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The book, "War," from Sebastian Junger is well worth a read. I read it before seeing "Restrepo" (which I also recommend). On Goodreads, I wrote this about Junge

The book, "War," from Sebastian Junger is well worth a read. I read it before seeing "Restrepo" (which I also recommend). On Goodreads, I wrote this about Junger's book and his take on men and war after finishing it: "[T]he experience of warfare seems to strike a chord deep within the psyche of the men in combat. The bonding among men, the heroism, the swinging extremes of victory won only by the palpable threat of mortal danger, the adrenaline rush and flood of endorphins during and after battle seem to be almost overwhelming to the human animal, eclipsing any larger moral considerations or even the rest of what we might call everyday life. To the men in the thick of the fight, it's an unrepeatable experience that they find themselves strangely missing years afterwards. What they miss doesn't minimize the horror of what they've experienced, and that's what they find so strange. In some respects once the shooting starts, the soldiers have all the justification they need to continue indefinitely. The immediacy of the experience provides satisfaction enough and requires no further rationale. In some ways it creates a microcosm of life and packs more than a lifetime's worth of living into its fleeting moments. How can life afterwards compare?"

stevenmays 8y ago
The book Tribe was also good.
Nzen 8y ago
This reminds me of the comments [0] on skydiving and depression from last month. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840955 > I heard a interview with a vet and climber once who described the appeal of alpinism as "all of the good parts of combat, without the shooting or any conscious thing trying to cause me harm".
- ryanmarsh 8y ago
  He was doing his best to self medicate. That’s him trying to convince himself the medicine is good. Nothing comes close to combat. Nothing. There’s such an ocean between the sickening frantic chaotic competition with Death and “oh shit if this rock slips I’m going to end up a paragraph on page two of the morning paper”. Plenty of us combat vets climb, and for the same reasons. Don’t be confused. Climbing can kill you like cigarettes, combat is like smoking crack while trying to land a jet on a carrier deck at night in a storm.
solidsnack9000 8y ago
Many of the awkwardly out of place, positive emotional responses of men to war -- the intense engagement, the euphoria, the sense of bonding and belonging -- make a lot of sense when we consider what would happen to those men if they were absent. The same goes for the immorality of it -- indifference to suffering and lack of interest in context or justification.
emmelaich 8y ago
Everyone should play a team game at some point. Soccer, basketball or similar. Not so much baseball or cricket but they're fine too. The experience is a good substitute for war and makes you understand yourself and others.
- fapjacks 8y ago
  I think saying team sports is a good substitute for war is like saying that if you need a good substitute for afternoon tea, just eat a bag of mushrooms. At first blush, this might seem like a funny joke, but there are times in combat that feel almost psychedelic: Colors seem brighter and you get a kind of tunnel vision, your senses are not only highly engaged but more sensitive, your heart is pounding, your mind is racing, you're overcome with a kind of euphoria from the adrenaline, and the bottom of your stomach drops out at the existential overload. Playing a team sport is not a substitute for going to war. Perhaps there are some superficial similarities, but nothing on this Earth compares to the experience of combat. Incidentally, this is why training is the difference between life and death: Without the aid of muscle memory, you could be trapped cognitively, and being trapped in any sense of the word will get you killed on the battlefield. Actually, this is why I find the ending of the play/musical "Hair" to be so shocking and believable: Going to war with no training would almost certainly be a death sentence.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    I feel like you’re arguing the obvious, something your OP almost certainly understands. Actually I think your point would be stronger if your agreed with them—that sports do substitute for war in important ways, and use your knowledge and experience to show specifically where and when that stops being true.
    - fapjacks 8y ago
      For my arguing something so obvious, you sure seem to have missed what I said. You think my point would be stronger if I agreed with the parent instead of disagreed... Except that my point is that I do not agree with his post at all and it's obvious that he does not almost certainly understand the difference. Suggesting team sports as a "good substitute" for wartime experience plainly demonstrates a lack of understanding, really a true failure to grok. This suggestion has some features in common with the idea that Call of Duty somehow captures what combat is like. It's immediately recognizable as something a distant spectator would say. Someone that watches sports and war on television, for example. But it's not a good comparison at all, and certainly not a good substitute. Since you think this is such an obvious thing, perhaps you can compare and contrast your own combat experiences with his proposition to get what you were hoping to get out of my post. If you're not speaking from experience, then I'd ask that you not add noise by trying to oversimplify something you're only guessing at. If you don't know what it's like, that's totally okay, but I'd suggest not trying to shoehorn posts that do come from experience into the narrative you want to find, which is that it is somehow possible to "substitute" team sports "in important ways" for war. I'm telling you that they are only superficially, vaguely the same shape if you squint across a dark room. Add a few layers of abstraction, and they share cosmetic similarities. Otherwise they are not comparable in any way, let alone important ways, and I do not agree with the parent I replied to.
stevenwoo 8y ago
It's not just combat veterans, a novice photographer wrote a book about covering/surviving the messy civil war in former Yugoslavia. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4360.My_War_Gone_By_I_Miss_It_So https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4360.My_War_Gone_By_I_Mi...
bwb 8y ago
One of my fav books, that story about him being in Germany with a friend and his son, and watching this young kid scream over the edge of a dropoff really hit something for me. There is something in us with that energy and we shouldn't ignore it.

stevenmays 8y ago

The book Tribe was also good.

