There's No Crying In Baseball -- Absolutely Not in the Military

You did it ONE time. Imagine if you were on call 24 hours a day and went through it all the time like Groundhog Day. Your tune might be different if it was your regular duty.

Former Army E-4 (Specialist) here,

Yes, there is crying in the military. In 2001, one of my friends, and fellow soldier, was murdered while 8 months pregnant. There were 6 jr. Enlisted, 2 NCOS, and a damn O-1 in the area when that news broke, and not one of us went without shedding a tear. Rage is also very acceptable. No NCO or brass worth their merit would have rebuked us, but had we done so in public reactions might have been different. We are taught from day one that A) our every action reflects upon our friends and the uniform and B) that you civvies are very impressionable. So you get a lot of misplaced bravado and silly claims that we don't cry. We do. Just not in front of you. It is not appropriate for all ranks to show tears in front of other ranks. But there are situations where anyone would say anything, and the story I told you is one of them. Incidentally, the murder is now in CID's cold case files, and the murderer remains at large.

By the way, my Nuke friend here was right about one thing: The Casualty Notification Officers do not function exactly as Captain Stone outlined. Emotion is permissible. Touching is okay in a limited capacity, will go with NOK to break the news to certain other family, and so on and so forth. There's a wide degree of flexibility in how this service is executed. What you saw was simply Captain Stone's method. He was a recovering alcoholic. It is sometimes necessary for recovering alcoholics to adopt very rigid, absolutized, dichotomous methods, perspectives, sets of rules, often very black-and-white and zero interpretation. AA is set up that way for the purposes of self-accountability and to avoid equivocation. So if you meet a recovering alcoholic is very strict (call it limited), rigid, all black-and-white in their thinking, please understand this may have been structured purposefully to keep themselves under control and evolved into a worldview.

Please understand that I am not trying to generalize or disparage recovering alcoholics, but explaining a system of thinking that may be in play, one I had decipher on my own (as a social service worker at the time, the last thing I wanted to do was deconstruct someone's way of thinking and analyze it when they were simply trying to cope). I hope it is well-received.

I also thank you for your service; I'm currently an officer in the Army. That said, I don't know why you make the assumption that you just made. So no one in the military ever cries? I grant that when making a notification you should keep yourself composed, but did it never occur to you that sometimes people can't help it? Is it beyond the grasp of your imagination to believe that a notification officer might break down and cry when giving a notification? It's an extremely emotional event.

You might as well have said, "This movie is B.S. because nobody in the military would EVER yell at their superior officer. I never did it while I was in, so that means that no one would ever do it."