> It's your job to be shot at in the army. If you have a bad reaction to being shot at, you're incapable of your job.
Someone else has already mentioned this, but it was WWI. You didn't have an option, which means it's not really your job, but something everyone was put into.
You also missed the point; this "bad" reaction which you speak of, back then, like I said, was considered to be the result of either a wound (say, to neurons - unavoidable and could happen to anyone), or psychological trauma. Nowadays, we've figured out that the former did not occur.
The point is that they used the former, which you don't seem to refer to, since you can't possibly be talking about a "bad reaction" which also is unavoidable. If something is bad, then there must be something else which will be good. Unavoidable means that is the only possibility, so a logical fallacy. It is the latter you're speaking of, so you must not believe the former is true. That was your natural reaction to this matter. The question, and my point ultimately, is why did they say this back then? Later, the article provides an explanation, that they awarded with pension only those who were traumatized, and not those who were wounded. Nowadays it's proven the latter did not exist, so they were all cases of mental wounds, and not physical ones.
Why would they choose to do this? To avoid giving them the pensions. It's fucking simple. They sent them to fight for them, then they did not care about them. The same happened in vietnam and many other wars. Nations and their leaders do not care. Why should we care about Nations? I'm condemning nations and nationalism. History has much to teach, and this is one of the things History teaches best.
> This was before the even semi-progressive thinking of the second world war when combat stress was considered at all legitimate.
What are you talking about? Progressive thinking exists for thousands of years now. Ancient philosophers are still relevant. It's silly to believe that there was some sudden peak of knowledge between WWI and WWII
I'll explain what happened. WWI was the first major war, so naturally, many new things were observed. At that time there was much improvement in strategy, and other things related to combat & war. Not that the ideas were unknown - but they were verified empirically, which allowed us to make more progress and observe more. So, in WWI it was the first time they found out about "shell shock". There were no influential documented cases before this.
What shell shock did is, it crippled soldiers. Lowered productivity. Such weakness will be quickly exploited by the enemy, don't forget we're talking about war between nations - expect some of the greatest minds involved, and that is easy to verify with history.
So what I'm saying is, in WWI everyone made mistakes, and then they learned from them. That's solely the reason combat stress reaction is nowadays treated and taken seriously.