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Ray wrote:

Hope 8gb of RAM is still enough

FVBTVS wrote:fuck

is anyone getting bf1? i really wasnt going to but now im having second thoughts..

who am i kidding

It has been 9 years since I deployed to Iraq. I spent 15 months there doing convoy recovery. Since I got back I’ve dealt with at times crippling PTSD, and about three years ago my therapist recommended I try playing a more realistic war game, as it apparently helps many people (though honestly I don’t know how). At the time I just picked up a game that I knew nothing about, but looked cool. It was Spec Ops: The Line.

For anyone who has played that game I can feel you likely cringing. It is both the hardest game I’ve ever played, and one of the single best examples I’ve seen (though obviously embellishments exist) that help to really show some of the difficulties of war. All in all I saw some benefits though it was incredibly hard for me, but wasn’t really sure and after beating SO:TL I decided to take a break from the more realistic video games for a bit.

Cut to last week when I picked up Battlefield 1. I really enjoyed the beta a lot, it was fun, fast paced, and it felt good (something rare for FPS for me outside of Destiny). I decided to go ahead and try out some of the story first, and the first mission set I played through after the opening was the story of Bess and the tankers. Oddly enough this is probably the closest to my deployment. There was one moment in particular, toward the end of the story arc where you are fighting for the train yard, when a shot hit the side of the tank and for the first time in my life I had a flashback while playing videogames.

The second hardest day of my deployment was about 4 months in, I had recently been moved from TC (Tank Commander, though I was in an up-armored HMMWV not a tank, basically the guy in the passenger seat) to the gunner position because a sniper round had hit our previous gunner and injured his shoulder. They were nervous about putting someone fresh to the team in the gunner’s position so I volunteered to take it while the new guy took the TC spot. My job was pretty simple, I covered the left side of the convoy, period. While we were on our way to pick up a truck that had been hit by an RPG we came under some small arms fire. Our TTP was to push through and avoid the engagement if possible. As we were pushing through my TC, fresh off the base, unhooked my harness (we had a harness system so I wasn’t exactly standing but wasn’t exactly sitting while in the gunner’s nest) and I fell down into the vehicle. Just as I was starting to yell at him for being a fucking asshole I hear, hell I can’t even describe it well today. It sounded like someone almost banging a gong, but not exactly? The vehicle rocked up on it’s side a bit but kept moving and I watched as my nest caught fire (we had netting covering the top that apparently wasn’t as flame resistant as I had hoped). I don’t honestly remember a lot of what happened for the rest of the mission. I remember getting back up in the gun but it is still kind of a blur after that. I’ll never forget what Matt (the newbie) told me afterwards though, he looked me in the eye and said “I wasn’t sure what to do, so I dropped you”. We started laughing like absolutely maniacs, to the point of crying our eyes out for almost an hour. He died a few months after we got back from Iraq, one of those weird cases where he went to sleep and just never woke up.

Since that I’ve played the multiplayer a few more times, and I haven’t really had any other issues with it. What is most interesting to me is that during my flashback I had more vivid memories of the event than I did before it. My therapist today said that while it was likely difficult in some ways she is hoping that it can help me better remember the events after the explosion.