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. The phrase was originally used to describe war combatants and the post-traumatic stress they exhibited but is now also used to refer to an unfocused gaze observed in people under any stressful situation, or in people with certain mental health conditions.^[2]

The thousand-yard stare is often associated with shell shock, combat stress reaction, and other trauma-related mental health conditions.^[2][3][4]

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,^[5] 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.^[6] 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?^[7]

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.^[8]

See also

• Catatonia – Psychiatric behavioural syndrome
• Defence mechanism – Unconscious psychological mechanism
• Hypervigilance – Nervous system condition
• James Blake Miller – United States Marine

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Thousand-yard stare.