View Full Version : Too much info in the combat zone
I've been mulling this over and will make a comment: feel free to agree/disagree( like I need to say that).
This may impact PTSD/sexual activity/basic mental health I believe.
Back in the day, Shield/Storm and prior we communicated with family and home thru letters...letters that took days and weeks to arrive.
At the time we thought that a pain in the ass, the waiting, the long interlude...now I wonder.
That 'distance' allowed me to focus on what needed doing in the zone. It allowed me to be 'in the zone' mentally and physically.
In RVN I was totally immersed in the environment and that was good, the 'world' was a world away...no intrusions, no cell phone calls, no distractions. I was on another combat planet.
When I was in Astan, as a contractor but training Afghan combat troops, the daily cell calls, Skype, constant touch from 'home' was comforting....but I believe there is a price, a serious price, a dangerous price.
It is akin to what we did to Vietnam grunts/combat troops by sending them home alone after a quick out processing.... in a micro manner.
They lost their equilibrium, there location...a foot in two totally separate worlds.
I am very glad that as a young infantry sergeant in RVN that I could not call my girlfriend or my Mom/Dad. That would have distracted me, taken some of my earned edge from me.
I do not think this information flow is healthy for those in 'the zone'....I think it leads to the bi polar actions of some of our soldiers.
Well said, makes sense to me.
This plays into my theory that, as the closer we come to information saturation, the further we get from the truth. Until we reach a point of the information singularity where everything is true, and false, all at the same time.
Stay safe.
I've been mulling this over and will make a comment: feel free to agree/disagree( like I need to say that).
This may impact PTSD/sexual activity/basic mental health I believe.
Back in the day, Shield/Storm and prior we communicated with family and home thru letters...letters that took days and weeks to arrive.
At the time we thought that a pain in the ass, the waiting, the long interlude...now I wonder.
That 'distance' allowed me to focus on what needed doing in the zone. It allowed me to be 'in the zone' mentally and physically.
In RVN I was totally immersed in the environment and that was good, the 'world' was a world away...no intrusions, no cell phone calls, no distractions. I was on another combat planet.
When I was in Astan, as a contractor but training Afghan combat troops, the daily cell calls, Skype, constant touch from 'home' was comforting....but I believe there is a price, a serious price, a dangerous price.
It is akin to what we did to Vietnam grunts/combat troops by sending them home alone after a quick out processing.... in a micro manner.
They lost their equilibrium, there location...a foot in two totally separate worlds.
I am very glad that as a young infantry sergeant in RVN that I could not call my girlfriend or my Mom/Dad. That would have distracted me, taken some of my earned edge from me.
I do not think this information flow is healthy for those in 'the zone'....I think it leads to the bi polar actions of some of our soldiers.
I agree. Over-stimulation through phone calls, social media, email, texts, and other real-time communications methods mean no separation of combat stresses and life-goes-on stresses. Joe can go on patrol 20 minutes after finding out from his wife that the car got repossessed yesterday. If you look at the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, any score above 300 is high risk. Married deployed Soldiers score about 440 given what one expects them to deal with during a deployment.
I'd add the ARFORGEN cycle as a contributing factor as well. My Master's project was a two year study of Army suicides. Suicides spike during PCS and leave cycles; periods of time when people leave their support base for the last 2-4 years or when they're unaccounted for by leaders. AFRORGEN is a two year cycle now, meaning Soldiers switch their support base every 24 months now and get to develop new relationships and, often, prove themselves over again (and again, and again, etc).
I agree. Over-stimulation through phone calls, social media, email, texts, and other real-time communications methods mean no separation of combat stresses and life-goes-on stresses. Joe can go on patrol 20 minutes after finding out from his wife that the car got repossessed yesterday. If you look at the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, any score above 300 is high risk. Married deployed Soldiers score about 440 given what one expects them to deal with during a deployment.
Totally agreed. I have mentioned it before, in so many words. The troops that have time to think about home are the ones that have problems.
In Nam, it was the REMFs that had daily access to MARS and snail-mail. And these same troops were the preponderance of the drug problems. They had to much time to think..
If you were lucky, the troops in the field received mail weekly.
The troops on the FB's and outside the wire had only one thought, one need, one desire, one focus..
