Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

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My grandfather was similar - he started drinking after he returned home from WW2. He kept the outward appearance of an old-school hard guy, but he was plagued by nightmares and was obviously very disturbed by some of the things he'd seen and done. As kids, we used to love listening to his war stories, but every now and then he had to stop and wouldn't finish a story. As kids, we didn't understand how this seemingly invincible man, who we basically idolised, could have such demons.

He drank heavily for decades - vodka and super-strength lager. As a kid, I don't think I ever once saw him without a can of beer at his side.

One day when I was 16 or so, he ended up in hospital because of his drinking. He decided he would stop drinking - and he just did, having only a single hiccup in the 10 years or so before he died. It was really quite incredible - that must have taken incredible strength and will power after decades of abuse.

I've had my own brushes with drink a long time back, and I fully agree with your reasoning - I think most people that use drink and drugs are able to do so safely and responsibly, and most of those that don't sink into habitual drink or drugs for a reason; trying to ease pain (physical or psychological), make life more bearable, or to escape it altogether.

Someone once told me that just up and quitting alcohol or other things without treatment, drama, etc. was kind of the norm for the generation that fought in WWII. I have also read that Vietnam vets did a lot of drugs while in Vietnam but most of them quit when they returned to the US and did so without any kind of treatment.

Vietnam was really ugly. Women and children were acting as suicide bombers and it was an unpopular war, so we did one-year tours and most people going were about 19 years old (compared to mid twenties for average soldier age in WWII) and you are most likely to die in your first battle. If you survive your first battle, your odds of surviving the war go up.

So there were a lot of people seeing their first battle at a young age and it was a meat grinder. It was ugly even for a war.

>>"I have also read that Vietnam vets did a lot of drugs while in Vietnam but most of them quit when they returned to the US and did so without any kind of treatment."

I have read elsewhere that something that makes a big difference when quitting drugs is change your environment totally. That means, the group of people you spend time with, but maybe, also, work and even home. Moving away to another city or country probably helps.

Frequently, we don't realize to what point we are our environment.

"Change your people, your places and your things" is something I have heard as a recommended best practice for overcoming addiction. I suspect there is some element of psychology involved but probably also physical effects.

It's more or a less a recipe I followed as part of my efforts to address a completely different health issue having nothing to do with addiction. I think we are in the infancy of our understanding of how germs, chemicals, etc. proliferate in our lives and shape them.

And, yes, hopping a flight back to the US and making a clean break with Vietnam -- both the place and the war -- likely helped them make a clean break from their addiction in this case.

Yes but they are really talking about habits/triggers there. They have another saying: "Wherever you go, there you are." The core assumption of twelve-step programs is that the problem is defects of character in the individual.

It's a known best practice. Best practices work well whether or not our ideas about why they work are accurate.

I'm speculating that we don't fully understand why it works and it may be effective for reasons beyond habits/triggers.

> defects of character

Addiction can be a way to deal with problems that you are having, which is incredibly uncharitable to call a "defect of character". There's nothing wrong with using, there's perhaps something wrong with being destructive. Those two things are not at all the same.

That is the terminology used by AA and derived twelve step programs. I didn't say I endorsed their world view.

As these experiments have shown over 40 years ago, animals cease doing opiates when their needs are met.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

The narrative is popular, but if you read the criticism and failure at replication, you'll see the study is far from conclusive.

Not only that but animals can’t fall off the wagon because they don’t control the intake and even if they had the temptations you wouldn’t know

Yup, and imagine seeing all the new people show up and get killed immediately. How that must have effected the way they interacted with people, and how it must have felt to be treated that way when you first show up.

The new people would get you killed if they didn't learn how to avoid dying.

It was apparently an issue in Vietnam, where individuals were rotated in and out of existing units. Units that had bonded over training, death, and suffering - and then a new guy (sometimes a new leader!) shows up. From what I read, people were not always welcoming and this was also a way to avoid becoming attached until after that first battle

> Women and children were acting as suicide bombers and it was an unpopular war.

From my experience with the URSS Afgan war veterans, the problem is not when children and women are trying to hurt you. The post-war nightmares come from you deliberately hurting them in most unimaginable ways. Unimaginable even to the perpetrators after the war finishes.

It was only intended to say in a nutshell "When you have a situation where people think it's appropriate to strap bombs to children, things are extremely ugly."

I didn't really want to go into a whole lot of details. The ugliness of war is not really directly on topic and I try harder than I used to to make my point in a way that shouldn't require trigger warnings.

I think a bigger factor was that we were the good side in WWII and the bad side in Vietnam.

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