this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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IDF Soldier Recounts Harrowing, Heroic War Story Of Killing 8-Month-Old Child (www.theonion.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 136 points 10 months ago

From 2018 lmao. This entire article is a gold mine

said Saadon to the group of awed soldiers, describing the chills that went up and down his spine as he realized that all he had was his M16 assault rifle and some tear gas to defend himself against the unarmed Palestinian family standing only dozens of yards away. “I could see the whites of the baby’s eyes and hear her terrifying cries, and I knew it was either her or me. And this wasn’t some newborn infant, you know? This was a baby who could probably sit up independently. I was scared, but I acted quickly to throw that tear gas at her and her older sister. And who knows how many lives I saved

[–] [email protected] 54 points 10 months ago

Well that story is sadly evergreen.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 10 months ago

That's a fucking hilarious title.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Merica is the only country that makes movies about how traumatised they got from invading other countries

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I get that this comment is hyperbole, but it's not entirely true. The trauma experienced by U.S. military personnel, and processed through movies, is primarily moral injury, knowing that they went to war and did terrible things unjustly, unnecessarily, based on lies. (Contrast this with the trauma experienced by the protagonists in The Best Years of Our LIves, veterans of what is seen as a just, necessary war. They struggle with life after war, not guilt about what they did in it.) There are movies from other countries which process the same sort of trauma, such as the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir, made by a former IDF soldier processing his role in the 1982 Lebanon War.

Point is, 'merica doesn't have mentally-weak, or entitled, soldiers compared to other nations, it just gets into a lot of morally-indefensible wars. (And Israel causes moral injury to many of its people with its morally-indefensible wars, too.)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

James Jones' Whistle (the third book in his sort-of trilogy which includes From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line) is also about the post-battle trauma experienced by WWII combat veterans. It is remarkably like all the Vietnam books and movies - perhaps the moral aspect of whether the war was just or not is less important than the fact that war is a very fucked up experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Ooh, thanks for the comment! I was only familiar with From Here to Eternity, and looked up the other two. If I may try to expand and clarify my comment, absolutely, the trauma experienced in war can destroy the people, and it damages everybody. My grandfather, for example, served in the infantry in Italy, and, that's all we know. He never talked about it to anybody that I know of. I'm talking about a particular kind of trauma and the way that people process it, which honestly, I can't quite define, except to say that it's the result of moral injury, and it's part of the joke about Americans returning to the former war zone to make movies about how much killing people there traumatized them.

The summary of Whistle reinforces this, saying it's about four wounded veterans and their struggles to adjust to life at home. A good example of the type of story that I'm talking about from WWII is Slaughterhouse Five, and the way that the destruction of Dresden affected Vonnegut so profoundly. I guess a undercurrent of guilt would be one of the defining elements.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

All quiet on the western front is another non American book about essentially this same thing, too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

You're confusing nations with people. People get traumatized, whether or not their role in a given war/aggression was legitimate

[–] [email protected] 34 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The TTDF(Time Traveling Defense Forces) have high confidence that that baby was the next Hitler. That or the kid born in the hospital bed next door. It's not an exact science.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

The real Hitler was the genocide we did along the way...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Leveled the whole city for good measure.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Those tunnels could hold infrastructure or terrorists, can't be sure, have to be safe.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

The Onion's changed ever since they got bought out by the Sun God, Apollo.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

???

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

Apollo's godly domains include prophecy