While we've been blogging about "healthy sexuality and the combat veteran" lately, in our series on sexuality and intimacy - the good, the bad and the ugly -- it's always interesting to note by comparison just how amazingly close combatants end up feeling to one each other. It makes you wonder if some of that fellow feeling and clearly love could be transferred successfuly to other, more classically intimate relationships after combat -- some of which seem dysfunctional at best -- and if so, how.
In the meantime, let's take another look at the closeness combatants develop in combat, as expressed by several articulate sources.
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A few weeks ago we blogged about an excerpt the stunning war poem by Robert Graves to Siegrifed Sassoon, both WWI soliders, one gravely wounded, the other with PTSD -- about the relationships formed in combat:
Show me the two so closely bound
As we, by the wet bond of blood,
By friendship blossoming from mud,
By Death: we faced him, and we found Beauty in Death,
In dead men, breath.
Here's another item, this time from prose, but so artfully written, as to be poetic itself. It seems to be highlighting just the same bond:
"We sit opposite one another ... two soldiers in shabby coats, cooking a [stolen animal] in the middle of the night. We don't talk much, but I believe we have a more complete communication with one another than even lovers have.
We are two men, two minute sparks of life: outside is the night and the circle of death. We sit on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease [from the fire] drips from our hands, in our hearts we are close to one another, and the hour is like the room: flecked over with the lights and shadows of our feelings cast by a quiet fire. What does he know of me or I of him? Formerly we should not have had a single thought in common -- now we sit with [the grilled animal] between us and feel in unison, and are so intimate that we do not even speak."
--from All Quiet on the Western Front, quoted by Robert Jay Lifton, in "Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans - Neither Victims nor Executioners."
Editor's note: There were some neat personal quotes I was going to add in here from a conversation with a veteran via email about his relationships with his foxhole buddies, but unfortuantely I can't seem to find them at the moment. When I do, I'll add them back in to this post. They seemed to quite confirm the two passages above.
