I loathe using the "emotions" word because of the connotations it has in today's culture, but it is accurate in the story I'm about to mention.
When my second son was born about 7 weeks ago, me and my wife stayed overnight at the hospital for about 4 nights. She was sleeping and I was on a couch next to the bed watching Saving Private Ryan which had come on TV. Only thing they censored was the swearing.
I was enjoying it like I usually did, but something different happened this time.
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We get to the part where Mrs Ryan is washing dishes and she sees the a car driving up the road to her farm. She notices the army symbol and considers the worst. Sur enough, they get out and tell her that 3 of her sons were killed in the landings and they don't know where the 4th one is. She drops to her knees.
During this part, tears came to my eyes and I couldn't stop them for a few minutes. I just kept thinking of how it would feel to lose both my sons in a day. All that time, investment, love, seeing them grow up, and bringing them up to do great things - gone in an instant.
For a brief moment, I felt this overwhelming sadness.
This happened again, though not as pronounced. Just a few tears this time. It actually happened when I was looking at the war world one thread in this deep forum and someone posted an imgur gallery of a lot of previous unseen photos.
Toward the end of it are photos of soldiers with parts of their face missing from wounds and the attempted reconstruction surgery that never made them look close to how they were before. It brought some tears to my eyes thinking what it would feel like as a parent to see one of my sons come back, completely disfigured and helpless for life and imagining what the future would hold for him after it.
Then I thought about how I would justify it to myself considering the result of the war and what it was fought over. In a true story, one mother lost 5 of her sons in The Great War. Again, that feeling manifests when I saw this:
Honestly, I believe it would be worse today. A marine comes back from Afghanistan disfigured. Good luck having enough game to get past a nasty facial injury. The guy's future is screwed.
This emotion of sadness stirs in me specifically during war films and pictures where parents lose their kids or the soldiers are left with terrible facial scars and missing limbs..
Has this happened to anyone else when you had kids and imagined what it would be like if it were them horrifically injured or killed in a war?
.
When my second son was born about 7 weeks ago, me and my wife stayed overnight at the hospital for about 4 nights. She was sleeping and I was on a couch next to the bed watching Saving Private Ryan which had come on TV. Only thing they censored was the swearing.
I was enjoying it like I usually did, but something different happened this time.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
We get to the part where Mrs Ryan is washing dishes and she sees the a car driving up the road to her farm. She notices the army symbol and considers the worst. Sur enough, they get out and tell her that 3 of her sons were killed in the landings and they don't know where the 4th one is. She drops to her knees.
During this part, tears came to my eyes and I couldn't stop them for a few minutes. I just kept thinking of how it would feel to lose both my sons in a day. All that time, investment, love, seeing them grow up, and bringing them up to do great things - gone in an instant.
For a brief moment, I felt this overwhelming sadness.
This happened again, though not as pronounced. Just a few tears this time. It actually happened when I was looking at the war world one thread in this deep forum and someone posted an imgur gallery of a lot of previous unseen photos.
Toward the end of it are photos of soldiers with parts of their face missing from wounds and the attempted reconstruction surgery that never made them look close to how they were before. It brought some tears to my eyes thinking what it would feel like as a parent to see one of my sons come back, completely disfigured and helpless for life and imagining what the future would hold for him after it.
Then I thought about how I would justify it to myself considering the result of the war and what it was fought over. In a true story, one mother lost 5 of her sons in The Great War. Again, that feeling manifests when I saw this:
Quote:Quote:
"Following the death of her sons, who were all killed in action in the trenches of the Western front, Mrs Smith was known to say: "Don't have boys, they just grow up to be cannon-fodder."
Honestly, I believe it would be worse today. A marine comes back from Afghanistan disfigured. Good luck having enough game to get past a nasty facial injury. The guy's future is screwed.
This emotion of sadness stirs in me specifically during war films and pictures where parents lose their kids or the soldiers are left with terrible facial scars and missing limbs..
Has this happened to anyone else when you had kids and imagined what it would be like if it were them horrifically injured or killed in a war?
.