The Painful Truth by Monty Lyman

Author:Monty Lyman [Lyman, Monty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473555341
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

9

Belief as Relief

Faith and frameworks

If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or he is a Gurkha.

FIELD MARSHAL SAM MANEKSHAW, CHIEF OF THE ARMY STAFF IN THE INDIAN ARMY, 1969–1973

A CLOSE FRIEND OF mine is Mancunian and one of his more endearing terms for me is ‘Soft Southerner’. The British stereotype – that your pain tolerance and general toughness is directly related to your latitude – is an old one. Indeed, the idea of cultural differences in pain perception and tolerance is as old as humanity itself. We all have impressions and opinions, many of which are fed by the hearsay and stereotypes created by our own culture. I grew up voraciously reading any history book I could find, and particularly ones about ancient, alien peoples who had seemed to master pain and fear, from ferocious Amazon women of Greek legend to battle-hardened Vikings. One group of people for whom I’ve always had a romantic reverence are the Gurkhas. These are Nepalis (or ethnic Nepalis from India) who serve in a number of militaries around the world, including the British Army. These soldiers have a legendary reputation for bravery. They are recruited in the mountains of Nepal, where as many as 25,000 tough young men apply for around two hundred places annually. The selection culminates in the gruelling Doko Race, where contenders run five miles up the side of a mountain carrying a twenty-five-kilogram basket strapped only to their heads.

Given that Gurkhas and British officers serve and fight in the same battalions, I’ve always been curious as to whether the former have higher pain thresholds and tolerances (‘pain threshold’ being the minimum intensity at which a stimulus feels painful, and ‘pain tolerance’ the maximum pain someone can bear). My research revealed no studies; the closest I came was with a relatively well-known 1980 study that found that Nepalese mountaineering porters had much higher pain thresholds than their European counterparts.1 In the absence of existing data, I decided to consult someone who has been intimately involved in Gurkha selection his whole life. Colonel James Robinson, CBE, was born in Nepal (the son of a Gurkha officer), joined the Royal Gurkha Rifles and was the head of the Brigade of Gurkhas between 2012 and 2019. He said: ‘I don’t see any noticeable differences in pain thresholds between Nepali and British soldiers today. But I think there were in the past. When I first went to Nepal to recruit soldiers, in the 1980s, many of the villages we’d travel to weren’t even accessible by road. The people were mostly subsistence farmers and the young men were tough. They had a greater acceptance of pain than the Westerners, who at the time were definitely ‘softer’. But the gap has been closing as Nepal has been Westernized. In the 1990s, young Nepalis would go to India and the West to train as doctors, bringing back a largely pill-based system. Roads have been built to the villages and Western comforts and medicines are now much more available to these young men.

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