Not eggsactly.
I'm actually getting shell shocked, not eggcited, so don't eggspect an oviation....but it's also not deserving eggscoriation.
I was happy crepeing in the shadows, but you beat and whipped me into eggstion, (which took some juevos), coming out of my shell, so now that egg is cracked, can't put Humpty together again (probably shouldn't have let the horses have the first crack at it).
I hope that doesn't leave you feeling rotten or like you have egg on your face, something I know a lot balut. Beats being all eggststential about life.


Egg.

@noims -- My grandfather had about 10 war stories that he rotated through telling, pretty much exclusively after one of my uncles "broke the dam" by asking him to recall things as they were at the Oshkosh air show standing next to a P-47 airplane like he had worked on.

By the time that happened, my grandfather was in his 80's and in very good physical and mental shape (cattle rancher that did daily work manhandling heavy feed bags around, etc.) but had a quirky personality because he was 90%+ deaf. I don't think that was a result of the war, hearing problems seem to run in the family.

Anyway, he frequently used those hearing problems as an excuse for not having to interact with people. He had hearing aids, but he'd turn them off most of the time and just ignore people. I think some of that was being an introvert, and some was probably lingering "shell shock" / PTSD effects. But overall he really adjusted back to civilian life just fine. Got a degree in education on the GI Bill and taught and coached basketball to High School students, then worked as a small-town Postmaster, and eventually retired to work the ranch. I don't think any of us in his family, including his wife and children, thought of him as being "impaired" by the mental effects of the war. But it was clear that some of what he experienced had a very deep, lifelong effect on his outlook.


I wrote out the 3 stories of his above because they seemed to be the ones that had the most emotional impact on him. To me, it was interesting that a lot of stuff outside of combat hit him the hardest. He also had more traditional "war stories" stuff about victories and bravery, like when his unit captured / accepted the surrender of a young German pilot in a Bf-109 who deserted to avoid near certain death from flying too many missions after the handwriting was on the wall that the allies were going to win. But by far, he got more choked up about the other stuff like having to knock that French girl off her bike and seeing starving civilians and being unable to help them much.

Like you said, more banal stuff side-by-side with or against a backdrop of horror. I think it's pretty much impossible to imagine what those sorts of experiences in war are really like and what being in those situations would do to us mentally. And then WW2 in particular just had a massive impact on the entire generation. Basically everybody back home knew multiple people that went away and never came back. Then when some did come back, they were clearly different and yet reluctant to talk about what happened. Pretty messed up time to live through, I guess.

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Possible, but I don't really think so. I think that the Medical minds of the time thought that physical shock, pressure waves from bombing etc. as you described, were a (or perhaps THE) primary cause of the psychological problems of returning soldiers. So the name "shell shock" came from there, but the symptoms that it was describing were psychological and, I think precisely equal to modern PTSD. Basically, "shell shock" became a polite euphemism for "soldier that got mentally messed up in the war and is having difficulty returning to civilian life".

My grandfather was an Army Air Corps armorer during WWII. He went through basic training, but his primary job was loading ammunition, bombs, external gas tanks, etc. onto P-47 airplanes. He was never in a direct combat situation, as I would describe it. He was never shot at, never in the shockwave radius of explosions, etc. But after the war he was described as having mild "shell shock", manifested by being withdrawn, not wanting to talk about the war, and occasionally prone to angry outbursts over seemingly trivial things. Eventually, he started talking about the war in his mid 80's, and here's a few relevant (perhaps) stories of his:

He joined the European theater a couple days after D-Day. Came to shore on a Normandy beach in the same sort of landing craft seen in Saving Private Ryan, etc. Even though it was days later, there were still LOTS of bodies on the beach, and thick smell of death. Welcome to the war!

His fighter group took over a French farm house adjacent to a dirt landing strip / runway. They put up a barbed wire perimeter with a gate on the road. In one of the only times I heard of him having a firearm and being expected to potentially use it, he pulled guard duty at that gate one evening. His commanding officer gave him orders to shoot anyone that couldn't provide identification on sight. While he was standing guard, a woman in her 20's rolled up on a bicycle, somewhat distraught. She spoke no English, only French. She clearly wanted to get in, and even tried to push past my grandfather. By the letter of his orders, he was "supposed" to shoot her. Instead, he knocked her off her bike when she tried to ride past after getting nowhere verbally and physically restrained her. At gunpoint! When someone that spoke French got there, it turned out that she was the daughter of the family that lived in the farm house. They had no food, and she was coming back to get some potatoes they had left in the larder.

Riding trains was a common way to get air corps support staff up to near the front, and also to get everybody back to transport ships at the end of the war. On one of those journeys later in the war, my grandfather was riding in an open train car with a bunch of his buddies. They were all given meals at the start of the trip. A short while later, the track went through a French town. A bunch of civilians were waiting around the tracks begging for food. I'll never forgot my grandfather describing that scene. It was tough for him to get out, and then all he managed was "they was starvin'!" He later explained that he and his buddies all gave up the food that they had to those people in the first town -- only to have none left to give as they rolled past similar scenes in each town on down the line.

