My name is Joshua Hood, and I am a combat veteran, author, and current game writer for Bohemia Interactive. I am also one of the thousands of veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan to be diagnosed with PTSD.
Growing up, some of my best memories were playing video games with my younger brother. Back then my only job was to keep him out of trouble and make sure we were both home before the streetlights came home. We were close and I like to think that he relied on me, but all that changed in 2003 when he enlisted in the Army.
I was in my last semester of college when he dropped the news, and with the war in Iraq just kicking off I knew there was a good chance he would be going overseas. But it wasn’t the fear of combat that bothered me as much as the realization that if my brother did go to war our relationship would never be the same. So, I did what any older brother would do in that situation, I enlisted and followed him into the army.
Life as a civilian is defined by many factors: your job, your house, your feelings, but the army doesn’t care about any of that. Their job is to teach you to suffer in silence, to become a weapon of war. Free from opinions, feelings and weakness of any kind. So, it’s of little wonder that they had little time to worry about anything as bothersome as PTSD.
Reading this now it might be hard to believe, but when my brother and I left the army in 2008, PTSD wasn’t a thing. If fact it wasn’t even a blip on their radar, but you didn’t have to be a doctor to realize something was wrong with the veterans coming home. For me it felt as if I’d spent the past five years in the cab of a speeding freight train, then all of a sudden someone had slammed on the brakes, leaving me to deal will all the pent up trauma and emotion I’d stored in those cars.
The symptoms were mild at first, the hyper-vigilance that came with being in a crowd and the sudden burst of anger all easily explained. Then the panic attacks started. For those who have never had to suffer through a panic attack, it’s like being a passenger in a crazy person’s body. Seriously, one minute everything is right with the world, then in the next instant you feel like you are having a heart attack. For someone used to being in control going from zero to meltdown for no apparent reason was unnerving to say the least, but instead of getting help, I did what I’d been trained to do. I suffered in silence.
We'd been taught to suffer in silence. So that’s what we did.
There was a part of me that knew my brother was going through the same thing, but I was either too proud or too ashamed to ask him. Instead of being able to talk like we used to, we went radio silent, both of us living in denial despite the turmoil within. Just as a shark will die if it stops swimming, all we could do was keep moving forward. So, we threw ourselves into work and family—anything to avoid the face staring back at us in the mirror.
It worked for a while, then my brother took a job in Chicago and our mental separation turned physical. Having your support system living in a different time zone is the ultimate isolation and the move left me wondering if we’d ever be close again. Then in 2018 my brother began having vision and memory issues and a trip to the VA showed lesions on his brain from the IED’s he’d eaten in Iraq. The first few tests came back benign, but a later trip to a specialist confirmed our worst fears—brain cancer.
Now, I’ve been through some sticky situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, firefights where I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it out alive, but NOTHING had prepared me for the dread and utter helplessness that came with sitting in that hospital waiting room while my brother go his brain biopsied in the OR.
Talk about an instant reality check.
Fast forward to 2024 and my brother and his family have moved back home. His cancer is in remission, and we are both in therapy, but the scars of that fateful day in the hospital have yet to fade. We talk, but never about the war or the burdens we carry, and I was beginning to wonder if we ever would when fate stepped in.
I had just started working at Bohemia Interactive as a game writer on Arma Reforger and wanted to get a feel for the game before I started writing. The only problem was that when I tried to download the game, I found that it wasn’t supported on my Mac. Dammit. But as luck would have it, my brother had a brand new Xbox, so I gave him a call and he invited me over to play.
Problem solved.
Now, it is important that you understand my mindset heading over to his house. This was work and I spent the drive over compiling a mental checklist of things I needed to learn from this playtest. Sure, playing a video game with my brother had all the trappings of “fun” but I was not expecting any kind of breakthrough.
That all changed the moment we downloaded the game.
To be perfectly honest, I still struggle to explain what happened next. All I can say tell you is that the moment we started playing something changed. Perhaps it was the immersion of the presented world: the attention to detail the artists and designers breathed into everything from the Woodland patterned BDU’s to M-16 that “virtual me” was carrying that pulled me in. I don’t know, but I was hooked.
