2:23am September 27, 2013

➸ Trying to find the right words: Practically everyone thinks they're doing either the right thing, or the only possible thing, at the time.

youneedacat:

thegreenanole:

youneedacat:

There are major exceptions but I’m not talking about them here.

This goes back to how we all tell ourselves stories about the world. And in most of our stories, we are the good guy.

I sometimes get into other people’s heads. I don’t know how and I don’t know what I’m doing and…

A dear friend of mine killed himself last fall. He was a former Marine, and had spent five years in Iraq and Afghanistan as an infantry squad leader. He told me what it was like to kill, to become a killer - it never rested easy on him. It does change you in a fundamental way. It has to.

He’d ask, rhetorically, why when he killed someone in Iraq or Afghanistan who may not have done anything they’d pat him on the back and say, “Good job, Marine,” but if on coming home he would have killed a child rapist or the social worker who left the child in an abusive home, that would be murder.

He told me about one particular time in Iraq and he said he went back to his tent that night and wrote in his journal that he didn’t know if he’d ever be safe to be around people again.

It changes you. Even if your government tells you it’s all right. Maybe especially then. Dehumanizing the enemy. That’s how they do it in the armed services. Some of the most institutionalized racism you’d ever not want to find - right there.

We need to stop dehumanizing each other.

Let me not turn this into an anti-war rant, though.

I’m saddened not surprised he killed himself. :-( I’ve heard some of the worst war ptsd happens to people who have killed. (Unless they lack a conscience altogether, but then the military LIKES people like that because they don’t break down the way most people would. Ugh.) The military has tried to find ways to make killing more distant and remote… But even then people who do it continue to get ptsd even if they weren’t physically in battle. It really, really screws people up.

And then when you have to try to function in the regular world, with all those walls smashed down, it’s nearly impossible. Because your instinct is to respond with much more violence to much less provocation than most people would. And that takes an extreme amount of self-control. Those walls can apparently, with great difficulty, be built up again. But it did not surprise me to at one point find a support group online for people who have killed as part of their jobs and are having trouble handling it.

Lesser violence mirrors that experience, but it’s much less intense than killing is. But it’s still a wall with consequences for breaking it down.

(Oh and also not everything that breaks down those walls is external. People who decide to do violence or kill often have to work themselves up to it deliberately and intensely. The first time anyway. It gets easier to do, harder to stop, every time. Unless something else changes.)

Some people aren’t phased by the killing. They can do it without problem. For some it’s a means to an end or others it’s justified and others it’s like doing the dishes.
I have a friend who was an Army sniper. They would give him a picture and tell him to kill the person in the picture. He couldn’t do it anymore so he didn’t reenlist. He would think of how the person had a family that would miss them. He had sleeping problems before but after they were much worse. Not just the killing that causes PTSD though. Constant feeling of being under threat, loud noises and sounds do it too.

Yeah. The ones who aren’t fazed by the killing are the ones the military likes the best. All those things cause ptsd but killing turns out to cause the worst of it usually. The military has done a lot of research into ptsd.

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