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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rackhir" data-source="post: 5711739" data-attributes="member: 149">Personally, I'm good with not having a lot of experience with violence. Bad-asses who are ready to kick people around at the drop of a hat sound great in fiction when you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are good guys doing things for the right reasons and that the people they are beating up are bad people who you also know are doing things that "justify" what happens to them.Real life is rarely that cut and dried as are the right and wrongs of who did what. Also people who are ready to kick ass at the drop of a hat are not generally good people doing things for the right reason.This is basically, RPG player character thinking. Where you just mark off HP and it can all get healed in a moment with a spell. So wounds and injuries don't hurt or cripple you for life.In the comfort of your home with plenty of time to think over and analyze the situation it's really easy to make statements like this. It's a LOT more difficult to do in the confusion and surprise of an event like this. I've read a lot of reports of how difficult it is to get trained soldiers to react well in high stress situations like combat. A shockingly high percentage of them don't even shoot to kill when someone is shooting at them. There are numerous reports of untrained people in gun fights emptying guns at 10' or 15' and both of them missing with all their shots because of the adrenaline and excitement. This is why combat experience is such a precious commodity in a military force. Having had someone shooting at you and trying to kill you, means you've gotten past some of the shock and grown accustomed to it to at least some degree. But, being ready for and anticipating events like this in otherwise peaceful situations, is pretty much the definition of PTSD.In real life, I've stared death in the face twice and there is a VAST difference between knowing at an abstract level that "Everyone dies eventually" (except that never is quite real to you and who knows you might be an exception) and death shoving you down in the mud and rubbing your face in it.Once it was all in my head, I was driving late at night, pulled off to rest for a bit. I woke up suddenly and was confused as to exactly where I was. I vaguely remembered being concerned about falling asleep, saw the guard rail in front of where I was parked and lept to the conclusion I'd fallen asleep at the wheel doing 60 mph and that I was going to die in a fraction of a  second. It was all in my head, but it was no less real to me until I realized I was in fact not moving. But I basically froze up and just didn't react until after I finally became aware that I wasn't in danger.The second time ironically, I was actually in serious danger, but was completely unaware of it. I was seriously ill a couple of yrs ago and spent the better part of a month in the hospital, including though I didn't know about it until afterwards, several days in the ICU on a breathing machine. They basically drug you out of your skull when they do that to keep you unconscious, so that you don't do what is your first instinct is when you wake up with tubes down your throat and try to tear them out. The drugs also interfere with your memory formations, so you basically don't remember it. Which quite frankly I'm also good with. I was lucky enough to have good health insurance. I was in a first rate hospital, with excellent doctors and all the modern medical technology you could ask for. I got into the hospital early enough and they started treating me quickly enough. So arguably I wasn't really in danger of dying, but it would not have taken a lot for things to have turned out very differently and there were times after I found out exactly what happened, when I had to just say "I'm not going to think about this right now, because I am starting to seriously freak out".I think Clausewitz put it very well, when he said "In war all things are simple, but the simplest things are very difficult."</blockquote>

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