Now common sense will tell you that because this was a shooting/military simulation, the gunfire and explosions that followed SHOULD have triggered some kind of post traumatic symptom. Anxiety. Fear. Panic, you name it, but the results were the exact opposite and whatever magic was at work on that screen, it sucked us in. Instantly transporting us from my brother’s living room to the “safety” of this pixelated battlefield and instead of panic there was peace. For those of you who have never served, this won’t make ANY sense, but in a very strange way, it was like going home and in the hours that followed, that psychological wall—the invisible bastion our psyches had built to “protect” us disappeared and we actually began TALKING about the war. Healing through the community and shared experience of a video game.
By the time I left my brother’s house it was dark, and I felt a hundred pounds lighter. It was as if during that playtest, I’d finally taken off this rucksack full of the mental and psychological stones I’d collected during and after the army and left it behind. I spent the drive home trying to figure out what had just happened. The playtest had felt like therapy, but that wasn’t possible. I mean video games (especially shooting games) are bad for you, right?
The moment I got home, I fired up my computer and asked Google a simple question: do video games offer any therapeutic value to people who suffer from trauma? The first result was a VA article on a study conducted by Dr. Michelle Colder Carras, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins. A hyperlink in the text took me to Dr. Colder Carras' ground-breaking research paper: Connection, meaning, and distraction: A qualitative study of video game play and mental health recovery in veterans treated for mental and/or behavioral health problems.
The next day, I reached out to the team at Bohemia Interactive to share my findings and together we reached out to Dr. Carras, Dr. Rachel Kowert, an award winning author and globally recognized researcher on the uses and effects of digital games as well as Stephen Machuga, a veteran and CEO of the nonprofit StackUp who was already getting video games out to veterans in need. In the following articles we will explore what we learned through these interviews and dive into how video games can help alleviate mental health issues, build stronger social communities and better serve those veterans in need.
[Conspiracy Sarah] I have always been interested in the psychology of media. Those of you that have followed me for a while will already know that my mom seeded this interest in me. She always insisted on muting commercials, and got rid of TV entirely by the time I was 7. She used trips to the grocery store to teach us how companies advertise specifically to children, and why children are almost always a target audience.
I have come to believe that media, and entertainment in general and without exclusion, are used as advertisement. Commercials that play separately are the most blatant and obvious way in which advertisement is delivered via media.
While still relatively overt, placing a branded product in a show or film advertises less conspicuously, particularly to children. An example of this is the use of Reeses Pieces in the film E.T.
Brands and products are not the only things that can be advertised within media. More covert promotions are being delivered via screens, embedding messages that the conscious mind often does not perceive. This is arguably the primary reason for the introduction and existence of television as well as the subsequent emergence of other forms of media and entertainment.
Although much less obvious, narratives and agendas enter the brain and are very effectively reinforced subconsciously as media is consumed. For example, the show Dexter delivers a very clear message around DNA evidence as iron clad and forensic science as settled science.
#1
I realize this post is a lot. The psychology of diabolical assholes and their use of Disney to program innocent minds. Malaria. DDT. Polio. It’s a lot.
"It's a lot." ......Well, possibly not.
Actually seeing the skunk is not generally necessary. Some things are simply intuitive.
President Trump signed pardons for nearly all Jan 6 defendants after his inauguration
Constitutional law attorney and Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley reacted on "America's Newsroom" Tuesday to the pardons given by President Donald Trump to nearly all the Jan. 6 rioters charged with crimes. Turley said the "shock and awe" campaign used by the Biden Justice Department ended up undermining the prosecutions.
JONATHAN TURLEY: Well, the Department of Justice really made the case for these pardons, and it was hard to do because most of us supported the people responsible for the riot being held accountable. It was a terrible day. But the Justice Department unleashed what one of its top lawyers called a ‘shock and awe’ campaign, and they just scooped up hundreds of people. They often demanded really excessive sentences, in my view. Most of these people were charged with just trespass or unlawful entry. Most of them were not violent. The government tended to oppose bail, they kept a number of them for a very long time in segregation. In some cases, they demanded limitations on what people could say or read or associate with after they were released. All of this tended to undermine their case. So when the president campaigned on this issue, I think a lot of people wanted to see this chapter closed, and he certainly did that. I mean, this was broader than most people expected or even asked for.
