Me the drama queen

[MajGenl.Meade]

I'm off for a 7 a.m. "old man" type of relatively minor surgery . . . but not feeling as sanguine as I did for two replacement knees, a carotid clean out and the heart bypass stuff. Just in case . . .

. . . if you don't hear from me from now on, it's either because ICE finally got me or I'm on ice myself. In either case, thanks for all the fish. Isn't it a long way down?

[Joe Guy]

You don’t have to tell us what the operation is, but does it involve hormone therapy and a change of wardrobe?

Hang in there, Meade, you’ll be fine.

Best wishes for a speedy recovery….

[Crackpot]

Good luck.

[BoSoxGal]

Will keep you in thoughts and prayers today; please check in from recovery when you are able.

[Sue U]

Best wishes for a successful outcome and a speedy recovery. And if things go sideways, I know a few very good med mal attorneys.

[Burning Petard]

The older I get, the less 'routine' my own perception of my medical constraints and treatment seems to be

Take time to enjoy the cute nurses. Best wishes. As part of your recovery, go to Fairmont Park in Philidelphia and ponder your statue. We don't hold it against you that you were not born in the USofA. You still managed Gettysburg pretty well, considering.

snailgate.

[MajGenl.Meade]

You don’t have to tell us what the operation is, but does it involve hormone therapy and a change of wardrobe?

Thank you all. Back from the hosp., Foley catheter is a bastard. Bra's a bit tight too, Joe. Attorney on hold, Sue. And Snail, always remember I beat Lee in open battle. No one else did that; Grant just snuck around until they-all got tired and hungry.

[Big RR]

All the best in your recovery Meade.

Grant just snuck around until they-all got tired and hungry.

[liberty]

Lee found himself at Gettysburg without J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry intelligence, which left him effectively blind to Union movements. As the days passed, Lee’s position weakened while Meade’s grew stronger. That pressure pushed Lee toward taking decisive action. Pickett’s Charge might have succeeded if Longstreet had not hesitated and if the artillery bombardment and infantry assault had been better coordinated. It was a risky move, but given the circumstances, Lee didn’t have many good options.

What we Southerners learned from that experience was that discipline in the military, especially among the officer corps, is indispensable. In my opinion, the only acceptable consequence should have been for both Stuart and Longstreet to be Left face on the ground decaying as the army retreated. But nineteenth century military culture did not allow for that. Officers, considered gentlemen, were often able to get away with actions for which an enlisted man would have been severely punished; that was a weakness in the system, and it probably still is.

Lee is often criticized for sacrificing fifteen thousand troops in Pickett’s Charge, but he had very few options. He could not retreat without risking a collapse in morale, and such a withdrawal might have been seen as extreme cowardice. Most likely, it would have damaged the army’s confidence. It was a sacrifice that had to be made, and Lee’s men did not hold it against him. These are military realities that we should study and learn from today.

In the military, the unit is everything; everything else is irrelevant.

[MGMcAnick]

Lee is often criticized for sacrificing fifteen thousand troops in Pickett’s Charge,

I didn't remember Pickett losing that many from my visits to Gettysburg, so I Googled it. It says over 6,500. I will concede that 15,000 is over 6,500. Still too many.
It has been said that men were having to step on dead soldiers to advance toward cemetery hill.
PTSD hadn't been invented yet.

[BoSoxGal]

PTSD hadn't been invented yet.

Was that intended to be snarky? FYI it comes off as dismissive of modern soldiers who suffer PTSD, as if they aren’t as tough as the soldiers of yesteryear.

Nostalgia
Soldier’s heart
Irritable heart
etc.

PTSD is just a modern name for a condition which soldiers and veterans have experienced since the beginning of warfare. Humans have not changed much over the millions of years of our existence in terms of the capacities of our brains to tolerate and survive traumatic experiences. We’ve just developed better language to describe the phenomena and blessedly, better treatments which help active duty and veterans to cope and sometimes even thrive again.

