To get past the paywall, sign up for VICE membership. A Digital Only subscription is $2 a month (or $20 a year, if you prefer), while $70 a year gets you the full digital package plus 4 issues of VICE magazine, delivered straight to your door.
More often than not a week editing VICE demands you get to grips with so many different rock pools of strange human activity that life can start to feel like a form of astral projection, one out-of-body experience following the next as you jackknife between fact-checking long COVID death stats and exploring the roots of anal vorephilia.
This week has been no different at VICE: Members Only, the paywalled section of VICE.com where much of our best work now lives. The distance between war veteran PTSD and debauched quad bike fuck fests in rural Maine would seem to be vast. And yet when you zoom out there does appear to be something linking the two, the primordial appeal of strange pleasures in the mud.
Both stories are also eye opening in their own ways. Writer Matthew Mitchell, making his debut for VICE, managed to articulate the borderline unspeakable in his long read on the growing acceptance in psychological circles that pleasure is a big part of the trap of post traumatic stress disorder, the adrenal thrill of war knotting itself up with the horrifying trauma and spiking anxiety levels.
The new phrase on the tongues of those who spend their lives trying to counter PTSD is “combat addiction,” and it flies in the face of decades of assumptions about the condition:
“‘The academic community invested a great amount of time and money into the paradigm that PTSD is tragic, and that we need to feel sorry for the service members it afflicts,’ said Marjorie Campbell, former research director for the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury. Backpedaling on the myth of the American war hero now would potentially gainsay decades of credible work, not to mention the queasy moral questions it would raise about how we palliate returning soldiers. ‘The old guard doesn’t want to change. They would look foolish if they overlooked something like this,’ she said.”
Mitchell does a great job of teasing out the nuances of this controversial debate, using as his subject a Brit named Reece Searle (pictured up top) who absconded one night without telling loved ones to join the Ukrainian International Legion. Since returning from the fight against Putin’s meat grinder, Searle has never been the same, as he grapples with the empty tedium of a civilian life not laced with the constant, thrilling threat of death.
Or, as Mitchell puts it:
“A brutal catch-22 about combat PTSD is that, for many veterans, anxiety and pleasure can become tightly latticed within the same traumatic event, a complexity that often disguises the issue. ‘They’ll acknowledge that they’re irritable, but they can’t link that to their positive thoughts about combat,’ Campbell said. ‘They have no clue.’
“Many veterans are reluctant to work through those experiences, since doing so could jar them into a vivid awareness of why they felt so good in the first place. Their guilt stems less from what they did than from the pleasure they took in doing it. Caught between the poles of thrill and shame, some eschew treatment altogether.”
READ NOW AT VICE: MEMBERS ONLY
For those of you who are sick and tired of nuance, our second story this week should come as welcome relief, as it is a total nuance-free zone, a slide show of images of people determined to give themselves over to the most ancient and basic pleasures there are, to drive fast, live dangerous, derobe, and drink in wallow pits of sodden dirt, to howl at the late summer moon, to be horny, crazy mud truckers.
A selection of David Horton’s photos from the last five years of Maine’s 4×4 Proving Grounds event ran at VICE back in May.
You loved them, so we sent him back for this year’s Labor Day event. What he returned with did not disappoint.
Follow the link below to see the full set of images, alongside a Q&A with Horton in which he attempts to explain the weekend’s events.
SEE MORE AT VICE: MEMBERS ONLY
Alright, that’s it. May your week be full of wonder,
Kevin Lee Kharas
Editor in Chief, VICE Magazine
To get past the paywall, sign up for VICE membership. A Digital Only subscription is $2 a month (or $20 a year, if you prefer), while $70 a year gets you the full digital package plus 4 issues of VICE magazine, delivered straight to your door.
The post Strange Pleasures in the Mud—This Week on VICE: Members Only appeared first on VICE.
