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Comment by snakeyjake | Hacker News Reader

I was an infantryman in the Army for ten years, from 1998 to 2008, and deployed three times, twice to Iraq,

Encounters with IEDs were common, especially during the surge.

So many of my friends have died to suicide or have killed themselves due to drugs and/or alcohol that it is hard to keep track.

Now that primadonna seals are dying maybe someone will pay attention.

Thankfully the only lasting effects of my deployments seem to be a bad back and distaste for authority.

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All the best to you, just wanted to add that it’s interesting that I’ve read similar opinions about the Russian SOF coming from Russian grunts, too, so I guess this is a general feeling among the world’s forces. If it matters I personally am in the grunts’ side, they’re the backbone of any army.

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.

>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 have no idea.

Strangely the most common thread seems to be the ones who off themselves went back home after getting out.

Almost everyone I know who got out and stayed away from home is doing ok. Almost everyone I know who got out and went back home is a wreck.

Some had TBI exposures, some didn't.

What do you mean by stayed away from home? Like stayed away from the wife and kids? For how long?

Going home means going back to their hometown after getting out.

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."

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.

> Maybe it's not that home is bad, but the fact you ended up there.

Particularly when vocational and transition supports are available from the VA.

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.

It's not exactly uncommon for people to join the military to get away from an unsatisfying or low-opportunity home life.

Ending up back at the place you wanted to get away from could be pretty depressing.

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.

> 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?

Why not both?

One of the key challenges with taking care of humans is that we rarely have the luxury of having only a single problem at a time.

Because if we are to address this problem we have to identify the primary cause.

If a problem has multiple causes, only addressing one of them seem like a mistake.

If there is a more likely single “tipping point”, solving for that one may be easier and therefore more likely to have an impact.

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

I didn't say "every little bit helps".

"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.

Multivariate problems can often fail to have a “primary cause”.

It can be the case that two easily treatable conditions combine to make a condition that is very hard to treat.

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.

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.

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.

This feeling doesn't last forever though. It fades relatively quickly, all things considered.

What made you think Seals are primadonnas? Does this apply to other special forces too?

They don't do anything without $40 billion of air assets circling their position providing cover and get pissy when you tell them they have to shave and can't paint their weapons arbitrary colors.

Also they're all on drugs and will kill you if you report them for embezzling unit funds.

They take PEDs or street drugs?

PEDs.

See the Kyle Mullen death during the SEAL entry testing[0] and subsequent policy to test for PEDs[1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32656856

[1] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/10/20/navy-seals-st...

> they're all on drugs

To be fair to the SEALs, this is every US SF unit.

> Also they're all on drugs and will kill you if you report them for embezzling unit funds.

This is maybe not too related to the brain damage stuff (or maybe it is?), but I don't think the wider public knows nearly enough about the frankly shocking kinds and amounts of criminality in the various US special forces units. OP is not kidding about these people operating as gangs (but worse, because they're sanctioned killers).

A smattering of such behavior:

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/07/internal-study-defe...

https://news.usni.org/2021/01/24/seal-sentenced-to-10-years-...

https://abc7chicago.com/us-navy-seals-seal-training-drugs-in...

The journalist (and Army vet, iirc) Seth Harp does yeoman's work on this topic, and is a good Twitter follow. He's got several excellent long-form investigative articles, often for Rolling Stone. Here's one on the rampant murders (ongoing!) at Fort Bragg that the Army won't talk about:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/fort-b...

And another one about rampant drug deaths at ... also Fort Bragg:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/inside...

I think it's time to have a big cultural conversation about how much our current era of spec ops worship is worth all the war crimes and other less-than-normative behavior.

It isn’t just in SPECOPS. A lot of the current mess going on in society with politics is about ‘as long as they do what we need them to do, crimes don’t matter’ too.

> In late May, a 21-year-old enlisted man from California was killed — beheaded, in fact — while on a camping trip with six of his fellow paratroopers; once again, no arrests have been made in the case.

What the flying fuck!?

I only lightly skimmed that article, but holy shit. I couldn't take much before I had to bail.

Every time I bring up the military, I get down voted. That's because (I believe) suggesting anything is wrong with military spending, military behaviour, or foreign adventures, is simply off limits.

Discussing or criticizing anything military related us seen as disrespectful to troops, and Killing the argument there kills more problematic questions (like 'was the invasion of Iraq a symptom of a larger problem like a too-bloated budget?')

One can appreciate those choices served, and support their assimilation into society, while at the same time questioning military ideals, spending levels, and behaviors.

And yes, training people to function well in situations that are borderline suicidal, training them to follow orders that put them in harms way, is going to have psychological effects on at least some of them. When you train people to behave abnormally you shouldn't be terribly surprised at abnormal behaviour patterns.

I say this as an ex military person myself. There are a lot of questions worth asking, but unfortunately society would prefer to remain ignorant. It's easier to live guilt free if "we didn't know".

With the war in Ukraine, I have a newfound appreciation for defense spending and intelligence gathering(We know Russia was going to invade), while at the same time I am able to view Afghanistan and Iraq as disastrous and unnecessary as well questioning indiscriminate surveillance and other immoral activities done under our name.

I don't know exactly what our military budget should be. It is probably undoubtedly bloated and perhaps full of white elephants, while we're underspending in some area. It seems that the peace dividend is over.

> Discussing or criticizing anything military related us seen as disrespectful to troops, and Killing the argument there kills more problematic questions (like 'was the invasion of Iraq a symptom of a larger problem like a too-bloated budget?')

I've seen this too, and it doesn't make sense to me either. Asking if it we shouldn't have sent our troops to do something isn't being disrespectful, IMHO; they didn't choose to go do the thing that shouldn't have been done; I'd like to ensure we respect the troops by only sending them on appropriate missions. I can respect the people, and not the mission.

RIP Pat Tillman

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

There are a lot of factors around military members and civilian law enforcement. Generally civilian law enforcement will let the military handle their own under UCMJ. Under UCMJ they can lose rank, retirement benefits, or get jail time and a dishonorable discharge. The prospect of losing retirement could be earth shattering g for these guys I imagine. Further complications are these SOF people have A LOT of classified information. The government absolutely does not want them testifying under oath about anything.

UCMJ can take a long time to process similar to civilian cases. All that time the accused is with their unit, as usual.

Different roles. Everyone has a part to play but SF relies upon relative superiority. Assets and ignoring military customs which do not increase effectiveness and lethality are requirements to get the job done. An infantry company is more able to defend its position than a troop of SF without heavy weapons if bogged down. Camouflage works and when you're rolling multicam with a black gun it reduces its effectiveness.

I sense a lot of bitterness.

I doubt there would be as much bitterness if the "silent professionals" didn't write so many books about what incredible badasses they are.

Are they? a farmer shoots one of them in the leg and they nuke a town? there is a reason that medals for bravery don't goto SF but to forgotten army guards who die defending little hinterland hillforts against insurgency. sf era is closing rapidly with flying ieds getting everywhere..

    > they're all on drugs

Steriods? I have heard similar.

I anectodally heard that some US special forces soldiers joined the Ukraine war, but after a few weeks of getting shelled, being wet and cold and not getting three square meals and a bed to sleep in, they packed up and went home.

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