- Pronouns
- He/Him
The Mental Cost of Observing a War
April 4th 2022
By Olde Delaware
I contemplated starting this article after appearing in the War in Europe show on EBC Radio. There is a great mental cost in observing war. I've been bearing that cost as much as I can but there are great limits on one's psyche on what they can and cannot take and how they balance what they see and how much they try not to see. There is great truth in the tagline for 80s war movie 'Platoon'; "The first casualty of war is innocence".
I got into OSINT or Open Source Intelligence quite by chance. I grew up in a military family and as a result knew more about weapons of war than who was on Sesame Street. As I got older, I gravitated to friends who grew up similarly or ended up going into the service. As a result I grew contacts in the spheres of National Defense, Security and the Federal Government. If you have spent any given time with me in Eurochat, you've heard me talking about these people. I'd trust them with my life and as a result they trust me with theirs and the information I get from them I have never doubted.
You get the idea.
I took a phone call from a friend of mine in mid December, we will call them "Bob". Bob is a senior enlisted man in the United States Air Force, I am talking the upper echelon of the enlisted ranks. He told me that there's a lot of movement going on in Europe and to keep my ear to the ground. He was right. What ended up being announced near the end of December was a mobilization of Russian forces to the border with Ukraine. This coincided with the reports hitting mainstream media from U.S. Intelligence. This was when I began posting and of course there were doubts. Honestly, you cannot fault ANYONE for having doubts. As big a drum beater I am for the United States, several wars with fake information made trusting U.S. Intelligence a safe a bet as trusting your enemy with a bent pin around a corner.
But the reports kept coming and I kept posting. Sources people had never even heard of. Again, I don't fault anyone there, who are you going to trust, the BBC or Evergreen Intel on Twitter. The more posts that came, the bigger the doubt, the louder the doubt, the higher frequency of posts. I remember logging off Discord in early February and loudly screaming "Its going to happen, I can't fucking believe its going to happen." As much as I would like to say this was confined to just Europeia, I was also giving updates to friends in another server who were asking so many questions that I couldn't keep up. One person, who serves at the present in the Finnish Army told me that I was getting intelligence before he was being briefed on it by his army and mine was better.
Wednesday, February 23rd 2022, 9:50pm Eastern Standard Time:
"THIS IS IT"
I go back daily and read that I wrote that.
This is it.
No one needed me to be the town crier. But there I was, screaming it and posting the words of the President of the Russian Federation and his flimsy excuses for violating Ukraine's sovereignty. I started scouring sources, reaching out to my own sources, checking telegram and twitter. This was it after all I kept telling myself, people were going to need me more than ever. That's when the first picture of the war came through. Most people will believe its the video of the CNN journalist putting on kevlar on top of some hotel in Kyiv. It is in reality a picture of a Ukrainian gate guard outside of Annexed Crimea having his position overrun. The soldier looked to be mid 20s and had dinnerplate eyes, so whatever was coming at him was not good.
That image has stayed with me throughout this war and I often think of what happened to or became of him.
I championed the Ghost of Kyiv and the Snake Island holdouts.
I kept posting.
The more I posted, the harder it was to look away.
Post. Post. Post.
Irpin, Kyiv, Mariupol, Liyv, Putin, Shogin, Zelenskyy, Crimea, MiGs, Prisoners, Tanks, Trucks, Conscripts, Bodies, Missiles, Liberation.
Post. Post. Post.
I don't remember exactly what it was that broke me but I think it was a video I saw in the middle of updates. It was an attack by Ukrainian regulars against a Russian position.
The aftermath was just too much to bear.
I took a few days off posting at the request of Lethen and Drecq but the nightmares started almost immediately. I felt guilty for letting down Euro and my friends and I suffered what I think was second hand trauma. So I did something I don't usually do, I reached out to my uncle who served in Vietnam. He was Marine Force Recon and served 4 tours. We got coffee and we talked and he told me what I was going through was PTSD. He told me two things, that if my friends were truly my friends that they would understand and that I needed to take time for me because War doesn't change.
So I took the time off, I posted intermittently because I wanted to, not because I felt like I had to and I thought that I had worked through a lot of what I was going through. The nightmares had stopped, I was less anxious, etc.
Until Wednesday when the initial horrors of Irpin and Bucha started to come through.
I have lived through many wars, seen many horrible things but I got physically sick when the first images started to come out and I aggressively warned others, especially in Europeia, to avoid the media because of it. The words 'Never Again' aren't just words, it should be a rallying cry for the entire world. We left Auschwitz and other camps standing to force the world to see the horrors and stand by their promises and we failed.
It broke me.
There is a great mental cost those who choose to observe war.
I wish to wake up from this nightmare and find out it was all a horrible dream. That I was wrong. That we are at peace.
