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What It’s Really Like to Fight a War

161 points by smacktoward 7y ago

platz 7y ago
Also see r/combatfootage Citizens should aware of what happens without passing through the media's filter/framing. Also, a lot of the value in that sub is also from the comments. It's like the experts we have on HN, but for armed conflicts.
- solotronics 7y ago
  I was watching a video (helmet mounted gopro) from a small unit doing recon in Ukraine. They seemed disorganized and were in enemy territory in broad daylight. They all died on video and then the Russians who defeated them used one of the cellphones to call the families and let them know they weren't coming home. Horrible. The thing that struck me is how often does your local government make a mistake or have incomplete information? Now imagine this same process applied to your life in a warzone. Everything outside of your control possibly with inept people who don't care about you making all the decisions. What a waste of life.
  - ryanmarsh 7y ago
    They all died except one. I think how things were handled with the survivor, also on video, is very telling of the humanity in all of us. Immediately after trying to sneak up and kill his enemy in an ambush he was rendered aid by them.
    - baybal2 7y ago
      I myself grew up in a garrison town in Russian far east, Vladivostok. My early childhood memories were all about seeing gloomy gloomy military men, and hearing weird discussions at public canteens from which I remember phrases like "how much do they pay per body" and "who will be killing those people if not us?" It must've been a shitty thing to be a union's officer. Officer corps' relationship with the state was not easy, in contrast to union's general staff, who were "lardons in uniform" in their majority. It was almost as if the state and general staff was trying to bargain with their conscience.
  - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    You think about this if you ever watched band of brothers. The autobiography of one of the main people, "The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters" gets into this. The leaders would send them into pointless investigations that would get nothing and lead to them being killed, maybe it was near the end of the war, he wouldn't send his out.
  - ttraub 7y ago
    Even in modern warfare, with its surgical accuracy to pinpoint and take out specific targets, hundreds if not thousands of troops will still die in the course of a major engagement, counting tactical errors, accidents, and friendly fire incidents. It's a sobering thought and one that makes me glad we're disengaging from foreign conflicts. War is hell.
    - thrower123 7y ago
      We really have no concept of what a real shooting war looks like. Twenty years of counter-insurgencies around the Middle East has amounted to a US butcher's bill that would be less than one single day during a major offensive in 1916 in France or 1943 in the Ukraine. The generation that was alive during Vietnam is dying out. I'm from a backwoods area that disproportionately sends recruits to the military, and I don't know anybody from the dozens who went over there that actually fired any shots in anger. The fobbit-fighter ratio is pretty absurd.
      - Merrill 7y ago
        It would seem that our soldiers current experience would be most like that of the British Army soldiers of the late-Victorian era from the Crimean War to the Boer War, when they were largely engaged in policing the colonies of the British Empire in mostly small scale and guerrilla engagements. Is there a literature from ordinary British soldiers forming "the thin red line"? Kipling is probably unreliable. "Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Tommy, 'ow's yer soul? / But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes' when the drums begin to roll," https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/tommy.html https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/tommy.html When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, / And the women come out to cut up what remains, / Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains / An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/young_british_soldier.html https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/young_british...
      - idoubtit 7y ago
        > Twenty years of counter-insurgencies around the Middle East has amounted to a US butcher's bill that would be less than one single day during a major offensive in 1916 in France or 1943 in the Ukraine. That's an exaggeration. Iraq 2003-2009 suffered around half the deaths of France 1914-1918. WW I, most deaths in a single day: ~30,000 WW I, total deaths from France, cvilians and military: ~1,400,000 Iraq invasion: ~200,000 verified violent civilian death. Total estimations are 2x-5× that number. These figures were from Wikipedia. From memory, a few comparison points with other Middle East wars were the USA had a minor role (a military minor role, since I doubt Saudi Arabia and UAE would have invaded Yemen if the USA had not provided their full support): Yemen (2015-): ~100,000 deaths. 10 millions suffer from hunger. Syria (2011-): ~300,000 deaths
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    There was an equally good and polar opposite video where the Russians are advancing through some fields using APCs for cover until a Ukrainian tank shows up (unsupported) and wreaks havoc for a little bit. The audio is a combination of the guy in charge yelling at everyone and the lower level grunts making wise-ass quips about how poorly the operation is going the whole time. Everyone involved was well beyond the point of giving a fuck about anything.
  - zoomablemind 7y ago
    Lack of credible information indeed can be deadly, let alone horrifying. For that exact reason propaganda is very much gladly filling in the void. Sure there're different flavors of propaganda, but the one which is able to target masses back home is a lot more potent than the one directed at the front lines. I doubt that the Ukrainian soldiers would be swayed by footage like this, but their mothers sure will be. Perhaps this may also be meant to convince the mothers back in Russia that that their sons are "safe" in hands of "good" COs and are facing "easy" opposition. Being able to recognize BS is as much vital.
    - FpUser 7y ago
      <SARCASM> Spoken like a true expert who has all "credible information"</SARCASM>
  - gdy 7y ago
    And all that started with the US-sponsored coup in Kiev.
  - turk73 7y ago
    War doesn't suffer fools. Glad something doesn't.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  While I cannot attest to the accuracy of anything posted on that subreddit, it is worth pointing out that a lot of "combat footage" is selectively presented or staged for effect rather than representing the typical situations that actually occur in combat.