When my mother was growing up, she and her brothers learned that they'd better not leave any food on their plates to go to waste. She has said that the angriest she ever saw her dad was when her brothers got into a food fight one time, and my grandfather went ballistic. They couldn't really figure out what the big deal was, until years later when my grandfather started telling his war stories and suddenly things made more sense.


A lot of guys had a much rougher war than my grandfather. Way more direct combat. Saw stuff much worse -- and had to DO things that were hard to live with. I think the psychological fallout of stuff like that explains the vast majority of "shell shock", without the addition of CTE-like physical head trauma. I'd wager that when the docs said Stewart's father's shell shock was a reaction to aerial bombardment, that was really just a face-saving measure to try to explain away the perceived "weakness" of his condition.

I feel there's confusion here.
The term "shell shock" covers two different things.
One is purely psychological, trauma over seeing things your brain can't handle. This is what most people think of when they hear the term.
Two is physical, and is CTE like football players get, caused by pressure waves from nearby explosions bouncing their brains inside their skulls. It sounds like this is what Stewart's father had, as it causes violent tendencies, confusion, and uncontrollable anger.

It was an amazing episode, thanks for sharing, shell shocked is a good description

I know this is what he and a lot of others want to think, but for most of his examples, just like his example of stupidity vs learning disability, there are actual and reasonable grounds for the name changes. PTSD vs shell-shocked, for example, isn't a case of trying to be 'less offensive' - shell shock was an informal term coined by soldiers to describe a range of experiences and symptoms, and combat stress syndrome, PTSD, etc, were developed by professionals who wanted to make an actual diagnosis (to me, shell shock sounds a lot less harmful than PTSD, because I'm not 80 years old). It's a case of people with more expertise and knowledge than Carlin trying to create concepts that are actually useful. You could call it 'murder crazy' if you want to be 'raw' but that doesn't get us anywhere. This is the problem with Carlin's thesis - he brings in terms that he doesn't understand, describing situations that don't affect him directly, and tries to cram it into some 'old white man post-relevance get off my lawn syndrome' (OWMPGOMLS).

I know that a lot of people agree with what they see as his underlying point. I'm just saying that his examples here don't support that point.

Agreed, Payback. The shell-shock of newsspeak and race-baiting, media manipulation and fear-mongering caused this woman to go into shock while in the presence of a black man, probably because she lives insulated from their culture in some all-white sanctuary. She's no more developmentally-disabled that 85-90% of the entire Population of America.

Part of her initial association-reaction may have come from having seen zombie after zombie in film with dirt all over their faces or that deep-blue hue of necrotic flesh.

OR, her 1st zombie film (like mine) was George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, in which the first zombie of the film to take a heinous bite out of that persons shoulder, was a blackman zombie with a giant afro. That shit fucked me UP when I was 12!
I will never forget that brother....best zombie film still, ever made.


To cry "racist" from the utterance of one word is quite a stretch and usually denotes a lack of critical thinking capability of the user. Racism is a convenient label for assholes who think their shit does not stink, ESPECIALLY coming from an American.
Not accusing you of being an American or an asshole Gunter, but that kind of quip reminds me of the type of shit dick-berries from UC Berkeley would say, the ones who can find racism in a bowl of clam chowder.

Yes, of course, judge an entire generation by the babblings of a C-list reality star-tard. After all, the history books are littered with similar examples:

Pretty sure it was all those uneducated, worthless orphans and factory rats that caused World War 1

And don't forget how absynthe, ganja, and the Charleston caused the Great Depression.

Then there was that greatest generation of war-hungry, shell shocked GIs that could barely even put people on the moon.

Only to be followed by hippies and disco queens that gave us Reagan and Thatcher (think my faux-nalogy is falling apart here...)

But a quick reaction on apologizing for it (at least after the second of shell shock)

yeah ptsd is a very broad term and covers more than shell shock. but it certainly downplays the severity and problems associated with a large or repeated concussions to the central nervous system.

Low information voters eh? Maybe they would be better informed if news outlets actually started trying to report the truth and facts, rather than just acting as spin doctors for the party of their choice. I really like George Carlin, but I did take issue with his bit on shell shock vs. PTSD, I suspect that as time went by mental health professionals started seeing people who exhibited the same symptoms as someone with "shell shock" but had never been to war, so they ended up with a more clinical sounding and event neutral name.

I don't know about that @Hybrid. Maybe they are shell shocked and war weary.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'war, trauma, soldier, shell shock, sad, mental' to 'war, trauma, soldier, shell shock, sad, mental, conversion disorder' - edited by Norsuelefantti