Do you think it's because of whatever brain damage they may have encountered, or because they could not find meaning in their civilian lives? I've read it's often the latter in military men, especially the ones that really believed in the mission and experienced highly stressful life or death situations. They come back and they're taken aback by the mundane bullshit that our lives are in comparison to what they've been through. Intuitively that rings true, but having never served, I can't fully relate.
I would say that of almost all predicaments of the world. We like to reduce our problems down to single factors but they are almost always a marbled symphony of good & bad, black & white, up & down.
While we cannot find a response to everything, we can isolate the key significant factors.
What if there is no ‘primary cause’ that can be fixed, while still solving the underlying need the country seems to have - which is ‘have a large standing group of highly trained, extremely focused, non-conformist, insanely competitive, and professional killers ready at a moments notice’?
It’s not like the mere fact of creating/concentrating the population of the folks willing to be this doesn’t also create a whole swath of secondary effects.
Since after all, if steroids and similar PEDs do actually improve performance - which we wouldn’t be getting worked up about them this way if they didn’t! - then isn’t using them nearly a duty of the folks we are talking about? After all, mission first, and they’re (somewhat) expendable due to the nature of the work.
We make them do all sorts of other things which regularly puts their lives and health in danger, after all, and all the ‘high speed low drag’ folks I’ve personally known have had some kind of long term health impacts. Even if it’s just a lot of joint pain, or screwed up knees/backs.
And barring undesirable secondary effects, isn’t it saving lives and accomplishing missions that otherwise would not be? That is what they signed up for, literally. That and having the absolute craziest stories at the bar later.
note: professional bicyclists and weight lifters will also always have a doping issue that needs mitigating. Well, mitigating if we care about their health vs absolute performance anyway.
What if there is a primary cause, and brain trauma is not it? Seems pretty likely that the issue is psychological in nature, otherwise contact combat sports and eg rugby/football would show similar incidence of suicide. I can see how after a couple of years of high intensity combat civilian life would feel like a complete waste of time and a road to nowhere.
Interestingly, if I remember correctly, other contact sports like football do show similar increases in suicide (and unexpected homicide). It’s why football is getting phased out in a lot of areas for kids. But oddly, based on [https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/04/10/health/student-athlete-su...] cross country athletes actually have the highest rates, which is surprising.
Unless, like you’re saying, it is as much about the group being selected for as it is whatever is going on during the activity itself.
> otherwise contact combat sports and eg rugby/football would show similar incidence of suicide.
As the article says, the brain damage described here is from blast shockwaves passing through brain tissue with different densities. It's entirely different from the brain damage caused by sports injuries like in American football.
That doesn’t mean the same type of effects don’t happen. I knew a guy who suffered a closed head TBI due to
a commercial trucking accident - not the same as a concussion or a shockwave induced tbi mind you - and his personality changed in similar ways to those I’ve heard described.
He started to isolate, got paranoid and (more) violent, and ended up divorcing his first wife and marrying a second woman who seemed to be a kind of hoarder, and isolating at home with her - long before it was ‘cool’.
No idea what ended up happening to him, but murder/suicide would not have been surprising.
That's the destructive wasteful thinking of "every little bit helps". 80/20 can be applied to almost everything and looking at the second top factor of anything is a waste of time until you properly looked at the first and can't do anymore.
In a multi-stage process, even if you fix the cause with 80% responsibility, the outcome may not improve by much, as there is failure now at another stage. Of course, fixing that single cause is still progress.
Then it didn't have 80% responsibility and you failed to identify the bottleneck, it just means you identified a local optimisation, which is again "every little bit helps" thinking - what you should do when thinking about queueing systems (or multi-stage) like you describe is to identify the bottleneck. An improvement on the bottleneck should directly translate to an improvement to the end result.
The issue is when there is overdetermination - fixing a single cause resolves 80% of the current cause of failures, but the process fails at another point which becomes the new bottleneck. Say, most people are failing at a task due to stress(A). But even if you solve that, then most people can start failing due to another cause, B, say laziness. Fixing A is not "a little bit" and any solution will have to face A(in order to have success rate > 20%) but it is not sufficient to fix stress alone.
You can of course agglomerate A & B into a single cause C but for that to be meaningful C has to be the 'root' of A and B, otherwise the solution for C also just becomes an agglomeration of the solutions for A and B.
All I said is you identify the major factor first and fix it, and keep doing that. What you're saying now is basically what I started with, except applying a recursive step of "keep identifying new bottlenecks". But the algorithm should always be "Look at the biggest factor and nothing else", of course you should check if the biggest factor stays the same over time
"80/20" absolutely can't be applied to "almost everything" and assuming it can is lazy thinking.
Even if it does apply in this case, just because as secondary cause has 1/4 impact, that doesn't mean you should ignore it. Sometimes secondary causes have cost effective solutions that mean it is more efficient to address first. Simply ignoring this possibility like you are suggesting is not smart.
Many situations don't have a primary cause. There's no rule in the universe that says physical objects can always be decomposed into simple systems with a hierarchy of priorities.
If I break my leg and have COVID, I'm not going to be better until both of those problems are fixed and neither has any bearing on the other. There is no primary cause. There may be different levels of urgency, but some problems in the real world are just intrinsically messy and complex.
This makes a lot of sense. People are fundamentally changed by their experiences in combat zones. I'd imagine that going somewhere new afterwards allows you to be whoever you now are on your own terms, whereas going home means continually experiencing the pain of no longer fitting in to the life and loving relationship that you'd had before, with no relief in sight.
Could also be the difference between having a plan with long term goals that leads you to a new city vs not knowing what to do next and defaulting to just going back home. Maybe it's not that home is bad, but the fact you ended up there.
Changed maybe but not a whole new person. And its not binary - my experiences will different to yours even if we were in the exact same situations. After two tours I am not so different that I cannot interface with friends or family as I did before. I think the misconception of this statement does more harm then good and shows a rather negative interpretation of combat veterans.
I've heard similar comments from civilians, that dealing with extreme situations overseas isn't as stressful as dealing with folks when you go back home.
I don't know whether home folks are actually the problem or it's just delayed response. I think it was T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) who said that reactions to the trauma of war continue to bubble up long afterwards. Maybe that is suppressed for as long as you stay "in the field."
Sounds like what makes military service a good path is that 1. enlisting puts you in a better place than the previous day or 2. the time in the service enables a step up of some kind afterwards.