Posted by: Skidmark ||
01/22/2025 10:04 ||
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#1
Read an interesting piece; in short whatever one thinks leading up to it, as soon as the J6 Prosecutors received a pardon, everyone down river of the prosecution required a pardon as the due process was tainted.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Olga Borisova
[REGNUM] Russian fighter, assault trooper Farhad, call sign Okhotnik, received a serious abdominal wound right before the New Year. A native of Chebarkul (Chelyabinsk region) was taken to a hospital in Makeyevka.
The injury was very serious: Farhad was covered in tubes, barely alive, and hallucinations had already begun, recalls the head of the Donetsk headquarters of the Committee of Families of Warriors of the Fatherland (KSVO) Anzhelika Bairachnaya. At the time, she herself was on vacation in Krasnoyarsk Krai.
"Nobody took him out - they planned to route him to another hospital on January 1. They called us at half past two in the morning, there was no time to waste - every hour counted. I called the girls at headquarters from Krasnoyarsk, they rushed to the hospital. But it was a holiday: no head doctor, no one. And the soldier's condition was terrible.
The girls bought a phone so that he could call his wife - she was in Omsk, and I contacted our Ministry of Health. And with the assistance of the Ministry of Health, we urgently took him first to Rovenki, and then to Rostov," Bairachnaya said in a conversation with IA Regnum.
After that, Farkhad underwent three surgeries, now his condition is satisfactory, but doctors continue to keep the man in artificial sleep. At the same time, doctors confirmed: the count really was every minute, the fighter had to be taken out immediately - otherwise he would not have survived.
"DONETSK VOLUNTEERS SAVED"
This situation with an emergency, but at first glance impossible, transportation of a wounded soldier is far from the first on the account of the head of the Donetsk headquarters of the KSVO. A little less than a year ago, she managed to take another serviceman out of the Donetsk hospital.
It was spring. Vladimir from Kurgan had frostbite on his extremities, he was in the Kalinin Hospital, but they wouldn't let him evacuate - there were no cars.
"They could have amputated his legs, but we don't have that kind of equipment here. That is, to save him, we had to evacuate him urgently. Well, we jumped into the car ourselves, even though it was late at night. We arrived at the hospital, talked to the doctors, and they quickly discharged him.
We loaded him into our car - we have a Gazelle, brought him to the evacuation point, from there we sent him to Rostov on the same day. His feet were amputated anyway, but there was no infection or other terrible consequences. The man's family and the head of the region thanked us," says Bairachnaya.
Deputy Head of the KSVO headquarters in Kurgan is Olga Pashkova. She wrote about Vladimir and his wife Elizaveta on social networks, as well as about his rescue - thanks to Donetsk volunteers.
Anzhelika Bairachnaya also remembers Vladimir very well. She found out that the man signed a contract, served for literally a week and got frostbite. But after treatment in the hospital, after two months he began to use a wheelchair and began to recover.
A LARGE FAMILY AND FOUR CHILDREN OF THEIR OWN
Servicemen and their relatives contact the KSVO headquarters with a variety of problems, says an interlocutor of the IA Regnum. Some were helped with medical care, others with payments. The headquarters also collects and delivers food and essential items to families whose breadwinners are missing.
Often, explains Bairachnaya, the task of the committee staff is precisely to build a “bridge,” to establish interaction between the fighter and government agencies—the Ministry of Health and other departments.
However, the headquarters staff also have other things to do: deliver humanitarian aid and conduct master classes on folk crafts for the children and wives of military personnel.
"We have a warehouse - help comes: clothes, shoes, books. People come every Sunday and choose what they need. Once a month we give out a food package, give gifts for the holidays... Recently we went to the monument to the children who died in Donbass and made doves with the children..." - recalls the head of the Donetsk headquarters of the KSVO.
Another category of people that the headquarters helps are displaced persons from recently liberated settlements: Selidovo, Maryinka, Ukrainka and many others.
Anzhelika Bairachnaya is not only a native and patriot of Donetsk, but also the wife of a serviceman, so it is not difficult for her to find a common language with families who find themselves in the same situation. Although by her first education and many years of pre-war work, the woman is a financier. Already in the DPR, she began to engage in public activities, for eight years she held the position of the chairperson of the Council of Large Families.
In 2022, her husband, Ivan, volunteered for the front, and the headquarters of the Committee of Families of Soldiers of the Fatherland opened in Donetsk. A competition was held for the position of head of the regional division. Among the candidates submitted by the local administration was Bairachnaya.