Getting back in one piece,, alive..
They could focus on survival without the day to day barrage of inane home life problems,, that take on WORLD SHATTERING importance..
I won't go so far as to think social media and cell phones should be stopped,, rather a new paradigm of usage needs to be developed..
My $00.00002
:munchin
Irishsquid
06-06-2013, 07:05
I've been mulling this over and will make a comment: feel free to agree/disagree( like I need to say that).
This may impact PTSD/sexual activity/basic mental health I believe.
Back in the day, Shield/Storm and prior we communicated with family and home thru letters...letters that took days and weeks to arrive.
At the time we thought that a pain in the ass, the waiting, the long interlude...now I wonder.
That 'distance' allowed me to focus on what needed doing in the zone. It allowed me to be 'in the zone' mentally and physically.
In RVN I was totally immersed in the environment and that was good, the 'world' was a world away...no intrusions, no cell phone calls, no distractions. I was on another combat planet.
When I was in Astan, as a contractor but training Afghan combat troops, the daily cell calls, Skype, constant touch from 'home' was comforting....but I believe there is a price, a serious price, a dangerous price.
It is akin to what we did to Vietnam grunts/combat troops by sending them home alone after a quick out processing.... in a micro manner.
They lost their equilibrium, there location...a foot in two totally separate worlds.
I am very glad that as a young infantry sergeant in RVN that I could not call my girlfriend or my Mom/Dad. That would have distracted me, taken some of my earned edge from me.
I do not think this information flow is healthy for those in 'the zone'....I think it leads to the bi polar actions of some of our soldiers.
Meh. I did a couple deployments back before we had mega-FOBs with MWR tents and Skype access and email for everyone all the time...and I did a couple where anytime I wasn't in the field, I could jump on my laptop anytime I wanted to video-chat with HH6. Honestly, it made no difference in my combat readiness, or my ability to keep my mind on my job. What it did was make my downtime slightly less miserable. For my part, I think we all fall victim to the idea that that Soldiering is supposed to be hard, and anything that makes it less unpleasant must be bad, but Soldiering is a profession, and any profession is going to change over time. To me, what ruins a Soldier's readiness is the jacked up pay system, horrible benefits process, and the myriad other things about military life that keep him constantly worried about the family back home.
I've seen the same arguments used for the PX...but I've deployed with and without the ability to buy new DVDs daily and pick up a pack of condoms on the way out...and again, it made no difference at all, except that I was less miserable in my downtime...
Suppose "you" personally can handle the disconnect and hop from a skype session with the wife and toddler to an immediate direct-action engagement, are you certain the guy next to you can? I can see no reason why a quick phonecall to say "hi" to the family is a problem, in a vacuum. But communicating home, whereas the actual phone call is a creature comfort, can have totally different motivations afterwards.
Soldier A: just found out their new daughter was born without complications and will be going home from the hospital the next morning.
Soldier B: just found out his wife is sleeping with the next-door neighbor, his son was just arrested for trafficking narcotics, and the bank which force-placed insurance on his home is about to foreclose (in actual law a foreclosure must be stayed while a solider is serving active-duty overseas, but attorney fees and interest rates plus back payments keep rising).
Assume both soldiers are equal professionals in every comparable manner. No way in hell will Soldier B not be more distracted. Will it necessarily mean they can't do their job? Of course not. But as mentioned above, the Holmes Rahe stress scale is real. Everyone has a breaking point and why risk it on a foreign battlefield?
Extending this out from overseas deployment to regular work, anyone with more access to communicate with their family or friends WHILE working, said communications will necessarily affect the person communicating from work. It might not be catastrophic failure, but the reward is no way commensurate with the risk.
I remember receiving letters from my family serving and eagerly writing back that evening so it could go in the next-day mail. I also remember speaking with family as gunshots and explosions ring out in the distant background. I'm not sure if the family communications disrupted any strategy or operations but every action has an equal and opposite reaction. How the reaction manifests itself varies to the individual.
As a whole, our society is too technologically ingrained with social media. Everyone feels a need to know what everyone else is doing right away. And ironically, that takes away from the intimacy of what's going on in real life right in front of your face.
TL;DR - If it's not safe enough to take your family with you, you should probably not communicate with them even weekly until you're out of theatre.