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Subject: Dealing with combat stress
jofredes    4/20/2004 9:31:17 AM
What is a good method for dealing with stress in combat? It seems to me that primitive societies are a lot better at dealing with combat stress using schamans, different forms of drugs and different forms of hypnosis in spells and dances. Does any modern industrialised contry use any even vague similar method today? What could western armies learn from for example shaolin monks, Indian combat gurus etc?
 
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jastayme3    RE:Dealing with combat stress   5/11/2004 12:17:32 PM
Dealing with combat stress 4/20/2004 9:31:18 AM What is a good method for dealing with stress in combat? It seems to me that primitive societies are a lot better at dealing with combat stress using schamans, different forms of drugs and different forms of hypnosis in spells and dances. Does any modern industrialised contry use any even vague similar method today? What could western armies learn from for example shaolin monks, Indian combat gurus etc? .......................................... Actually western societie does do very similar sorts of things. Salutes, "sirs", flags, "great deeds of our regiment",cadence chants, and other military rituals. Remember the Welshmen in "Zulu" singing "Men of Harlech" while the Zulus chanted (I like that scene; it gives a feeling of "me great warrior, you great warrior" commonality). Of course westerners don't give those things an explicitly religious aura-at least not to that degree. Part of the reason is that westernerners tend to prefer religions that only reluctantly accept the validity of the warrior's path. Westerners certainly have been known use drugs before combat; remember the stories of "Dutch courage" whipped up by infusions of alchohal? Be that as it may I don't believe that privative people are free from combat stress. They just deal with it in different ways. Also in many cases ordinary life is lived at the survival level. After all hunting big game with spears, probably psychologically simmilar in many ways to hunting men(though men are-usually-plundered rather than eaten). For that matter, did our ancestors always think all that different of going to sea, or going out West, than they did of going to war? Warfare is more of a contrast with everyday life today than it was in the past when there were quite a few very dangerous jobs. For that matter do cops and firemen get PTS? It would seem probable that they do. Moreover when primatives fight they fight on a different level. Unless it's about a blood feud, the prize is usually some portable spoil,notably livestock(I sometimes make a bad pun and call these things "rustling matches"). You can see why the heros of legend liked that sort of thing so much. When it does escalate it never gets into the Verdun-like stage because there is simply to few combatants and the objective doesn't demand that one stand and fight. Besides each individual warrior is a important part of a given chieftain's strength, because of the small-scale. One warrior is as valueable to a chief as a whole battleship was to the Admiralty. And the chief knew all his warriors personally. Besides if they think their chief cares nothing for their lifes, the warriors are in a very could position to "frag" him. Western warfare is built around the assumption that the prize will be territory and political control. You can move a herd of sheep into the hills away from the foe. You can't do that with Alsace-Lorraine(it's already in the hills, of course but you know what I mean). Therefore westerners are more likly to have to fight intensely for long periods of time. This is more the case today than in the past where campaigning was more marching, and battle came seldom. Sieges were different,which is why everyone always looked on them with dread in the past-and still do. They were more common and it could be argued that they were the real foundation of western military culture(they also carried over into civilian language, which is why a given scholar might be a "bastion" of Civilization, even though someone else is trying to "undermine" his work). Also Westerners think a lot about Psychology today. A primative who saw someone with PTS would if charitable call it the equivalent slang term for "buck fever". If uncharitable he would call him a coward. But he would think no more about it. He would be reasonably fammiliar with the phenomenon from experience; he simply would not make a scientific analysis. For that matter neither would most Western soldiers unless they have interests along that line. There is no new thing under the sun.
 
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jastayme3    RE:Dealing with combat stress   5/11/2004 12:41:07 PM
It must also remember that running modern weapons needs a cool head while berserk rage can carry one through a close in rumble(though even there a cool head is useful). Also sometimes Westerners make a war ritual out of having fewer war rituals. They make a fetish out of stoicism. Remember the old stories like Drake's game of bowls? Westernern warriors look like a inhuman machine sometimes and it is often terrifying to outsiders. Remember the tales of militiamen running and leaving the Contenentials in the lurch while the redcoats slowly advanced? Or the leigionaries standing in solid blocks amid a sea of screaming Celts? For that matter remember how Dracula(or the Ringwraiths) are pictured as moving slowly on their victims? It's creepy on a screen and is creepy in war. Americans may have nightmares about "wild terrorists" but our enemies probably have nightmares about "antlike westerneres". I remember once during the buildup to Desert Storm watching a soldier cooly and methodically describing the technicalities of his particular specialty, while someone next to me commented that it sounded scarier than Saddam's rants.
 
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stratego    RE:Dealing with combat stress   10/2/2004 7:50:05 PM
It seems to me that, as a known sociological phenomenon in the US, "combat stress" took off in the Vietnam War. At the time, the idea was commonly presented in the media that Vietnam was creating much higher levels of combat stress due to unique aspects of the war, such as the difficulty of determining friend from foe, etc. Yet, this seems unlikely to me. Did the millions of US soldiers who fought in WWII experience significantly less combat stress than the US soldiers who fought in Vietnam, just because all their enemies wore uniforms? I doubt it. Perhaps out society was more coherent and interconnected in the past (less mobility, more family solidarity, stronger communities) and the WWII combat stress cases were more often absorbed and taken care of by wives, brothers, sisters, parents, etc. In that case, they wouldn't have existed statistically, even though they were there. (i.e, no treatment by the Army, the VA, etc.) The men themselves may have been more stoically and quietly accepting of bad outcomes of this process (becoming alcoholics, for example.) In addition, our society gets softer and softer. That probably makes combat seem worse and worse, even if its just the same. For example, I'm 53. When I was a kid, almost every boy was subjected to a fairly tough, macho regime. If you couldn't really cut it (and I was one of the ones who couldn't very well), you blamded yourself, sucked it in and got by as well as you could. Although many considered such boys wimps, there was in fact an element of toughness there. Now I don't have children, but I can see this idea is considered morally evil by much of society now (the macho idea). In my day, I was not aware of anyone even questioning it. And a big part of the macho system was to prepare boys to become men in a war. I suspect it worked, to an extent. These kinds of factors would affect the amount of combat stress. I feel it is quite impressive that such a "soft", wealthy society as the US can continue to produce warriors and defend the world's freedom. Read Fehrenback's comparison of American soldiers and Chinese soldiers in the Korean war (This Kind of War). He just makes the point that life was very hard for almost everyone in China, almost all the time. The difference between everyday life and combat was not nearly as big for them.
 
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