understand the understanding
Today a good friend and I were talking about how we could possibly explain to people back home what its like out here, what we do. It is something we have never been able to do, and we both agree that it is not a possible task. I explained an approach that I feel is the best way to give some understanding however, or at least help people to understand why its not possible to understand.
There are a couple definitions for the word context that I like. The first is "the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event, situation, etc." and the second is " That which surrounds, and gives meaning to, something else." I prefer the second definition. For my purposes I will say that it is a mental state. It can be a set of smells, or, as in the first definition, the circumstances that surround and define an event. These can all be combined to form a larger contextual pallette for a situation.
As far as understanding goes, Its like an artist, pulling colors from a pallette to form a painting. If you are colorblind, you wont have the contextual understanding of what the different paints mean. Sure, you would have some level of perception, for example, two shades, one is a darker gray than the other. In reality, one is red and the other is yellow.
Based upon that analogy, I could paint a picture of this entire deployment, but due to the lack of similar experiences, or contextual similarities, of the audience, the perception would be very different from what I would be trying to explain.
I go out on the road here, in gun trucks, providing security for convoys. There is a threat, every single night on the road, a risk I might not survive the night. Our enemies main goal is to see us die. These people are out there every night setting bombs, hoping to see us hit. The more this happens, the larger our understanding of the risk grows. As such, we become more accepting of the risk. It becomes part of the daily routine. As such, if we find a bomb on the side of the road there is a good chance it wont even be a topic of conversation back at the base, unless it was an unusual situation that can be analyzed for future knowledge.
I don't know the level of understanding that someone who has never been here would be able to have, but I do know that it will never be a full understanding.
There are a couple definitions for the word context that I like. The first is "the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event, situation, etc." and the second is " That which surrounds, and gives meaning to, something else." I prefer the second definition. For my purposes I will say that it is a mental state. It can be a set of smells, or, as in the first definition, the circumstances that surround and define an event. These can all be combined to form a larger contextual pallette for a situation.
As far as understanding goes, Its like an artist, pulling colors from a pallette to form a painting. If you are colorblind, you wont have the contextual understanding of what the different paints mean. Sure, you would have some level of perception, for example, two shades, one is a darker gray than the other. In reality, one is red and the other is yellow.
Based upon that analogy, I could paint a picture of this entire deployment, but due to the lack of similar experiences, or contextual similarities, of the audience, the perception would be very different from what I would be trying to explain.
I go out on the road here, in gun trucks, providing security for convoys. There is a threat, every single night on the road, a risk I might not survive the night. Our enemies main goal is to see us die. These people are out there every night setting bombs, hoping to see us hit. The more this happens, the larger our understanding of the risk grows. As such, we become more accepting of the risk. It becomes part of the daily routine. As such, if we find a bomb on the side of the road there is a good chance it wont even be a topic of conversation back at the base, unless it was an unusual situation that can be analyzed for future knowledge.
I don't know the level of understanding that someone who has never been here would be able to have, but I do know that it will never be a full understanding.