Why is it rude to ask a combat personal if he killed someone at war?

When I was a kid, the dads of everyone I knew had fought in WWII. Every little boy quizzed his dad about what he did in the war. (Probably girls too, I don't know).

We got our ideas about WWII from war movies on TV and basically we thought everything was infantry. My dad told me he never shot at anyone, never got shot at. AND he said, it was not a good question to ask because men who did shoot at people would not be eager to talk about it.

I didn't understand why, not then, when I was six or seven. But I did later. Later we got into the Vietnam War and I was just the right age for that war.

I stayed out of it (and I feel history has vindicated me) but quite a few guys I knew couldn't wait to get into it! None of those guys came back from the war the same person! Just about all of them were haunted by demons.

George Carlin used to do a bit about how some men coming back from war were emotionally injured. In WWI they called it 'shell shock' but in the years since it's gotten more names, each new name had more syllables, until now it's Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. After GW Bush's Iraq War we discovered that PTSD was MUCH more common than we'd thought, affecting perhaps 1/3 to 1/2 of all combat participants.

Our govt. , of course, wants to minimize it, partly to minimize the cost, and partly for fear of giving war a bad name. This is mostly why we have 22 vets committing suicide every day!

So, bottom line, though it's a perfectly legitimate question: Did you shoot anyone in the war? , I think it's a subject best avoided. 8.

Eh....I was in during the Cold War. A lot of the guys from Nam were just retiring and they used to tell stories. Most of them didn't act like that way was traumatic.

It was the friends that got it that they had problems talking about.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.