We had an interesting problem develop where people were going to the medic tent and getting prescribed Ambien for sleep, but then they would stay up after taking it. It makes you feel really drunk, and it was the only escape from the drudgery. This substance abuse may have ironically saved our sanity.
I refined my programming skills developing a personal open source software tool over two deployments. Two deployments was almost enough to transform me from a junior developer into a strong senior. I also passed the CISSP exam on the first try because I had time to read the entire course book and think about the qualifying management scenarios.
You absolutely have to find a way to say busy. Boredom reinforces your loneliness and lack of emotional intimacy, which is a bad place to be in.
Tallil, Iraq, 2008
I don't know - our fellow FOB inmates (Afghan security forces) kept turning on us and shooting people.
Even with these insider threats and the periodic rocket attacks daily life was still hopelessly dull. I remember people willing to cut off their arms to experience the misery of combat just to get off the FOB.
What does FOB mean to you people? In the UK military a FOB is a little base with maybe twenty to a hundred people in, planted in an area surrounded by the enemy, designed for you to patrol out from it and dominate the ground. Sleepy wasn't how I'd describe it. Sleep-less more like. I worked 16 hour days for seven months and dealt with people being killed and maimed daily.
And then, on a later topside tour, I was standing 3-section watches and then one of the other guys transferred so we went to 2-section watches (port and starboard) while I trained the new guy. The problem was that the new guy was also my roommate on the ship. So we'd stand watch for 6 hours together, go eat together, go back to the stateroom and sleep at the same time (in bunk beds, of course), wake up, eat, go back on watch together. Except for bathroom breaks, we literally spent 24 hours a day together. It only took 3 or so days of that before we were both begging for the sweet release of death...
I was on a submarine and what you've described was what I experienced as well. Add not seeing the sun for 90 days and you've got sub life nailed down. 18hr days, 6 on watch, 6 off watch doing maintenance/training, 6 in the rack...rinse and repeat for the entire deployment...you kinda just fall into a routine after the 1st week or so that causes some distance between what is going on inside the sub to what is happening in the real world...very strange looking back on it now
The people who went crazy the fastest were those without "real jobs" (i.e. where contractors did the work and they were still in the force structure but essentially used for undifferentiated tasks). For doctors in (busy) hospitals, aviators, etc., it wasn't as bad.
If you are talking about unhealthy enough to create injurious situations I think that differs by the situation and stimulus present. I don't think there is a single uniform answer. Also, it really helps if there are people around to watch for dramatic shifts in behavior before it becomes self-destructive.
It is important to note that many people may silently suffer from exceedingly minor and undiagnosed mental health defects that they may not be aware of. When you are around people long enough these qualities become more observable. In my experience it takes as little as 2 to 3 months of observation to really identify it with some amount of fine precision and learn to your own communication skills to compensate for the identified personality qualities.
I have a professional mental health counselor in my family who insists as much as 40% of the population could benefit from some minor amount of behavior altering medication. I haven't observed numbers that high from deployment environments, but I have observed a higher number of individuals fitting this criteria than you might think.
lol, that's what the pharmaceutical companies want us to believe. a lot of those medicines are based on inconclusive research and wrong assumptions. unless you're taking antipsychotics, stimulants, benzos, or a few other families of drugs, your crazy pills are probably based on bunk science.
I am not alleging anything on any particular nation, but coming from a developing country where its own internally deployed troops known to commit a lot of sexual violence, I am curious about the underlying causes. And if there is a way through which civilian governments can control it.
I am really not the expert to provide a qualified answer to any of this. I can only speak to my own observations. My perspective is that of a US Army soldier. Everything that follows is only my personal opinion.
I have been deployed three times and only one of those times was sexual assault a significant concern. When a certain NATO ally left the area the problem essentially evaporated overnight. That change happened shortly after we arrived at the area. I am unaware of what that the motivating factor was.
Coincidentally, shortly before that NATO ally left (days before I arrived) there was also a notable incident. A seemingly unarmed victim was attacked at night by two people in civilian clothes. One of these people served as a distraction while the second clubbed the victim in the head from behind and then drug the victim to a nearby area that muffled sound. Shortly after that the victim regained consciousness and pulled out a very small knife hidden on their person. The victim was able to carve up one of the assailants legs leaving the second assailant to pull him to safety. The victim then walked to the hospital to be treated for the head injury and there reported the offense. I have no idea if this defensive action contributed to the immediate decline in following sexual assault incidents.
According to the documentary "The Invisible War" the US military forces have had a problem with sexual assault much higher than the comparative civilian world. The documentary does not directly or officially indicate a cause, but to me it looked like the documentary spelled out a specific cause: weak leadership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_War
> And if there is a way through which civilian governments can control it.
Never tolerate or condone sexual assault in any form. Always investigate reported incidents. Also, and this is important, punish people who are proven to be aware of incidents but fail to report them.
There is no commute, no worrying about what to eat, what to wear, picking up kids, or anything else that consumes a normal person's time. In a way it is kind of like a vacation. You have so much disposable time to spend on hobbies, exercise, or education.
It is very much like being in prison, except that I am not afraid of my fellow inmates. It is strange though, because you don't get to pick your friends, much like prison. I suspect the fellow fobbits are substantially more educated on average than a typical prison population and probably generally healthier physically and mentally. You would be surprised, though, at just how mentally unhealthy many of your coworkers are when you are around them long enough to really see it.
Unless you are extremely ambitious and psychotically disciplined that much downtime grates on your soul. Being deployed for too long can be depressing and you cannot escape a certain amount of emotional isolation. It is also weird having a spouse and children and yet living apart for a year or more like a single person.
The long term consequence of the environment is an unhealthy dose of apathy. If you are too bored for too long you really don't care about most anything. Unfortunately, the environment provides little motivation to care as you are less likely to die in a combat zone stuck on a fob than driving to work in the civilian world.