned. Officers with that attitude tend to be more dangerous, not only to themselves but to those around them.

I mean at one point he equates eating frogs during Ranger training to shooting people, which is not only a huge stretch, but shows how far up his own ass he is. The most damning thing about Grossmans book is that Marshalls research had been debunked and considered trash for years before he published On Killing, yet he still uses it as his main source.

I'll agree that some parts are interesting and probably would be worth studying if someone worth a damn actually studied it. I haven't read War in Human Civ, so I'll take your word for it, might add it to my list.

I'm not particularly interested in the psychology of combat and war, but to add (very little) to the topic I recall reading about a minor English noble who's servant dropped some metal cookware, and he flipped his shit and had a mental breakdown. I wish I could remember where I read it, it's going to drive me crazy, but anyway the theory is that the loud sound of metal on metal clashing probably triggered a flashback.

P.s.- flashbacks suck donkey dick, and Chantix is the devils medicine.

>>3305752
That is a very interesting theory. Any possibility you remember where you read that?

>>3305407
probably why it apeared on a documentary
pretty new to history in general

>>3305745
>>3305961
well, that's dissapointing

I downloaded on killing thinking it would be a very good insight on the psichology relating to killing, and it turns out it's shit

You guys know other books on the subject?

>>3306300
Sorry anon, I know how you feel. Unfortunately no, I don't know any other books on the subject. You didn't buy it did you?

>>3305752
Not to mention that it's not exactly considered customary to talk to people about horrible gruesome shit you saw on the front lines. War veterans are under a lot of bullshit expectations from normies who expect them to be the pinnacle of manhood and society.

>>3306363
didnt waste money, just some time finding it, luckily

It's a shame because it really is an interesting subject and you dont get too many people talking about it
besides, I need the info for a project Im working on, so the need is doubled

>>3299233
They drink themselves to death. Alcoholism was much more ingrained into the lives of everyday people. So people suffering from PTSD would become heavy drinkers and die off.

>>3306455
Wew, that's good. What are you working on exactly? Out of curiosity.

>>3299233
PTSD is what happens when weak men suddenly have to start fighting.

Past societies tended to have strong men fight and not faggots.

>>3299241
They are cowards. Pity has no place in war, Last Man.

>>3306486
t. sheltered /pol/poster

>>3299398
The difference is that the heroes of those epics are strong and actually get over all obstacles that they face. Modern soldiers with "PTSD" are just weak.

>>3306492
Don't give him (you)s fool

>>3306499
sorry

>>3304412
People don't like to admit it, but I'll say it. Inflicting pain on people is fun. If you still have some small amount of testosterone and haven't become completely metrosexualized, you have wanted to beat and kill somebody at least once in your life. In war, the natural instincts of men are unleashed, and they can show their valor and strength.

>>3306483
>>3304216
this is me, I made two or three more post after that

I like to design boardgames as a hobby, and I wanted this one too be far too complex for a boardgame, so I am thinking about making a videogame
If you are interested, as I say there, AMA that you want

>>3299243
Some studies indicate that the concussive force from explosives may have a genuine impact on the brain, this was actually theorized to have been the cause of this spike in combat stress as far back as WW1.

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The real answer is that we don't know.
You can't take a phenomena from a Western psychiatric framework and try and stick it on people from different cultures and time periods. People always misinterpret that Shakespeare bit about Henry for example.
Even today psychology is waking up to the fact that modern PTSD research has been mostly Amerocentric, and doesn't necessarily map well to people from different places.

>>3306502
No this is just what double digit iq meatheads feel

>>3299233
Modern western soldiers are emotionally like little girls compared to pre modern warriors

>>3306486
>Pity has no place in war, Last Man.
meanwhile the bravest and strongest charge lines and die in a hail of gunfire. theres your ubermensch for you

PTSD comes mainly from an abrupt difference in the security situation of a person.

Basically, take a well-sheltered middle class kid from his safe american suburbia-paradise and put him into Vietnam as soon as he turns 18, and you get somebody who is deeply traumatised.

Take a medieval peasant who faces starvation every winter and who probably already lost several family members and put him on a medieval battlefield (that is indeed not as brutal as a modern front line) and he will not have such a traumatising experience.