Dying to Get Home: PTSD in the Civil War

[Burning Petard]

PTSD is a wandering term. Once upon a time Trauma was a technical term for an event that could be expected to directly result in death. Now it seems to apply to paper cuts, Now the military is using a term 'Moral wounds' Just one more datum in the long road of human behavior. Authority recognizes a big problem and names it. Understanding comes to see fixing the problem is too hard, too expensive, too embarrassing, so change the name. Nobody suffers from shelf shock anymore,

snailgate.

[BoSoxGal]

PTSD is a wandering term. Once upon a time Trauma was a technical term for an event that could be expected to directly result in death. Now it seems to apply to paper cuts, Now the military is using a term 'Moral wounds' Just one more datum in the long road of human behavior. Authority recognizes a big problem and names it. Understanding comes to see fixing the problem is too hard, too expensive, too embarrassing, so change the name. Nobody suffers from shelf shock anymore,

snailgate.

Normally I consider your contributions to be of the highest quality, but this one doesn’t pass the smell test.

No, nobody is calling a paper cut trauma except in the clinical sense that any abrasion to skin is a trauma to the epidermis.

PTSD is reserved for the greatest of insults to the human brain - whether the insults suffered in war by military members, or the insults suffered by children who are grievously abused in the developmental stages, or by adults who endure a pattern of abuse or individual incidents of abuse that create the damage to their brains that gives rise to the pattern of reactivity and suffering that is now labeled post traumatic stress disorder.

The article I linked from the Civil War studies journal went into great detail describing the various manifestations seen in the soldiers of that time, and it is instructive how similar these were to what is seen manifest in active duty and veterans of warfare today.

It’s been a long hard battle engaged in by PTSD sufferers and their advocates to raise awareness and support of the issue, so you’ll have to forgive my sensitivity when met with what seems to be the kind of dismissiveness that has made it so difficult for so many years to gain respect for the condition and the many people who suffer from it.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Lee found himself at Gettysburg without J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry intelligence, which left him effectively blind to Union movements. As the days passed, Lee’s position weakened while Meade’s grew stronger. That pressure pushed Lee toward taking decisive action. Pickett’s Charge might have succeeded if Longstreet had not hesitated and if the artillery bombardment and infantry assault had been better coordinated. It was a risky move, but given the circumstances, Lee didn’t have many good options.

A hodge-podge of errata but start a Gettysburg thread and I'll play.

What we Southerners learned from that experience was that discipline in the military, especially among the officer corps, is indispensable

Everybody learned it. And the rebel south lost because they did.

[liberty]

Lee is often criticized for sacrificing fifteen thousand troops in Pickett’s Charge,

I didn't remember Pickett losing that many from my visits to Gettysburg, so I Googled it. It says over 6,500. I will concede that 15,000 is over 6,500. Still too many.
It has been said that men were having to step on dead soldiers to advance toward cemetery hill.
PTSD hadn't been invented yet.

You’re right, the South didn’t lose nearly as many men as that claim suggests, and I knew it when I wrote it. I wanted to see if anyone would catch the exaggeration. I knew it was an exaggeration originally, but I chose to keep it. I can’t prove it, but I suspect the idea was promoted by the North to emphasize how badly the South was defeated.

In reality, it was a defeat, but the South wasn’t completely broken. Lee had no choice; he sacrificed those men because retreating without a show of defiance could have turned into the destruction of the army. True defeat does not happen on the battlefield; it happens in the minds of the people and the soldiers. Something that looked like a cowardly retreat could have been the end of the Confederacy.

The South was subdued but never truly defeated. You can’t defeat a people without crushing them, and Southerners suffered tremendously but were never completely broken. The fact that they later won the insurgency during Reconstruction is evidence of that. It also didn’t help that tens of thousands of young men were roaming around with severe cases of what we now call post‑traumatic stress, which made the South, in my opinion, almost ungovernable for nearly a generation.

[Burning Petard]

BSG, I understand your observation of my post about PTSD above. It is my yet forthright opinion now. You can tell me my thoughts stink. Yet they are still my thoughts. I cannot say how honest those thoughts are. They conflate my own emotional turmoil. You even support my view with your application of the word trauma to dermal insult. Is that not a paper cut?