Nzen 8y ago

This reminds me of the comments [0] on skydiving and depression from last month. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840955 > I heard a interview with a vet and climber once who described the appeal of alpinism as "all of the good parts of combat, without the shooting or any conscious thing trying to cause me harm".

ryanmarsh 8y ago
He was doing his best to self medicate. That’s him trying to convince himself the medicine is good. Nothing comes close to combat. Nothing. There’s such an ocean between the sickening frantic chaotic competition with Death and “oh shit if this rock slips I’m going to end up a paragraph on page two of the morning paper”. Plenty of us combat vets climb, and for the same reasons. Don’t be confused. Climbing can kill you like cigarettes, combat is like smoking crack while trying to land a jet on a carrier deck at night in a storm.

solidsnack9000 8y ago

Many of the awkwardly out of place, positive emotional responses of men to war -- the intense engagement, the euphoria, the sense of bonding and belonging -- make a lot of sense when we consider what would happen to those men if they were absent. The same goes for the immorality of it -- indifference to suffering and lack of interest in context or justification.

emmelaich 8y ago

Everyone should play a team game at some point. Soccer, basketball or similar. Not so much baseball or cricket but they're fine too. The experience is a good substitute for war and makes you understand yourself and others.

fapjacks 8y ago
I think saying team sports is a good substitute for war is like saying that if you need a good substitute for afternoon tea, just eat a bag of mushrooms. At first blush, this might seem like a funny joke, but there are times in combat that feel almost psychedelic: Colors seem brighter and you get a kind of tunnel vision, your senses are not only highly engaged but more sensitive, your heart is pounding, your mind is racing, you're overcome with a kind of euphoria from the adrenaline, and the bottom of your stomach drops out at the existential overload. Playing a team sport is not a substitute for going to war. Perhaps there are some superficial similarities, but nothing on this Earth compares to the experience of combat. Incidentally, this is why training is the difference between life and death: Without the aid of muscle memory, you could be trapped cognitively, and being trapped in any sense of the word will get you killed on the battlefield. Actually, this is why I find the ending of the play/musical "Hair" to be so shocking and believable: Going to war with no training would almost certainly be a death sentence.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  I feel like you’re arguing the obvious, something your OP almost certainly understands. Actually I think your point would be stronger if your agreed with them—that sports do substitute for war in important ways, and use your knowledge and experience to show specifically where and when that stops being true.
  - fapjacks 8y ago
    For my arguing something so obvious, you sure seem to have missed what I said. You think my point would be stronger if I agreed with the parent instead of disagreed... Except that my point is that I do not agree with his post at all and it's obvious that he does not almost certainly understand the difference. Suggesting team sports as a "good substitute" for wartime experience plainly demonstrates a lack of understanding, really a true failure to grok. This suggestion has some features in common with the idea that Call of Duty somehow captures what combat is like. It's immediately recognizable as something a distant spectator would say. Someone that watches sports and war on television, for example. But it's not a good comparison at all, and certainly not a good substitute. Since you think this is such an obvious thing, perhaps you can compare and contrast your own combat experiences with his proposition to get what you were hoping to get out of my post. If you're not speaking from experience, then I'd ask that you not add noise by trying to oversimplify something you're only guessing at. If you don't know what it's like, that's totally okay, but I'd suggest not trying to shoehorn posts that do come from experience into the narrative you want to find, which is that it is somehow possible to "substitute" team sports "in important ways" for war. I'm telling you that they are only superficially, vaguely the same shape if you squint across a dark room. Add a few layers of abstraction, and they share cosmetic similarities. Otherwise they are not comparable in any way, let alone important ways, and I do not agree with the parent I replied to.

stevenwoo 8y ago

It's not just combat veterans, a novice photographer wrote a book about covering/surviving the messy civil war in former Yugoslavia. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4360.My_War_Gone_By_I_Miss_It_So https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4360.My_War_Gone_By_I_Mi...

bwb 8y ago

One of my fav books, that story about him being in Germany with a friend and his son, and watching this young kid scream over the edge of a dropoff really hit something for me. There is something in us with that energy and we shouldn't ignore it.