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>>3305463
True, I wonder about those who didn't have a problem with all the violence and chaos though, I met men in my enlistment that thrived in that sort of environment and yet never seemed shook by any of it. I had a Staff Sergeant who had been on multiple deployments (He was at Ramadi when the entire city turned on the Coalition) and the man had a family and kids and was always smiles and jokes when he wasn't ripping your face off for having a fucked up uniform. I got to hear his stories on deployment (I'll share some if you guys are interested) and, from what I've seen in other people, this man's mind should've shattered long ago and yet here he is aloof.

Are some people just built for war, both mentally and physically?

>>3307777
>Take a medieval peasant who faces starvation every winter and who probably already lost several family members and put him on a medieval battlefield (that is indeed not as brutal as a modern front line) and he will not have such a traumatising experience.
You didnt use peasants for fighting. they were for farming.

>>3299316
>War back then was honoured by the population
kek

>>3299316
>conditions were far better
double kek

>>3307813
Perhaps he just hides it better. Perhaps he is a psychopath. Could be either, but my money is on the former.

>>3306486
Because the Elan Vital was such a success in 1914, right?

>>3307903
It could be, my theory is that he disassociates himself from everything he's experienced from what he's told me, he said his deployments felt like "Watching a movie with himself in them", kind of like he's watching everything unfold from an outsiders view. He also said that there really wasn't much he can do about all the things he saw and did, saw no point in kicking himself for things he will never be able to change or undo. In turn, he also doesn't share the blazing hatred other Marines have for the hajis, he has a disdain for them but not outright, vitriolic hatred.

Is this truly a portrait of a man at peace with himself?

>>3307777
>Take a medieval peasant who faces starvation every winter and who probably already lost several family members and put him on a medieval battlefield (that is indeed not as brutal as a modern front line) and he will not have such a traumatising experience.

Now take a 1810s French bourgeois and put him in the Battle of Borodino (which was far worse than anything the US experienced post-WW2) and???
Why didnt they suffer PTSDs?

>>3307818
Plenty of civilians were conscripted in times of war and often had a reputation to maintain as capable fighters of different weaponry, depending on the region.

In fact, many conscripts brought their own weapons and armor

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>>3302425
It could be like autism. People didn't know it existed, so it was never used as a diagnosis. Then when researchers started to see it was its own illness, but they got it all wrong.

>Autism was caused by unloving mothers, etc
>Shell shock is only found in weak men

Then the pendulum swings, research fleshes out the idea, but now every kid has autistic traits. So it's a case data catching up to our current psychological understanding. There were always autistic kids, but we didn't call them autists. They were just eccentric. There was always PTSD among war veterans. Men came home from WW2, developed into alcoholics, and beat their wives because of it. We just didn't call it PTSD. We know more about it now so it's inevitable that more people get diagnosed with it.

It's also a case of the pendulum swinging the other way. Now every eccentric trait of a child can be placed on the spectrum even though some people are just weird. Any sort of difficult experience that soldiers or people with trauma remember is PTSD.

>>3299233
PTSD comes from super traumatizing stressing situations. That has always happened to people since the dawn of humanity. However now that we got big boom booms and ratatatas it's easier than ever to get PTSD during warfare.

>>3308398

PTSD comes from /prolonged/ trauma. Fighting in a terrible battle that lasts one day is unlikely to give you PTSD, but being under fire for days or weeks is likely to, even tho the "absolute peril" faced in both scenarios may be the same.

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>>3308398
>now that we got big boom booms

We've had them since the 1400s senpai

>>3308447
>but being under fire for days or weeks

Which never happens to Modern US troops in the Middle East

>but le constant risk of ambush and sudden attack from rebels

Always existing for armies invading a foreign land

>>3308447
I agree that /prolonged/ is a thing. Shootyguns made sure people get to be traumatized for much longer now. I don't think vanilla medieval battles were very PTSD inducing either, but one-day-battles weren't the only source for trauma in the days of olde.

>>3308449
case in point?

>>3308458
>what are scouts
You do realize that there was always a force of horseback scouts patrolling the perimeters of the main army?

>>3307813
There's notorious mad lads like Mad Jack Churchill and Adrian Carton de Wiart, but who knows what makes them tick?
There's a lot of factors at play here. Like there's that woman that doesn't experience fear for example, but what that means is that she also can't really be traumatized. She gets robbed at gun point, and it's fine. Doesn't bother her one bit. So I can imagine fear plays into it.
Also some people are just more prone to anxiety which might get exacerbated during war time, where other people just keep it cool no matter what.

