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For some reason, I was reminded yesterday of a warrant officer who was in charge of the driving lessons for the Leopard tank when I was an officer cadet in 1988. He had a rather extraordinary story (short thread) /
Back in 1988, he was one of the last remaining veterans of the Korean War. He had arrived there in the winter, to find out that there was a huge pile of dead bodies of "Chinese volunteers" in front of the Belgian trenches /
Those bodies were the result of the "human tide" tactics the People's Liberation Army was fond of: attacking with huge number of ill trained and equiped rifleman without proper support from heavy machineguns or artillery, in the hope a fraction of them would overrun the enemy/
For some reason, it had been impossible to agree on a truce to evacuate the corpses, so they just kept on accumulating after each attack. Which was not too problematic in the winter. But then came spring.../
Our instructor told us that, 35 years after the event, he still permanently smelled the odour of the hundreds of bodies that had slowly decayed in front of him. In those days, there was no psychological support for veterans /
We had actually been warned that, while our instructor was generally speaking a patient and kind man, he would have occasional outbursts of unexpected rages as a result of triggers no one had ever been able to identify /
The only reasonable response was to just let things pass - which they always did. Post traumatic stress disorder is not something that was invented by sissies. It is a very real thing that can affect the best and the bravest /
It is often said that you should judge a society by how it treats it's weakest members. I would add: "and it's veterans". For decades, the people who have fought and suffered for our freedoms have walked around among us, often with deep wounds that are not visible to the eye.
