Thursday, November 8, 2018

PTSD was much worse after World war II worldwide than now

And people were killing themselves and their families all over the world then. IF you were a veteran of battle, people were a little scared of you. I remember my father telling me the story of a man he knew in church who said, "I could kill everyone here (hundreds) without batting an eye now!" and the man meant it. He had survived Italy during World war II under General Patton and everyone but him and a couple of other men in his company in the Army had not survived this. So, he was a mess from all this but eventually became a minister and got married which likely calmed him down a lot from his PTSD.

After World war II B-17 bomber pilots had a hard time after killing hundreds of thousands or millions of people over Germany and Japan from firebombing them to death. So, their PTSD from a lot of them caused them to start the Hells' Angels Motorcycle Gang when they returned in Hollister California. Then later they had hill climbing competitions with their motorcycles. Dresden was a particular example of what happened. Kurt Vonnegut wrote of his experiences as a Prisoner of War who was brought up from underground as a prisoner of war only to face a city basically gone with most residents dead from the U.S. firebombing. The same thing happened to many cities in Japan just before the Japanese surrender after the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which was done because they knew otherwise the Japanese would never surrender because of their Samurai battle codes of "Never surrender".

So, people were killing themselves and their families especially worldwide because of PTSD from 1945 to 1955. After that most people in World war II had either killed themselves or their families or strangers or all of the above (OR) they had found a way to deal with their horrors like Senator John McCain did after 5 years in  North Viet Nam Prison Camp and being tortured every day for 5 years during this time as a prisoner of war.

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