I wish.
April 4th 2022
By Olde Delaware
I contemplated starting this article after appearing in the War in Europe show on EBC Radio. There is a great mental cost in observing war. I've been bearing that cost as much as I can but there are great limits on one's psyche on what they can and cannot take and how they balance what they see and how much they try not to see. There is great truth in the tagline for 80s war movie 'Platoon'; "The first casualty of war is innocence".
I got into OSINT or Open Source Intelligence quite by chance. I grew up in a military family and as a result knew more about weapons of war than who was on Sesame Street. As I got older, I gravitated to friends who grew up similarly or ended up going into the service. As a result I grew contacts in the spheres of National Defense, Security and the Federal Government. If you have spent any given time with me in Eurochat, you've heard me talking about these people. I'd trust them with my life and as a result they trust me with theirs and the information I get from them I have never doubted.
You get the idea.
I took a phone call from a friend of mine in mid December, we will call them "Bob". Bob is a senior enlisted man in the United States Air Force, I am talking the upper echelon of the enlisted ranks. He told me that there's a lot of movement going on in Europe and to keep my ear to the ground. He was right. What ended up being announced near the end of December was a mobilization of Russian forces to the border with Ukraine. This coincided with the reports hitting mainstream media from U.S. Intelligence. This was when I began posting and of course there were doubts. Honestly, you cannot fault ANYONE for having doubts. As big a drum beater I am for the United States, several wars with fake information made trusting U.S. Intelligence a safe a bet as trusting your enemy with a bent pin around a corner.
But the reports kept coming and I kept posting. Sources people had never even heard of. Again, I don't fault anyone there, who are you going to trust, the BBC or Evergreen Intel on Twitter. The more posts that came, the bigger the doubt, the louder the doubt, the higher frequency of posts. I remember logging off Discord in early February and loudly screaming "Its going to happen, I can't fucking believe its going to happen." As much as I would like to say this was confined to just Europeia, I was also giving updates to friends in another server who were asking so many questions that I couldn't keep up. One person, who serves at the present in the Finnish Army told me that I was getting intelligence before he was being briefed on it by his army and mine was better.
Wednesday, February 23rd 2022, 9:50pm Eastern Standard Time:
"THIS IS IT"
I go back daily and read that I wrote that.
This is it.
No one needed me to be the town crier. But there I was, screaming it and posting the words of the President of the Russian Federation and his flimsy excuses for violating Ukraine's sovereignty. I started scouring sources, reaching out to my own sources, checking telegram and twitter. This was it after all I kept telling myself, people were going to need me more than ever. That's when the first picture of the war came through. Most people will believe its the video of the CNN journalist putting on kevlar on top of some hotel in Kyiv. It is in reality a picture of a Ukrainian gate guard outside of Annexed Crimea having his position overrun. The soldier looked to be mid 20s and had dinnerplate eyes, so whatever was coming at him was not good.
That image has stayed with me throughout this war and I often think of what happened to or became of him.
I championed the Ghost of Kyiv and the Snake Island holdouts.
I kept posting.
The more I posted, the harder it was to look away.
Post. Post. Post.
Irpin, Kyiv, Mariupol, Liyv, Putin, Shogin, Zelenskyy, Crimea, MiGs, Prisoners, Tanks, Trucks, Conscripts, Bodies, Missiles, Liberation.
Post. Post. Post.
I don't remember exactly what it was that broke me but I think it was a video I saw in the middle of updates. It was an attack by Ukrainian regulars against a Russian position.
The aftermath was just too much to bear.
I took a few days off posting at the request of Lethen and Drecq but the nightmares started almost immediately. I felt guilty for letting down Euro and my friends and I suffered what I think was second hand trauma. So I did something I don't usually do, I reached out to my uncle who served in Vietnam. He was Marine Force Recon and served 4 tours. We got coffee and we talked and he told me what I was going through was PTSD. He told me two things, that if my friends were truly my friends that they would understand and that I needed to take time for me because War doesn't change.
So I took the time off, I posted intermittently because I wanted to, not because I felt like I had to and I thought that I had worked through a lot of what I was going through. The nightmares had stopped, I was less anxious, etc.
Until Wednesday when the initial horrors of Irpin and Bucha started to come through.
I have lived through many wars, seen many horrible things but I got physically sick when the first images started to come out and I aggressively warned others, especially in Europeia, to avoid the media because of it. The words 'Never Again' aren't just words, it should be a rallying cry for the entire world. We left Auschwitz and other camps standing to force the world to see the horrors and stand by their promises and we failed.
It broke me.
There is a great mental cost those who choose to observe war.
I wish to wake up from this nightmare and find out it was all a horrible dream. That I was wrong. That we are at peace.
I wish.
