Thousand-yard stare

This article is about a military-related term. For the band, see Thousand Yard Stare (band). For the album by The Fauves, see Thousand Yard Stare (album). For the Chicane album, see Thousand Mile Stare.

The thousand-yard stare (also referred to as two-thousand-yard stare) is the blank, unfocused gaze of people experiencing dissociation due to acute stress or traumatic events. It was originally used about war combatants and the post-traumatic stress they exhibited but is now also used to refer to an unfocused gaze observed in people under a stressful situation, or in people with certain mental health conditions.^[1]

War artist Thomas Lea's The Two-Thousand Yard Stare

An exhausted U.S. Marine exhibits the thousand-yard stare after two days of constant fighting at the Battle of Eniwetok, February 1944.

The thousand-yard stare is sometimes described as an effect of shell shock or combat stress reaction, along with other mental health conditions. However, it is not a formal medical term.^[1][2][3]

Origin

The phrase was popularized after Life magazine published the painting Marines Call It That 2,000 Yard Stare by World War II artist and correspondent Tom Lea,^[4] although the painting was not referred to with that title in the 1945 magazine article. The painting, a 1944 portrait of a nameless Marine at the Battle of Peleliu, is now held by the United States Army Center of Military History in Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C.^[5] About the real-life Marine who was his subject, Lea said:

He left the States 31 months ago. He was wounded in his first campaign. He has had tropical diseases. He half-sleeps at night and gouges Japs out of holes all day. Two-thirds of his company has been killed or wounded. He will return to attack this morning. How much can a human being endure?^[6]

When recounting his arrival in Vietnam in 1965, then-Corporal Joe Houle (director of the Marine Corps Museum of the Carolinas in 2002) said he saw no emotion in the eyes of his new squad: "The look in their eyes was like the life was sucked out of them". He later learned that the term for their condition was "the 1,000-yard stare". "After I lost my first friend, I felt it was best to be detached," he explained.^[7]

See also

• Catatonia – Psychiatric behavioural syndrome
• Combat stress reaction – Behavioral disorder due to war trauma
• Defence mechanism – Unconscious psychological mechanism
• Hypervigilance – Nervous system condition
• James Blake Miller – United States Marine
• Post-traumatic stress disorder – Mental disorder associated with trauma
• Shell shock – Term for post-traumatic stress disorder