Has it been your experience when interacting with war veterans....
....most of them try to deliberately avoid discussing having to shoot at and potentially kill other people on the battlefield?
Most of the ones I've spoken with don't bring up the subject, and I personally don't feel like dredging it up for them. And that to me seems like the most natural response in having to deal with those types of harrowing experiences. I wouldn't view it as something to brag about, no matter how justified I may have been.
So if you come across someone who has fought in a war and that person makes a specific point of talking about how many people he killed, wouldn't that strike you as being somewhat abnormal?
Just an open question here. And for any DU veterans on here, I don't wish to open up any wounds, so feel free to pass on the question if you like.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Last edited Tue Jan 20, 2015, 08:25 PM - Edit history (1)
who won the Samuel Goldwyn Award For Screenwriting for his amazing screenplay Stagecoach Bravo about the Vietnam War (two-time Goldwyn Award winner, in fact). I think he's retired now but he was also a screenwriting professor at USC in their film school. McAdams had wild eyes that would bug out when he talked about being an infantryman during the Vietnam War. He'd describe his combat experiences as 30 or 40 minutes of complete insanity of people running around, shooting, screaming and losing touch with reality. He saw heavy combat and you could tell that it really changed his life. He never talked about specifically shooting someone but would discuss it as a totally chaotic gestalt of being someone else, out of body, in the heavier engagements he experienced. He's also written books about Vietnam. Frank Mcadams is one great guy, who takes time with young writers and is really encouraging.
My dad was a B-17 co-pilot shot down over Germany in WWII. His crew was followed by John Steinbeck when the latter went to England as a war correspondent and his name is mentioned several times in Steinbeck's war memoirs Once There Was A War. My dad parachuted out of a burning plane just before it exploded and fell through the roof of a barn, breaking his hips. A German soldier also shot him in the leg. My dad spent many months at Stalag Luft III (where the Great Escape occurred) but couldn't walk and his leg bones did not knit together as medical care was very poor. He had to wait until after the war to be treated. My dad would talk about being shot down but would always have nightmares afterwards where he screamed in his sleep and said he would relive having two of his crew members scream out as they were trapped and burned alive in the rear of the plane. He never watched films like Memphis Belle or 12 O'clock High. He didn't have a real complex about his experience and would talk about it (with the above described consequences) and would attend yearly Stalag Luft III POW reunions where everyone there had been shot down. What seemed to have traumatized him more than anything else, however, and something he only rarely talked about was killing a German civilian. On the POW train heading for the prisoner camp, a German train conductor, a civilian, was very cruel with the U.S. prisoners, sticking knives in their wounds and beating them. My dad said when the conductor got too close to an open door and the train was traveling very fast, he pushed the man out with a crutch, most likely killing him. My dad regretted killing a man all his life, up close and personal, even though that man was a sadistic bastard. My dad was the guy on the extreme right, with a mustache and cap.
I was asked a lot when I first got home (1967) by people who seemed to watch too much teevee. It was not something I wanted to discuss then or now. 