My son killed himself on early sunday morning, 18 August 2019. He ended his post traumatic distress by electrocution and left his body to rot in Oklahoma heat in a room where the temperature exceeded 140 degrees for an unknown period. Those remains were found by the police Tuesday afternoon when they could smell it outside his apartment.

I stand by my statement above. Your opinion comes out of your own life experience which is not the same as mine. Yours may be a much more accurate description of reality than mine. That possibility does not modify my understanding of PTSD.

Perhaps the title of this thread applies to me more than to the General.

[BoSoxGal]

BSG, I understand your observation of my post about PTSD above. It is my yet forthright opinion now. You can tell me my thoughts stink. Yet they are still my thoughts. I cannot say how honest those thoughts are. They conflate my own emotional turmoil. You even support my view with your application of the word trauma to dermal insult. Is that not a paper cut?

My son killed himself on early sunday morning, 18 August 2019. He ended his post traumatic distress by electrocution and left his body to rot in Oklahoma heat in a room where the temperature exceeded 140 degrees for an unknown period. Those remains were found by the police Tuesday afternoon when they could smell it outside his apartment.

I stand by my statement above. Your opinion comes out of your own life experience which is not the same as mine. Yours may be a much more accurate description of reality than mine. That possibility does not modify my understanding of PTSD.

Perhaps the title of this thread applies to me more than to the General.

I do not support your view by acknowledging that trauma is a clinical term in one medical context, whereas it functions in very different terms in another medical psychiatric context.

Out of respect for your experience of your son’s suicide, which you have shared before with me by PM (perhaps you’d forgotten) thus limiting the shock value of sharing it here in such gruesome detail, I’m going to walk away from this discussion and end by saying in light of that personal family experience of post traumatic stress disorder- which nobody gets from a paper cut - I’m just surprised by the comment you made. Perhaps I am misunderstanding you entirely.

PTSD has existed since people have; it leads to lifelong anguish in a great many cases and far too often to a life cut short by associated chronic organic disease and also by far too many suicides - in veterans the current rate is 17/18 PER DAY. PTSD is no longer a phenomenon assessed purely by subjective psychiatric evaluation, it is actual brain damage we can take pictures of utilizing functional MRI.

I just think it is a subject that should command the utmost respect.

[MajGenl.Meade]

The South was subdued but never truly defeated. You can’t defeat a people without crushing them

Which they were. There was a war. All Confederate armies surrendered to the victorious US Army. The insurrection was quelled

The fact that they later won the insurgency during Reconstruction is evidence of that.

Celebrating Jim Crow are we?

[liberty]

The South was subdued but never truly defeated. You can’t defeat a people without crushing them

Which they were. There was a war. All Confederate armies surrendered to the victorious US Army. The insurrection was quelled

The fact that they later won the insurgency during Reconstruction is evidence of that.

Celebrating Jim Crow are we?

Well, Meady boy,
The truth is the truth whether you like it or not, regardless of whose ox gets gored. Vietnam was not the first war the U.S. government lost; the Southern insurgency was, and for the same reason. But the whole thing was totally unnecessary. If you people hadn’t been foaming at the mouth for revenge, we could have had a completely different outcome, and perhaps Jim Crow would never have happened. If Lincoln had lived to supervise Reconstruction and the aftermath of the war, I believe he would have produced a completely different outcome; instead, we got revenge, and we ended up with what revenge usually produces, which is more desire for revenge.

If you are interested in my suggestions for how it could have been done better, and would have produced a better outcome, just say so and I will be glad to provide them; not that I expect to convince anyone, since I gave up on that a long time ago.

[Joe Guy]

How did this thread transition into the subject of the Civil War, PTSD and a side order of infighting?

Shouldn't we all be expressing our sympathy, encouragement and relief that Meade survived his dramatic traumatic surgery? And that he wasn't deported or shot by ICE agents?

I expected the discussion to be phlegmatic, not schismatic.

Take care, Meade. I hope you're resting comfortably...

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