A lot of them saw more action

[Ravi]

Obviously it is crazy to kill kids, we agree...

Now you're talking. It certainly isn't the fault of PTSD.

I'm not sure he even knew he was killing kids by what he did that night... ?

So you're saying he saw them as something other than children?

That sound pretty far fetched but I suppose anything is possible.

Regardless, he did something so wrong that he will have to be locked up forever, apparently.

 

[namvet]

ummm why are we still there???

 

[Salt Jones]

Obviously it is crazy to kill kids, we agree...

Now you're talking. It certainly isn't the fault of PTSD.

I'm not sure he even knew he was killing kids by what he did that night... ?

How about when he dragged their dead bodies into one room and set them on fire?

Did he know then?

He was just a gung-ho late-in- life enlistee who felt passed over and was tired of taking orders from younger, higher ranking soldiers. The vast majority of 38 year old enlisted service members are within a few months to a couple of years from retiring. He was in his 10 or 11th year.

 

[Valerie]

Now you're talking. It certainly isn't the fault of PTSD.

I'm not sure he even knew he was killing kids by what he did that night... ?

How about when he dragged their dead bodies into one room and set them on fire?

Did he know then?

He was just a gung-ho late-in- life enlistee who felt passed over and was tired of taking orders from younger, higher ranking soldiers. The vast majority of 38 year old enlisted service members are within a few months to a couple of years from retiring. He was in his 10 or 11th year.

Once they were dead.. Once he knew what he did...?

 

[The Gadfly]

They shouldn't blame this on PTSD. 99.99% of people with PTSD would never think of killing children.

That's probably true, Ravi; but with PTSD (and some cases of TBI) there's always the unpredictable. If someone had a really vivid, dissociative flashback while in a combat zone, I wouldn't rule out the possibility. Flashbacks themselves are unpredictable; they can be brief, or go on for hours, and involve anything from visual hallucinations one knows aren't real, to a break from reality where one feels as if one is literally right back in the midst of the event, complete with sights , sounds and even smells. In that sort of instance an individual can become completely irrational, even physically violent.PTSD, for anyone who gets it, is no laughing matter; it can usually be treated, with excellent success, but when it isn't , it can lead to irrational acts . The usual worst consequence is suicide, but there have been cases where it led to homicides, especially of family members.

There is always some risk of a troop having an actual psychotic episode as a result of continued or repeated exposure to combat, in which case all bets are off, as to what such an individual may do. That is comparatively rare; but it can and does happen. Usually, just as in the civilian world, this is preceded by behavioral warning signs, but not always.

I can tell you from personal experience that ground combat is a mind-shattering experience, one from which few people emerge emotionally unscathed.The individual threshold for profound psychological damage is not predictable to begin with, and service members are now often exposed to deployment and an operational tempo far beyond what we know damaged many troops in Vietnam. How much is too much? We don't precisely know, but we do know that PTSD and suicide among both active duty and recently discharged personnel have spiked dramatically in the last few years, which would suggest that more and more of them are simply being pushed past their limits. It would not surprise me, if we were to see more cases of combat-related psychosis under those conditions.

 

[Ravi]

They shouldn't blame this on PTSD. 99.99% of people with PTSD would never think of killing children.

That's probably true, Ravi; but with PTSD (and some cases of TBI) there's always the unpredictable. If someone had a really vivid, dissociative flashback while in a combat zone, I wouldn't rule out the possibility. Flashbacks themselves are unpredictable; they can be brief, or go on for hours, and involve anything from visual hallucinations one knows aren't real, to a break from reality where one feels as if one is literally right back in the midst of the event, complete with sights , sounds and even smells. In that sort of instance an individual can become completely irrational, even physically violent.PTSD, for anyone who gets it, is no laughing matter; it can usually be treated, with excellent success, but when it isn't , it can lead to irrational acts . The usual worst consequence is suicide, but there have been cases where it led to homicides, especially of family members.

There is always some risk of a troop having an actual psychotic episode as a result of continued or repeated exposure to combat, in which case all bets are off, as to what such an individual may do. That is comparatively rare; but it can and does happen. Usually, just as in the civilian world, this is preceded by behavioral warning signs, but not always.

