I was having a discussion with a few of my friends tonight about modern warfare and PTSD. My point was that PTSD was always common throughout the history of warfare, but was exponentially increased with the reveal of modern warfare.
My point was soldiers have more to fear about bombs, tanks, helicopters, jet aircraft, missiles and nuclear weapons as opposed to peasants chucking spears and hitting each other with axes and pikes which in turn results in more PTSD cases and experiences.
What do you think Sup Forums? Did modern warfare create more instances of post-traumatic stress?
Modern warfare and bronze/iron age warfare put different stresses on a person. With bronze age warfare, you need to get up close and personal, and people don't like doing that at all. Even in Napoleonic warfare, bayonet charges would peter out and soldiers would rather shoot at insanely short distances. So the experience of getting up close and stabbing someone in the guts with a pointy bit of metal can mess you up mentally. I would bet that these guys had PTSD-like symptoms too, a lot of soldiers, would go into battle under the effects of some degree of alcohol.
On the other hand, modern warfare is a slow, grinding, torturous assault on the sanity. A warrior from an earlier era had one shock, the troops today undergo constant ongoing stresses. I would bet that modern troops have more PTSD, not only because of the changing nature of war, but also because more people survive combat, thanks to infections no longer being 50% lethal or whatever.
If there are any combat vets, or historians here, and i'm talking out of my ass, please let me know and correct me.
Dylan Rivera
More instances these days.
Modern warfare increased the amount of time you're put under a lot of stress. Days, Weeks, Years in combat in proximity to gun shots and artillery. It builds up over time and you develop trauma.
Ancient combat was totally different. An entire battle might last half a day at most and you yourself would only fight for a couple hours because they had systems in place even in ancient times to rotate tired troops out etc.
Historians believe combat was still stressful in ancient times because ancient plays normally kept the gory details out of the historical fights that they reenacted, even sometimes not actually describing the fighting much at all. Historians believe it was done on purpose because a lot of veterans would be in the audience and not want to relive the experience.
We have some accounts from the Romans and Greeks describing the "phobos" (fear) that would spread through the ranks as the battle came closer and closer. People pissing and shitting themselves. Teeth chattering. Knees shaking. Literally cliche shit we see in cartoons
Thomas Evans
I'm not denying there wasn't stress for those soldiers, but I do this PTSD is more common in warfare where you can be killed by nearly anything from land, sea and air at any time.
Brandon Hill
You're kind of accurate. People really didn't like to get close and stab each other and most ancient battles involved a lot of hurling shit at each other and very brief engagements. Most of the casualties happened in the routes. Even in the gunpowder armies when they were putting bayonets on guns, officers had huge issues with getting their soldiers to actually use them because a lot of them prefer to club the enemy with the back of the gun rather than stab them with the bayonet. It took a lot of training and discipline to get soldiers to fight how commanders intended.
Jordan Scott
It's probably just different. It fucks you up to see people being hacked to death with melee weapons and have to do it yourself and it fucks you up to go about every day knowing that a sniper could blow your brains out of a bomb could go off and you'd never see it coming, just in different ways.
Sorry I said a sentence inaccurate. Historians believe that ancient warfare was less stressful because we don't really have much accounts of PTSD like symptoms until more modern warfare started and warfare changed to stress over long durations rather than long battles.
Ancient warfare was still stressful its believe due to the reasons I said in the other comment
Landon Jackson
Modern soldier feel guilty about slaughtering villagers for oil and cash
Historic soldiers knew what they were doing was necessary
Charles James
There wasn't anything necessary about warfare that wasn't necessary nowadays. Wars have been fought for countless reasons, don't always have to be noble.
Liam Wilson
Did you also listen to that Dan Carlin podcast? I can't decide if hes actually a decent source, or more of a pop culture historian. It sure is fun to listen to someone that enthusiastic though.
Adam Howard
I don't know, but both of my grandparents were functional alcoholics. No talk about war. Actually one of grandfather mentioned about enemy bombing the bathroom where he was taking a shit, and almost died.
They both hated communists. Really hated communists. I don't know why.
Luis Diaz
He's excellent. His podcasts use dozens of sources/books and he tells a variety of narratives to each event. He actually studied history in a tertiary institution so he knows how to research and relay information. He's nothing like pop culture history at all
Justin Ortiz
I prefer term "industrialized warfare", but yes you are correct. I think that seeing a conflict on so massive scale with so many destruction going around will have much more impact on a person.
Samuel Brooks
>modern warfare traumas >same name as crying when your newly born baby cries, when depressed over losing arms in accident
Warfare used to have honour and such in the great romantic tales because combat, while battles could last days later on in the 19th century, was brief. First you'd have a drink, then you'd line up, then follows a charge or firing your musket / shooting your bow. Modern warfare isn't brief at all. Soldiers can be stuck in tricky situations for hours or days and their numbers are smaller too, which doesn't help the anxiety.
It's no wonder really, that cases of shell shock have increased with every war.
