Could You Slit a Rabbit's Throat and Eat Its Eyeballs?

[DVV]

I'm sure some do, but I have never met Mike... Baddum tsh!

Mike never killed anybody. That's a common feature he shares with Kosminski.

[Smoking Joe]

No I couldnt. And I would suggest that anyone who could should be booked into a padded cell for the rest of his life.

[RivkahChaya]

The military tries to stress you out. They make you do a lot of crap; they make you get too hot, or too cold, they make go without a shower for a long time, every time you start to make a friend, they transfer one of you, they feed you tasteless (but nutritionally balanced) food, they work you so you burn 4000 calories a day, they bore you a lot of the time, mess up your paperwork, and tell you you might not get paid on time, make you wear a battle helmet all the time, and make you do all this sometimes on four hours sleep.

There's a reason. Some people crack. Some people start having fits of anger or frustration; some people start crying over everything, some people can't keep it together, and start losing their things, falling asleep in formation; some people start refusing to do things. Those are the type of people who you know are not going to be able to handle deployment, especially to a war zone.

That does not mean that people who are superstars at Basic Training won't end up with PTSD if something terrible happens in a war zone, but someone who can't handle Basic is practically guaranteed to have terrible problems while deployed. They want to break you at Basic, so they can get rid of you them.

My husband was in Iraq. His unit has a lot of supply truck drivers. They were under orders to keep driving even if there were children in the road, because sometimes the insurgents would deliberately put a child in the road, then when the truck stopped, ambush the drivers and kill them. That's an horrific thing, to have a standing order to run over a child, but the child is there to lure you into getting killed, and the order wasn't in place until there had been several ambushes, and the pattern was apparent. Of course, once the insurgents realized that the drivers were onto them, they stopped doing this.

So, yeah, a lot of terrible stuff in training is supposed to be terrible, because you are being trained to be in terrible situations.