“I had a smooth transition from the chairman of large families to the KSVO. There is a family that we are still leading, ” she recalls. “The father was in the militia, he died in 2019, three children from two different mothers were left. Both of them abandoned the children and they were taken by their grandmother, the mother of the deceased. And then, last year, the grandmother died, the children were left complete orphans. We helped them, of course: with things, food. We helped the eldest girl transfer to a budget, now she studies for free. We have a lot of families with five or six children, and the fathers are fighting…”
"THEY LEAVE US WITH SMILES"
There were never even thoughts of leaving Donetsk: neither in 2014 nor in 2022, admits Bairachnaya. In the family, with her husband and children, they simply did not talk about it. Although the danger was tangible, all the time nearby. The headquarters where she works is located in the city center, HIMARS missiles flew nearby.
"We're used to it. We sat out the shelling, came out of the basement - and continued working. In 2014, when all this began, Donetsk was practically empty. It was a city of a million people, but there were 140 thousand left in the entire Donetsk People's Republic. People left, but then came back.
And I didn't even think about leaving: I love my land, I love my city. In 2014-15 it was still scary. Everything was closed, nothing worked, and then the fear began to subside. This year, for the first time in all this time, the circus opened, the theater started working," - the interlocutor of IA Regnum shared her emotions.
Working with the wounded or relatives who have experienced loss is always hard work, Bairachnaya does not hide. At the same time, the woman's colleagues have had their own troubles similar to what people who come to KSVO for help have to endure.
"One of my colleagues lost her husband, another came at the call of her heart, others are the wives of active servicemen. We are all together, in the same boat. Therefore, knowing this pain, these problems, it is easier for us to help each other. And support helps to cope with all requests," says the head of the Donetsk headquarters.
And to help people even more effectively, Anzhelika recently received a second education - in psychology, working with military personnel. It also came in handy in her work with civilians.
"You know, when a mother or a wife comes, when they cry, telling their story, the most important thing is to hug and say "thank you" for your son or husband. That's enough. You listen to them, let them cry, they tell their story - about how they served, what they were like, how their childhood was... And everything goes away: they leave us with smiles," says Bairachnaya.
A Russian missile submarine disappears without a trace during a secret mission in the Greenland Sea. Viktor Voronin, the youngest commander of the Northern Fleet, whose older brother was in command of the missing cruiser, goes in search of him.
At the same time, due to the destruction of the polar station, a Kraken monster appears in the northern waters.
Upsetting. What would have been a better strategy, given deliberately harmful micromanaging by the Biden administration? What would be a better strategy given a supportive president who wants wars to be won?
[JNS] Ran Baratz, who teaches military doctrine at the IDF’s National Defense College and founded Mida, an online Hebrew-language Commentary-like magazine, raises no objections to the ceasefire deal with Hamas—but not for the reasons one would expect. It’s because the IDF can’t win. At least, not with a General Staff marinated in postmodern military doctrine.
Baratz notes that the army’s rank-and-file is second to none, but the General Staff’s lack of strategy results in endless targeted raids, where the IDF goes in, kills some terrorists, retreats, then reenters the same area to cope with more terrorists—and lose more of its valiant young soldiers.
"When generals don’t have a strategy, they come up with an overarching strategy of attrition, which doctrinally, is achieved by raids," Baratz told JNS on Jan. 15.
"They have different names for raids. In Vietnam, it was called ’search and destroy.’ But it was the same idea. You raid a place, you kill the enemy combatants, with some collateral damage, and you pull back. You could see that in the Second Lebanon War [in 2006], and you can see that today. If they had a good operational plan, they wouldn’t be speaking about raids," he says.
The General Staff didn’t even have a plan in place to invade the Gaza Strip, Baratz says. They thought it wasn’t needed as Hamas was "deterred." That’s why it took so long for the IDF to go into Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion.
More at the link.
Posted by: The Walking Unvaxed ||
01/22/2025 07:50 ||
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[11134 views]
Top|| File under: Hamas
#1
There are no winning strategy as long as Globalist-Islamist alliance dictates the rules of war. That Israel does is surviving until conditions change.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Conspiracy Sarah] I have always been interested in the psychology of media. Those of you that have followed me for a while will already know that my mom seeded this interest in me. She always insisted on muting commercials, and got rid of TV entirely by the time I was 7. She used trips to the grocery store to teach us how companies advertise specifically to children, and why children are almost always a target audience.
