Thousand-yard stare

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] The thousand-yard stare is sometimes described as an effect of shell shock or combat stress reaction, along with other mental health conditions.

[1][2][3] 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.

[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".