I guess it comes down to the emotional fluctuations of a person (which are also governed by thought). So somebody in a good frame of mind, feeling well emotionally is probably less prone trauma being inflicted. Maybe some guys really get a kick out of combat or something, and this keeps them emotionally and mentally satisfied.

>>3308102
Post some of the stories you heard. I'm really interested in learning more abouth the whole concept of killology and willingness to kill
(others can share too ofc)

>>3304412
When the Hoplite garrison of Bactria rebelled after Alexander the Greats death, his successor Perdiccas send out the General Pheikon with about the same number of Macedonian phalangites to wipe them out. Pheikon though promised to take them into his service, to strengthen his own position. When the Hoplites came towards the Phalanx, greeting them as old comrades, the Macedonians had their minds set on the loot the Greeks had acquired during the years of conquest. They proceeded to butcher their brothers in arms to the last man.
So yes, if they could expect some kind of reward, experienced warriors would murder even their allies.

>>3308447
Wrong. PTSD is associated with one specific traumatic event. Try claiming PTSD and not being able to clearly articulate the incident, and you'll get laughed at.

>>3299233
War was always horrific and evidence of war-related PTSD goes back to the Iliad, but you also got to rape and pillage. Not to mention being able to acquire land and political power. What do you get now? A possibly worthless college education?

>>3309559
It's a mixture of both. My mother is diagnosed with PTSD but it's not from some exact specific event. She's been through lots of shit though.

Didn't Ajax in Greek myth essentially suffer from PTSD and is a big reason why he killed himself>

>>3301346
>So keeping morale up - having soldiers that actually want to fight - was very important. This is also the reason why european armies, despite sometimes already have populations of >10 million, rarely had armies larger than a couple of tenthousands or 100k max. You wouldn't just turn everyone you can into a soldier ("cannon fodder") but only those that can and want to fight. Normal peasants would just drag the moral of the army down and that was a huge disadvantage. This is also why there are so many battles where a heavily outnumbered army still was able to succeed: they had better morals, and the enemy army started fleeing en masse.

Well that and the last thing the nobles wanted to do was arm their peasants and teach them how to fight. Hence why Napoleon came along with his "you cannot stop me, I spend 30,000 lives a month" which made him so dangerous

>>3301393
>Wounds from edged weapons are much worse than small arms fire, can you imagine how much blood there'd be an an ancient battlefield?
I can't remember who described it this way, but they said that an ancient battlefield would look less like what we think of with the term "battle" and more like thousands of individual murders going on in one place as the same time.

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>>3299241
>The poor souls who were suffering from PTSD were regarded as cowards looking for a way out of the frontline.

>>3304412

They didn't HAVE TO until very recently because total war is a relatively new thing. Back then they did it because they wanted to.

>>3305463
That specific image isn't ptsd though, it's a kind of temporary shock soldiers tend to go into after doing a whole lot of murdering. It can lead to PTSD, but it isn't the condition itself, it wears off.

Wasn't there an old officer that cured his ptsd and depression by shooting himself in the head?

>>3310781
Yes, The Major
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,815069,00.html

You'd be surprised how many people have tried to kill themselves due to suffering from mental illness, fail at dying and yet by mere chance just performed successful brain surgery via bullet. It's likely in the double digits.

>>3308102
>Is this truly a portrait of a man at peace with himself?

I doubt it. That kind of cool detachment about something apparently very disturbing doesn't sound right. Then again, I'm just on 4chan, judging a person I never met, with absolutely no training to judge him even if I did meet him.

>>3308106
Marshall Ney clearly suffered from PTSD

>>3310795
you cant read the story without paying

>>3300454
I have completed over 300 missions in VR
I feel like some kind of legendary mercenary

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>>3299273
>court marshalled

It's spelled COURT-MARTIALED

>>3306502
>things internet tards actually believe

>>3308789
It sounds kind of silly, but I tend to be fairly anxious in general. But whenever I play paintball with my friends I go full rambo while my friends are cowering. Of course this is nowhere near the real deal.

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>>3299336
>>"No son, your father has PTSD, he was in Vietnam. I'm just a little jumpy, I'll be okay."

Damn.

>>3299352
>hurr durr every commoner until 1950 experienced constant starvation and pillaging and then died at 40