My sister hates the sight of blood, and faints when getting a needle, but to this day I don't know how she did what she did, which was to reach in and clamp her hand around his neck to try and stem the bleeding, while trying to talk to him. His wife was in the passenger seat, relatively uninjured but screaming hysterically at her husband's condition. My sister said that she looked into the guys eyes while she tried to talk to him and reassure him - she said the look he gave her was one of 'pleading sadness', and she watched while in less than a minute the life went out of him right there and then.
She only ever told me the story once, and our family has one of those stupid 'don't talk about it' rules, which after reading this, I intend to break. She seems fine to this day and doesn't show any outward signs of it affecting her, but next time I get the chance, I will see if she wants to talk more about it.
FTR, my sentiment was really just about reminding people you care about that they are, in fact, appreciated.
EDIT: ... and there's hardly enough vomit in the world, is there? I'm sorry, that sounded absurdly cheesy, but it actually does matter.
But that meaning is a relatively modern extension of the original idea of heroes being "just" people who perform great feats. If you read the great epics, any people the heroes end up saving are often incidental. The heroic acts are for the glory of the heroes, a distinctly selfish act.
It's a bit difficult to explain, if you don't know the feeling. There's a reason I said "been through" rather than "done". Things can happen so quickly that you don't really apply rational thought to what you're doing. And as with all such situations, we tend to post-hoc rationalize what we did. So for a heroic[selfless] act to not be a heroic[selfish] act, it must be done solely for the good of those involved, not for any praise or glory for the "hero". It can make the act feel meaningless to receive praise for it.
You're often the clearest eye-witness to the event, but that doesn't mean you're objectively reliable. At best, you don't know why you did any particular thing. You might say "anyone would have done it." It feels bad to receive praise for a common act.
At worst, you second guess everything. You worry about the mistakes more than anything "right" you did. What if you hadn't hesitated for what felt like an eternity (when outside observers would probably say you sprung into action immediately)? What if you hadn't forgotten to carry your pocket knife today, so you could have cut the seat belt into a tourniquet (despite seatbelts being extremely difficult to actually cut). What if you hadn't pressed so hard during CPR that you broke their ribs (except CPR done correctly is very likely to break ribs)[0]? In emergency situations, the odds are against you, so even if you do absolutely everything right, you're probably not going to "succeed". It definitely feels bad to receive praise when you think you've screwed up.
That's why you'll see so many people say they "just want to move on." It's easier to bury the issue than deal with any one of those things, and it's highly likely the person is going through all of them. The most thanks someone will want is to see the person they tried to help walk away happy and safe; a thanks from that person will be sincere and will feel real. From anyone else who wasn't involved, it will only serve as a reminder of something the person would rather forget.
People don't want to receive praise when they don't feel like they deserve it. People feel like they deserve praise when they've done hard work and they've done it well. You want to thank a cop or EMT or doctor or search-and-rescue volunteer? Don't thank them for that one event over which they probably feel conflicted. Thank them for their choice to join their profession and their choice to continue to wake up every day and go back to it.
Incidentally, that's also why you probably shouldn't thank a soldier "for their service." You don't know why they joined. Some people have joined not out of a sense of service to country, but a sense of desperation to get out of a bad situation at home. And once they have joined, they can't easily un-join. Continuing to show up to be a soldier is not a daily choice. Or maybe they've joined for all the "right" reasons and they believe every day that their choice was the right one, the vast majority of military personnel are in support--not combat--positions, and that person might feel they are not deserving of praise because they are not in danger. Thanking a soldier for their service--especially if you're a random person on the street and only know they are a soldier because they are wearing a uniform--could be reminding them of lots of things outside of their control.
I also saw a thief beaten to death pretty much right in front of me, which haunts me even more. I witnessed it from my balcony and by the time I got downstairs (with the intention of stopping it) it was too late. There was also a suicide in my neighborhood where a young boy jumped off his balcony from about 5 stories up. I was out exercising so fortunately I didn't see it, but when I got back my neighbors all told me and the next day I saw photos in a newspaper taken right near my apartment of a monk blessing the boy's body. My wife as a child also saw a foreign English teacher jump off a tall building. It can be really depressing living in an impoverished place.
Source: am a veteran
True enough, but wars tend not to last long after they lose public support (or the population 'suffers from low morale'). Having veterans speak out and seeing flag-draped coffins on the front pages tends to do that (see Vietnam), which is why modern governments try to control the war narrative ("embedded" journalism, psy-ops, etc)
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+long+has+america+been+at...
I have listened when he's brought it up on his own accord, when he's been on both ends of war violence [giving it or receiving it]. They're not the prettiest images to imagine, let alone experience first hand as he did, but it's mine to listen and his to tell.
Those first ten seconds are shocking. For me it was understanding ^control^, the lack of control and the fight to get it back. The situation you were presented @bitcharmer is binary and anything other than a win can be seen as failure.
For me it took a long time to understand that whatever I did, I had no real ^control^. Understanding control, the complete lack of it, in extreme situations like the one you describe lets you move one step closer to understanding death. To understand what it is like in @bitcharmer shoes, read happened in a similar situation back in 2012 (non fatal) https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/7949327460
After this I'm one for one.
We don't get a lot of death intruding in our lives when we're young. But it starts to creep in as you get older and it is ... very unsettling.