Love and War
My father and my father-in-law were both Vietnam vets. My ex-husband told me once that as a child he leapt on his father while the man was sleeping and got thrown across the room.
My understanding is that such incidents and worse are common with war veterans. Patrick Stewart says his father beat his mother and he attributes it to untreated PTSD from having served in World War II.
My father spent his last month in Vietnam trapped behind enemy lines. He slept with his eyes open and never removed his boots.
After they medevacced him out, when they removed his socks at Walter Reed Hospital, the skin came off with them. He spent six weeks at Walter Reed, probably because he couldn't walk until the skin grew back.
He had shrapnel in his eye making him permanently uninsurable because they believed he was at risk of suddenly dropping dead if it left the eye and moved into his heain. The shrapnel caused blind spells which contributed to his tendency to be unemployed for months at a time.
He quit one job because of it, something I learned from my mother only after he died, something like four or five decades after he quit the job in question. He had been hired as a security guard and was carrying a loaded gun and sometimes went suddenly blind for up to twenty minutes without warning.
He felt this was an unacceptable situation. He quit after just a few months.
I look back in it and wonder why he didn't try to make a living making and selling crafts or something, some kind of masculine version of my mother taking in sewing. He wasn't really employable but he could have potentially created stuff, stockpiled it, found ways to sell it.
My mother agreed to marry him on a set of unspecified conditions, a private bargain struck because he wanted her badly and wouldn't let it go. She had certain expectations of him and this seems to have contributed to his inability to establish a second successful career following his military retirement.
My mother grew up in Germany during World War II and its aftermath. She was likely psychic and while my father was deployed to Vietnam she had extremely vivid dreams of the Vietnam war, as if watching her husband in the war in a live news reel.
She described one of her dreams of him or others parachuting in and how real it seemed and how disturbing it all was. She apparently took the whole thing very hard emotionally. I have been told that her first words to my father when he returned home were "How could you do this to me?"
When he came home, I didn't remember him. I was a toddler and had no idea who he was.
I had been sleeping with my mother while he was gone and when he laid down, I told him to get his head off my pillow. He dutifully moved over and I told him to get his head off my mother's pillow.
I don't recall a single incident where he struck someone or anything like that due to being caught off guard. More than fifteen years after his return home when I was eighteen, my older sister commented that he still slept with his eyes open because of his time behind enemy lines in Vietnam.
I felt stupid. I didn't realize he regularly napped with his eyes open.
I thought he just startled easily and that's why he sat up with a start when you walked into his bedroom while he was laying there with open eyes. This was something that happened somewhat frequently due to our defacto main entrance being the side door which opened into what was supposed to be a den but was used as the master suite because it was a three-bedroom house and they had three children.
He told funny stories about Vietnam. The only one I still remember is that he told his captain he could find them water. He pointed to a patch of green in the brown landscape and said they might need to dig for it, but there's water there.
So he and his best friend Mojo took everyone's canteen and left the cloth cover on so they wouldn't clank together (probably because they were trapped behind enemy lines) and strung them on a branch I think and went to get water. They did, in fact, have to dig for it.
So muddy water starts welling up and Mojo starts slurping up muddy water and my dad says "Mojo, you can't do that. You need to purify it." And Mojo pops two purification tablets in his mouth and says "It can purify in my stomach." and keeps drinking.
My dad laughed every single time he told that story and laughed harder than anyone else in the room. I was an adult before I understood the ugly context of being trapped behind enemy lines and in danger of dying of dehydration.
My father had died before I realized he told no stories about World War II. If Vietnam was laughable, World War II was apparently unspeakable.
I've never seen the movie Hacksaw Ridge. I like some of the clips from it. Late in this clip, after he is done rescuing people, he is extremely reactive and jumps away from comrades at arms who are trying to be supportive and they tell him "You're safe."
Both my parents spent my entire childhood somewhat like Desmond Doss at the end of that clip. They remained highly reactive.
You can take a person out of a war zone but the war zone stays inside them long after the fighting has actually ended. Like that Cranberries song Zombie.
This post is in reaction to a half heard video someone else watched that said a lot of stuff about prostitution that I don't think I would agree with it I watched it myself and paid attention. One of the things it talked about was prostitution in temples.
I don't know how to prove it, but I believe "prostitution" in temples was probably something more like the movie version of a young, reborn Spock going through Pon Farr -- which can kill a Vulcan -- and Saavik has sex with him so he won't die.
Historically, most human cultures the world over have been judgy about sex outside of marriage. You see more prostitution in conservative cultures or conservative eras, like Victorian culture. During Hippie free-love eras when a guy can get laid for FREE, prostitution doesn't thrive.
Temple prostitutes were most likely an attempt to keep control over sex so it wasn't spreading disease and promoting abusive treatment of women and I suspect it probably began as a means to try to rehabilitate soldiers newly returned from war and teach them to be civil again and feel a human connection. That's something prostitution as we understand it doesn't typically do.
Prostitutes tend to be women who are being trafficked and are owned by a pimp. Articles suggest their clients frequently want awful things in bed that would be viewed as abusive if they asked a girlfriend to do it.
Letting people be abusive to a woman they are having sex with "because she's a whore" doesn't rehabilitate people and help them put the war behind them and learn to make love, not war.
It just teaches them they can get away with being abusive assholes if they take it out on the "right" people. If you are NOT a complete and total moron, you know that doesn't work. People who get validation for their "right" to be abusive are consistently abusive to everyone they meet.
Temple prostitutes were probably something more akin to sexual surrogates and, no, you probably didn't get to slap them around while no one cared "because she's just a whore."
She was a priestess and had a respectable job and social standing. Their sexual services were likely intended to serve a larger social purpose in that context.
We have an expression "Young, dumb and full of cum." Countries the world over harness the anger and tendency towards violence of young men with high levels of testosterone.
Testosterone is good for two things:
1. Getting shit done no one REALLY wants to do.
2. Getting laid.
To this day, across the globe, the most wartorn areas and terrorist enclaves are associated with highly religious, conservative cultures where young men are expected to keep it zipped and be virgins until the wedding night.
Even when they weren't specifically rehabilitating soldiers with PTSD, temple prostitutes likely helped young men have a clean, safe, socially acceptable means to dump their excess testosterone without starting a bar brawl as their outlet.
And people who understood how humans work likely felt that promoted the peace and protected unmarried young women from being raped or pressured into sex, making it a practice that helped foster a civil environment and peaceful community.
Fostering a civil environment and peaceful community is the sort of thing one would HOPE is the purpose of religion.