Shell-Shocked Veteran: Difference between revisions

*** Total war is ''not'' killing everything. While the line between civilian and combatant blurs, and thus "kill everyone" did become more frequent, total war is not simply the slaughtering and sacking of an enemy combatant. Total war is the near total mobilization of the country's population, industry, economy, and resources to fight the war. Since even noncombatants are involved in the war effort, some would argue that they become, depending on their particular role in the war effort, legitimate targets. Since everyone and everything is mobilized, complete destruction is often called for in order to render the enemy state incapable of fighting back, as simply defeating the enemy army on the field of battle no longer meant the war was lost. In order for a state to participate in total war, it has to have an advanced infrastructure and technology, which meant that states prior to the Industrial Revolution were for the most part incapable of waging total war. The decentralization of authority that prevented wholesale conscription and mobilization of the population and lack of technology to fully exploit resources as well as overcome natural obstacles (such as winter, which pretty much ended an army's ability to wage war) meant that total war had to be a relatively recent phenomenon. It was only during the tail end of the 18th century, with the French Revolutionary Wars, that total war began to take shape, finally culminating in its ultimate form of World War II.

* There's a saying among veterans and survivors of horror ordeals: There Last Night. As in a discussion between two vets where one would say they were in Vietnam in 68, and the other might reply, "Mate I was there last night." For some they can never let it go. The tragic real life trope of Shellshocked Veteran led to the forming of groups such as Legacy.

** Just the normal process of recivilizing survivors could take weeks or months. The inmates were so traumatized they could often barely act human. Moreover any normal instinct for trusting even [[Reasonable Authority Figure|reasonable authority]] had been scalded away. It did not help that the processing could have a superficial resemblance and sometimes panic people into thinking they were inmates concentration camps. Quarantine is easily mistaken for imprisonment, and debriefing (necessary among other things to prepare for future trials) could make people suspect that they were going to be put under hostile interrogation. MPs were hardly SS guards but someone who had been under the charge of the later might be slow in seeing the difference. Medics required absolute trust of their charges and it did not help that the Nazis had tried to deceive them by saying gas chambers were [[Decontamination Chamber|decontamination chambers.]] Decent food and clothing were slow in coming and travel visas even slower. And perhaps worst of all they were often billeted on the very same concentration camp. In other words through a mixture of clumsiness and necessity, the reprocessing was almost as horrible for inmates as the actual camps.

** Not surprising; in real-life, people don't ever recover from or "get over" PTSD. They must learn to ''live with'' PTSD (which sucks for all concerned), because those ravages never go away. Sort of like cancer's remission. Tragically, in many cases, a [[Trigger/Analysis|Trigger]], a return to battle, a social situation requiring subtle grasp of nuance, or a random startle will instantly ratchet a sufferer right back up to their ''highest ever''—and most unbearable, undefusable, and unmitigated—levels of PTSD symptoms.