Discharging Emotions In Soldiers

Detachment is when someone convinces themselves that a problem or situation does not bother them. Detachment is often use in war and it helps a bit. The soldiers learn to self-anesthetize to not feel (Scurfield). When I say not feel, I mean not feel emotions. The reason for doing this is because when a friend or another soldier dies, they do not want their emotions to get the best of them. The negative about detachment is that the soldiers get so used to doing this that they go home and still begin to use detachment (Scurfield). They cannot feel the normal emotions like everyone else can. For example, a child of the soldiers is to pass away but the soldier is so use to using this coping strategy that he shows no emotion to his child’s death.
So soldiers us the coping mechanism discharging emotions. Discharging emotions is releasing the buildup of stress, fear, grief, and rage. It is usually expressed through rage towards the enemy (Scurfield). When the soldiers return home it is good for him to release those emotions, because if they are released the emotions will not lead them to being harmful (Scurfield). If they bottle up the emotions, they will eventually release those emotions all at once in rage and become harmful to friends and family. An example of discharging emotions in Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried is after Curt Lemon passed, Rat Kiley began torturing the water buffalo to deal with his pain and anger. He shot at the water buffalo repeatedly until it was dead
More than forty years after the war, there are still men using drugs and alcohol to cope with their fears and horrors (Scurfield). Alcohol and drugs are very big coping mechanisms and one of the most dangerous. Alcohol and drugs helps with the detachment. It takes the person away from what is reality. Alcohol was very inexpensive to make during the war, so that is why the soldiers just made quick cheap alcohol (Scurfield). Many of the soldiers had gone home became alcoholics or their alcoholism gets even worse when they do return home. Drugs are a bit of a different story. Marijuana was a major drug used in the beginning of the war. It was just a growing plant. Eventually authorities took charge and banned it. Marijuana has a strong smell which makes it hard to hide. Because of that, the soldiers had begun using heroin. Heroin is odorless and much easier and cheaper to receive. The drug heroin is much more addictive then almost any other drug. During WWII many of the soldiers did come home in pain and extremely addicted to heroin. In The Things They Carried, Ted Lavender, a soldier, used tranquilizers to cope with horrible situations (O’ Brien). The book shared that Lavender was scared. He had a habit of taking four or five tranquilizers every morning. This mechanism is not healthy but it worked for him because as he liked to say “We got ourselves a nice mellow war today