I can tell you from personal experience that ground combat is a mind-shattering experience, one from which few people emerge emotionally unscathed.The individual threshold for profound psychological damage is not predictable to begin with, and service members are now often exposed to deployment and an operational tempo far beyond what we know damaged many troops in Vietnam. How much is too much? We don't precisely know, but we do know that PTSD and suicide among both active duty and recently discharged personnel have spiked dramatically in the last few years, which would suggest that more and more of them are simply being pushed past their limits. It would not surprise me, if we were to see more cases of combat-related psychosis under those conditions.

Suicide, yes, I can see that.

Killing children? No, I can't see that.

I would hate to see all of those with PTSD stigmatized to this extent. The problem, really, is that we have wars without enough people to fight them. One tour is bad enough, but when no one else replaces you....and you end up going back again and again....

 

[The Gadfly]

They shouldn't blame this on PTSD. 99.99% of people with PTSD would never think of killing children.

That's probably true, Ravi; but with PTSD (and some cases of TBI) there's always the unpredictable. If someone had a really vivid, dissociative flashback while in a combat zone, I wouldn't rule out the possibility. Flashbacks themselves are unpredictable; they can be brief, or go on for hours, and involve anything from visual hallucinations one knows aren't real, to a break from reality where one feels as if one is literally right back in the midst of the event, complete with sights , sounds and even smells. In that sort of instance an individual can become completely irrational, even physically violent.PTSD, for anyone who gets it, is no laughing matter; it can usually be treated, with excellent success, but when it isn't , it can lead to irrational acts . The usual worst consequence is suicide, but there have been cases where it led to homicides, especially of family members.

There is always some risk of a troop having an actual psychotic episode as a result of continued or repeated exposure to combat, in which case all bets are off, as to what such an individual may do. That is comparatively rare; but it can and does happen. Usually, just as in the civilian world, this is preceded by behavioral warning signs, but not always.

I can tell you from personal experience that ground combat is a mind-shattering experience, one from which few people emerge emotionally unscathed.The individual threshold for profound psychological damage is not predictable to begin with, and service members are now often exposed to deployment and an operational tempo far beyond what we know damaged many troops in Vietnam. How much is too much? We don't precisely know, but we do know that PTSD and suicide among both active duty and recently discharged personnel have spiked dramatically in the last few years, which would suggest that more and more of them are simply being pushed past their limits. It would not surprise me, if we were to see more cases of combat-related psychosis under those conditions.

Suicide, yes, I can see that.

Killing children? No, I can't see that.

I would hate to see all of those with PTSD stigmatized to this extent. The problem, really, is that we have wars without enough people to fight them. One tour is bad enough, but when no one else replaces you....and you end up going back again and again....

Ravi, I agree with that last; aside from everything else, I have PTSD (get it and you usually have it for life; it's treatable but not curable) myself, and believe me, there is already more than enough stigma and misperception attached to PTSD as it is (which makes a lot of active duty personnel and veterans reluctant to seek treatment, as well as complicating recovery). As for the killing children part, as someone suggested earlier, he may not have seen them as children when he was shooting; if he had a psychotic break, there's no telling what he might have believed he was seeing; in such a state, a person's delusions may completely replace the real world around him; for a time, the delusion becomes reality. In some instances, something similar can happen with a severe flashback. I've never had that experience myself, but I have seen it in others; I remember one Vietnam vet I knew who attacked an ordinary storage cabinet, because he did not see a cabinet, but a VC soldier; to him it was totally real. The mind can do some very strange things.

Some of what these troops experience now, especially with repeated deployments, is orders of magnitude worse than anything we experienced in Vietnam, as awful as that was. I'm afraid a lot of them are going to be utterly destroyed by it.

 

[whitehall]

Different people have different thresholds at different times, it's proven over and over again in every conflict.

The Obama administration apparently has a different opinion about that.

 

[9thIDdoc]

A soldier in combat that thinks and acts like a civilian is killed.
A civilian that thinks and acts like a soldier in combat loses everything and gets locked up as criminal or insane.
Someone who has trouble fully adapting to the alternate reality has ptsd.
I have to think that the more often one must try to switch between realities; the more likely one is to fail.

 

[The Gadfly]

A soldier in combat that thinks and acts like a civilian is killed.
A civilian that thinks and acts like a soldier in combat loses everything and gets locked up as criminal or insane.
Someone who has trouble fully adapting to the alternate reality has ptsd.
I have to think that the more often one must try to switch between realities; the more likely one is to fail.

Words of wisdom, Doc; summed up as succinctly, yet accurately, as possible. VERY well stated, and unfortunately,all too true. This is like watching what happened to so many of us happen all over again to another generation of soldiers. It breaks my heart.