Andrew Ortiz
Cool, that's along the lines of what I was thinking. Is the older content worth paying for? I'm rather reluctant to pirate.
Jonathan Torres
oi buddy you were asking about pop culture history. This is an example of it:
>warfare used to have honor
Tyler Hughes
>not understanding that PTSD didn't exist until someone started calling it "PTSD"
It's like this, OP: There are a lot of soldiers now with the exact same symptoms all soldiers have had throughout history. It's not natural for a man to crouch in a field of flying metal trying not to get his ass blown off while at the same time trying to kill anyone not wearing the same color as him.
They used to call it shell-shock. Before that, I'm sure they had another name for it - Swordslapped or something.
But it's the same as it ever was, just updated to make it sound like something that can be successfully treated.
(Protip: It can't)
Parker Torres
I paid for and listened to all of it but I have a job and it's no biggie for me. I also take long drives because I live in rural Australia so it's convenient for me just to plug in a podcast and listen to it for several hours.
If you like ancient history then I recommend punic wars and death throes of the republic. This is about early Rome until it became an Empire ruled by Emperors and it was top notch stuff.
The Ostfront is about the eastern front during WW2 obviously and it was incredible.
Seriously I liked all his history podcasts, they were all top notch.
Luis Walker
You don't have to tell me that words don't have meaning until they're words, read my post. MORE instances in modern (industrialized warfare) than previous forms of warring.
Grayson Ward
A book I read on the subject talked about how the faster pace of modern war causes issues as well.
His example was that in WW2, you spent weeks traveling to war in a boat. You experienced most of, if not the entire war, with the same group of men who you bonded with. You bonded with these men through shared experience and comradely, and then when all is said and done you traveled home with many of them.\
Compared to say Vietnam where you got in a helicopter and were put with a random group of whothefuckknows and everyone rotated in and out based on their term of service.
Vietnam was more isolated and you had less time to process things before being back in normal society. This was speculated to be a big source of higher PTSD rates and an explanation for why WW2 vets fared so much better than vets of subsequent warfare.
The book is "On Killing" by Lt. Col Dave Grossman. Was a really neat read.
James Allen
I totally understand what you're saying. I was disagreeing with you, without just coming out and saying you're wrong. But if you insist, you're wrong.
Modern warfare is, objectively, nowhere near as taxing as warfare has been over most of the 20th century.
They say WWI was the most awful, gut-wrenching, blood & guts-flying, bodies-laying-everywhere war of all time.
Which makes perfect sense - those guys didn't have the option of lobbing tank rounds from a mile away or sending in the drones. It was killing up close and personal, man-to-man, the weapons themselves defined the barbarity of the conflict.
War is not so personal now. I know two ex-soldiers who are combat-decorated but never saw any of what once would be considered "combat," i.e. their lives were never really in much danger, even though they were in the combat zone.
Being on the USA side in the modern era is a cakewalk compared to, say, Vietnam.
As for the enemy, I can't tell you how they feel after taking an all-afternoon country ass-whuppin' from the most advanced armed forces in history. If you told me the sand-niggers are getting more PTSD these days, I might believe it.
If there are more documented cases of PTSD than there were cases of what used to be called shell-shock, I don't see that as particularly telling. What it really means is that in the increasingly distant past, the USA wasn't looking for so many soldiers-as-victims.
Juan Russell
Modern warfare?
Fuck off.
Modern soldiers know nothing about warfare.
At best they fight small, concentrated battles / skirmishes.
Lincoln Reed
When I say Modern Warfare I'm actually referring to warfare since WWI.
Evan Wright
Postmodern warfare plays a part, but so does the fact that the definition of what counts as PTSD has expanded to include a wider range of symptoms.
Sebastian Diaz
>on Sup Forums >doesn't understand why his grandpa hates commies
Gabriel Carter
Swap and change your intended meanings so it helps your argument.
We get it.
Christopher Robinson
I am pretty drunk so don't mind me. Seems like most of you understood what I meant without me having to clarify something I really didn't need to.
Zachary Williams
What?
Jaxson Moore
What about that didn't you understand?
Evan Sanders
Bayonet charges after the invention of guns, even in periods long ago like the seven years war and especially at later instances like the civil war were not nearly as high as they tend to be portrayed. This is because soldiers would rather risk the potentially dying to much more lethal gun fire OR getting away unscathed that comes to long distance shooting then the fear, risk of injury and messy, traumatic melee of close range. The "Bad War" of 15th century pike lies collapsing or the disorganized moshpit of men hacking at each other with crude weapons when the chariots rode apart in the bronze age. Things like 50 thousand romans getting crushed together in a clusterfuck like Cannae or savage hand to hand sieges in the Crusades, the traumas of these events I think would far surpass modern long distance shooting, which is why that was almost always chosen even by men with primitive guns. The fact it would be forced upon men of the past, whether in skirmish or seige or the rare and cataclysmic open battles would I think cause much more distraught, the fact we dont here of PTSD in the past is that people had other problems and had to overlook it and so to overcompensate they would glorify it and get into a mentality they would need to mentally cope with it.
