Well, when we get avatar robots so that infantrymen no longer have to go into combat, let me know and we can get to work on stopping it from becoming normal behavior. Until then, our ground combat veterans will be largely young men who themselves risk death or dismemberment, and will react as human beings have to those stresses since the dawn of time.
and all soldiers love and respect their chain of command, and are sure that their leadership has their best interests at heart. Perhaps they could celebrate with a checkers tournament? cmon man.
We had a suicide attack once by three guys chucking grenades and wearing vests (well, I say 'we', but I was part of the QRF), the first two guys were ventilated by everyone turning and firing en masse (one wounded an IP), at which point the third guy decided that he was maybe less dedicated to The Jihad than he had thought he was, and turned to run. He hopped a wall, accidentally triggering his own vest, and body parts showered back over. It was pretty hilarious. One of the parts that came back was an arm from the elbow down - which guys picked up and shook hands with, challenged each other to duels, etc. Their Lt let them for a while until it was time to put a lid on it - which was the right call. If you don't let guys blow off steam after a fight, you will find that they bottle and can explode in manners much worse than pissing on dead people.
you are a combat psychiatrist?
indeed. very naughty. then you can explain to them the importance of maintaining proper grooming habits and not wearing or using non-issued equipment while on a two week patrol
Gotta run now, i'll google map it later
I'm not a combat psychiatrist, but I don't need to be to make a call if I think something is wrong. Obviously its not an official diagnosis, but it would be like when one of my Soldiers showed up to the motor pool before a mission and he was piss drunk, this combined with other incidents that happened before made me think "This kid's probably an alcoholic." Now can I diagnosis alcoholism the same way an Army doctor or other trained specialist can? Of course not. But its part of my authority and responsibility to make my concerns known to my chain of my command, along with my PSG and his Squad Leader in the Commander's office. Why? Because I believed he needed someone who could make that medical diagnosis to take a look at him, and I wanted a Command referral to ASAP(Army Substance Abuse Program) to get him help.
Same thing with combat stress or any kind of negative thing affecting my troops, I obviously can't diagnosis them but I can refer them or ask someone with the authority to refer them if I believe something is up. That's part of my job to look after the Soldiers. And if my Commander said no for whatever reason, and I still felt strongly about it and my NCOs felt the same, we'd take that guy aside and have an informal or a formal counseling session. The goal being not to punish him, like if I caught someone pissing on a body my first thought wouldn't be towards punishment, but rather to nip a potentially huge problem in the bud before it goes.
Now every situation is different, I couldn't say what I would have done if one of my Soldiers picked up a guy's arm and started playing with it. But certainly at the forefront of my mind would be taking care of these Soldiers, which means asking questions like "This is guy OK mentally" and if I think "Yes or maybe" I need to think how to proceed. Perhaps that LT made the right call considering the situation, and he felt they needed a chance to detox, who knows. I know the book, regs, and superior commanders if asked for the "official" answer would say hell no to the extreme, but I've mentioned before here I don't always follow those like any good officer in my opinion should. I'm not here to be a walking regulation.
Using your example I think I would have allowed them to laugh and the absurdity and the irony of a guy blowing his own vest while trying to escape, but once body parts start getting played with its something else entirely. But who knows I wasn't there.
I've got a guy in my squad, an old ranger type who spent most of his military career in the rangers before transferring for health reasons to the truck driving field. He has a morbid sense of humor, like how he chuckles when he talks about how when having to put the bodies of the enemy into body bags after rigor mortis set in, they'd have to tie their arms and legs together to keep their limbs from popping back out into the position they were in when they died. And laughing at how if some reporter saw these bodies they'd think they were shot execution style because of the bindings. I understand he needed that humor to get him through that and other morbid tasks, but at the same time he also suffers from the memories of those days. We did have to take him to the hospital once for some serious self inflicted injuries one time.
My point being, I understand the humor as a common way to get over the immediate insanity of the whole situation you find yourself in, but in the long term it may drag heavily on your mind how cavalier you were at those times because the parts of your mind that were losing their **** were suppressed, but they can come back over the years with a vengeance. I want these Soldiers to be dealing with this craziness and stress as healthy as possible in both the present and the future. And if I believe that while playing with body parts, or pissing on bodies, can offer some short term relief but may lead to more problems down the road. I'm going to look for a better solution, which in no way will be perfect. Some of the best doctors in the world can't figure out PTSD and other combat trauma, so what can LT do? Well I'll do what I can, and when I say "I'll do" I mean we'll all do. Me, NCOs, the Soldiers themselves, watching each other watching their leadership, all of us together getting through it as safety as possible and with our minds intact as much as possible so the ghosts don't haunt us.
Like you said, its been a reaction to that stress since the dawn of time, but if I think there's a healthier way I'm going to pursue it. And by that I just don't mean my thinking alone, there are all kinds of resources out there for this problem and those will be my weapons against it.