Without knowing the details of his deployment, he was very likely safer wherever he was than he would have been in the US and commuting to work on our freeways. Why would I respect a man whose fictional fear left him broken?
Look -- you, and all the other "oh what a poor lad" folks are never going to agree. But when I hear about this non-combat PTSD I roll my eyes. Gangrape? Fine. Brutally tortured? Fine. Kept himself up late at night wondering if a mortar would land in his tent. Fucking pussy. These idiots tend to get all hush-hush about their deployment and let civilians fill in the blanks, they don't come right out and say ("Yea I got super scared in Iraq. I never left the wire on an enormous base; it was technically safer than my usual shenanigans in south California. But, weirdly enough, I got so damn afraid I fucked my brain up!") So yea, fine, if they convinced a doc they're broken then what the fuck ever, lets pay them in perpetuity. But the reason some vets, myself included, get fucking righteous about this is that we, and the other 99 percent who agreed to do a job and did that job, aren't getting paid in perpetuity for being afraid onourcombat tour, even though we were. And if we had felt like it, we probably could have convinced a doctor that we wereso afraid so oftenthat we rate a PTSD diagnosis. But we didn't, because that's a fucking pussy move.
You're assuming he never left the wire in a convoy. He saw the field hospitals, the wreckages from the Humvees that were vaporized, and the remains of soldiers that were still inside. He wasn't scared as dying, so much as coming home half a man. He also had his enlistment extended with those bullshit laws that broke the government's promise to a lot of the troops in order to maintain the necessary levels for the Surge. He had to spend another two years in the military unwillingly, and then when he returned home received completely inadequate medical care.
There's a movie called Lone Survivor, which shows the seals battling an army of 200+ insurgents and kicking ass before they bite it. In reality, they were attacked by 7-12 insurgents. When faced with death, people are a lot less heroic than we want to believe. They're making a great sacrifice, but even the greatest aren't perfect and are susceptible to our biological responses, which often results in PTSD.
Breivik said the first shots pushed him into a "fight-and-flight" mode that made it easier to continue killing.
Some teenagers were frozen in panic, unable to move even when Breivik ran out of ammunition. He changed clips. They didn't move. He shot them in the head.
While he was going around shooting, people were so terrified that they couldn't move. True fear is so powerful, and you can sit here and speculate how your body will react but you truly don't know. Combat, or even seeing the results of it, are amazingly stressful... especially in our age when death can come anytime, from anywhere. Most people don't even want to kill one another, and they'll "posture" instead of actually fighting. They do this by firing up in the air or pretending to fight, without actually trying to kill the enemy, even when that enemy is likely to kill those soldiers. It's said that a very small percentage 5-10% of soldiers are responsible for 90%+ of deaths involving small arms.
Read The Psychology of Killing as it explains that prior to cartridges, a lot of weapons on the battlefield were reloaded 7-8 times and never fired. Trying to simplify war is fruitless, as each soldier has his own personality, morals, and most importantly brain/hormones.
I read a good article that says that in wars involving melee combat, the lines weren't actually always joined. They'd fight, and separate and intimidate one another, and then occasionally close the gap and fight a little, then separate. Being in melee combat for an extended period of time was both exhausting and stressful. The longbow didn't win Agincourt. It was the fact that the infantry in the back were applying pressure to men in front of them, forcing them forward and to fall over face first, and get trampled by the men behind them. A historian is quoted as saying that more people probably suffocated face first in the mud/trampled, than ever killed by arrows.
Quit acting like a badass. You aren't some heroic warrior, and denigrating another man's service based on your own assumptions is just hypocritical.
That was overall a fun and extremely educational course, though.
