Red Bull is honestly not that popular in this crowd though, the major energy drinks you see are Monster, Rockstar, and as mentioned, Rip It (really an offbrand of the former two from the maker of Shasta/La Croix). These typically have 160mg of caffeine, which is high for coffee although not by a large margin. The culture around them seems to encourage much greater consumption though, with oversize cans (e.g. 24oz with over 250mg caffeine) not unusual and many people having multiple drinks a day. It does seem like something about them, perhaps the addition of a great amount of sugar, encourages more consumption.
I'm also a little confused by your accusation, since the article discusses a comparative study of two groups, both in a warzone, and finds increased mental health effects in the group with higher caffeine consumption. No one is denying that combat conditions contribute to adverse mental health effects, but the whole point of the article is that these seem to be exacerbated by caffeine use.
Sleep deprivation is becoming a real concern in multiple military branches, and I suspect that the mental impact is not due to the caffeine per se but due to the culture around it: consumption of hundreds of mg of caffeine is viewed as an acceptable alternative to sleep. This is definitely also an issue with coffee, but energy drinks seem to be predominant today.
I knew the Iraq war was going downhill when in 2004/2005 the DFACs switched from "free unlimited Red Bull" (4-6 per meal, plus whatever you filled pockets with and drank in between) to Rip-Its and a limit of 2 for takeout.
The peak "redbull-stockpiling" was "so we'd have stuff for later" or "for the office/truck/etc." I've certainly consumed 1g/day of caffeine fairly often. The biggest problem is once you get to that level, you need to hydrate (and...dehydrate) constantly, starting about an hour later, for hours.
Most people wouldn't get the 4 meals a day served (breakfast, lunch, dinner, midrats) all at DFACs. I usually ate once or twice a day in the DFAC, and in the summer, especially if you didn't have a physically demanding job, it was hard to even want to eat once a day in 100-120F heat. I often ended up reverse-cycle so had dinner for "breakfast" and then maybe went to midrats or maybe didn't, usually was too busy.
Coffee from "green beans" (the starbucks knock-off) with a total of 6 shots of espresso into a regular-sized paper coffee cup worked pretty well, too -- I could leave the cup in my truck for a few hours and in 120F inside a closed car it would stay rather hot.
It was pretty amazing to me how different things were at different times/places within the war. There were huge bases (where I nominally lived) with 5mph speed restriction (you could actually be pulled over and ticketed; I was once!), strict "you must wear your reflective belt" policies, multiple swimming pools, world-class hospitals, almost walmart-sized PXes, on-base vehicle registration, etc. There were guys living 6-12 in a house out in the country, and people on long range patrols in trucks and (rarely) dismounted, etc. And everything in between.
I'm actually curious now if the 30 year old boomer meme is in any way an outgrowth of the Iraq war. The aesthetic the meme embraces reminds me a lot of the guys I knew my age and older who served. Gonna have to reflect on this a bit.
Never thought I'd see a reference to the /sipps/ meme on HN, yet here we are.
Personally, I think the 30 year old boomer meme is rooted more in the fact that internet culture moves so fast these days that anything even a few years old is considered dated. Combine that with the definite cultural differences between Millennials and Gen Z, and the boomer meme makes sense.
Know Your Meme places the origin of 30-year-old boomer in April 2018. Rage comics became a thing in 2008, 2 years after the peak death toll in Iraq. I don't recall any link between the development of rage comics and Iraq though.
> and I suspect that the mental impact is not due to the caffeine per se but due to the culture around it
I would assume that people who consume excessive amounts of a sweat fluid from neon colored cans with ridiculous names tagged on it also have lower capability of self reflection and additional tendency towards drug abuse. That might also contribute to less efficient processing of traumatic experiences.
I'm also a little confused by your accusation, since the article discusses a comparative study of two groups, both in a warzone, and finds increased mental health effects in the group with higher caffeine consumption. No one is denying that combat conditions contribute to adverse mental health effects, but the whole point of the article is that these seem to be exacerbated by caffeine use.
Sleep deprivation is becoming a real concern in multiple military branches, and I suspect that the mental impact is not due to the caffeine per se but due to the culture around it: consumption of hundreds of mg of caffeine is viewed as an acceptable alternative to sleep. This is definitely also an issue with coffee, but energy drinks seem to be predominant today.