  - platz 7y ago
    Sometimes, but Vets also often comment and explain the context. That said, there is no such thing as true objectivity. The best you can do is try to get more evidence and personal accounts
  - ryanmarsh 7y ago
    selectively presented or staged for effect rather than representing the typical situations that actually occur in combat Staged for effect? Typical combat? They're certainly selected for being dramatic or kinetic. As far as being staged, I'm not sure what you mean, perhaps you could clarify. I don't know what typical combat means either. "Typical" small arms engagements in Afghanistan vs. Iraq were quite different.
    - baud147258 7y ago
      Perhaps he meant that some of those videos are fully staged, like an ad, in a safe area (for example for this one https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/du4vax/marines_find_an_insurgent_hiding_inside_of_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/du4vax/marin..., for the first part, the marines just found an empty/abandoned house, not in a combat zone and just shot the video. Or for this one https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/dumvcv/nlf_use_a_bgm71_tow_missile_to_eliminate_a_group/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/dumvcv/nlf_u... the soldiers(?) pitched the tents themselves before firing their missile).
    - zoomablemind 7y ago
      "Typical" may be when no one side is overwhelmingly victorious. Where on any advantages you may possess there're handicaps placed. That's what lets the wars drag on for the long times as they do.
- tpmx 7y ago
  Side-note: it would be helpful if HN turned strings like that ("r/combatfootage") into actual HTML links to that particular subreddit. Reddit is a YC company, so why not?
  - nothrabannosir 7y ago
    Lack of features and poor UI is a moderation tactic to keep Eternal September at bay. It’s used aggressively by 4chan (eg setting a fullscreen overlay which can only be removed using user style css), but you see it crop up elsewhere every now and then. Whether intentionally or not, I think HN effectively does the same. Let’s face it: the UI is lacking and laborious. While I only speak for myself, some might agree: that’s a feature, not a bug.
    - tpmx 7y ago
      That is an interesting thought. You may be on to something... They did eventually implement comment folding though.
      - dvirsky 7y ago
        Yet still they did (will?) not implement comment notifications, which I'm pretty sure will increase engagement significantly.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - Enginerrrd 7y ago
      >that’s a feature, not a bug. This! And I believe it's intentional. It's a common pattern actually: A site starts out and has a slight barrier to entry which keeps out the technologically illiterate and those with poor attention spans. The site gets good because all the contributors are, at the risk of sounding like a gate-keeping elitist here, high quality people because that slight barrier has selected for them. Then the site gets sold, bean counters and management want to increase users by enhancing usability and eliminating those barriers to entry, and quality goes downhill until the high quality people give up and find another hub to congregate. Wash, rinse, repeat. Case in point: Reddit. Only obscure niche subs are even tolerable for me anymore where nothing ever makes the front page and its just a bunch of knowledgeable enthusiasts. I love to educate new people and welcome them into a community, but I really like the Buddhist monk or Navy Seal model. They only get in after they've proved they're sufficiently motivated to do their own work by waiting on the door step for 3 days, or going through intense training, etc. That's just the extreme. I've seen so many organizations or sites that have managed to maintain a quality environment by doing really simple things, like charge $1 for entry, require a credit card number with no charge made, require some contribution or a membership fee. Look at the difference between Costco and Walmart for another example where a membership fee that keeps out the riff raff has certainly played an important role. The reality is, it's not always a design failure if your community fails to educate and cater to the lowest common denominator. HN I think absolutely does this intentionally. I love that you have to get 500 karma in order to be eligible to downvote. It's a really smart tactic IMO. You have to really contribute something over a fair amount of time and thus gain a lot of situational awareness before you can start throwing around full voting privileges.
baud147258 7y ago
When talking about "A Farewell to Arms” why did the author called WW 1 an "earlier war in Italy"? I don't really see the point
- shantly 7y ago
  That it was also about war in Italy was more important than that the war in question was WWI. I guess they could have written "WWI in Italy" but that seems to ask more of the reader without much benefit, I'd say.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    Well, it would have avoided to ask the reader to go and check which war is it about.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rdl 7y ago
Basing things on soldiers sending letters home doesn't seem generally likely to show a very unbiased view, either. Almost everyone I knew in Iraq/Afghanistan would send only very sanitized letters (well, emails, generally) home, except for a small minority who would send over the top insanity with little basis in reality. The only exception I saw was people sending letters to friends/relatives who had already been deployed in this specific conflict (not usually even Gulf War I or Vietnam or whatever era parents). The most accurate reporting seemed to be people who kept journals and then reported on it after they left. Without the journal fallible memory would be a serious problem, but in the moment it also seemed to be difficult. There were also a lot of efforts at 1) opsec 2) consequences if you DID share something, like "my 1SG is a dick..." etc. The VAST majority of everything is family life related stuff, mundane basics of life, interpersonal issues, etc. (Especially among units where families knew each other, like various NG units in smaller towns.) There was probably a bias in what I saw (I often got asked by people working around me to help proofread or phrase things, as I was often the one providing the Internet connection and there), but I mean my own experience was to not tell parents/etc. that I was anywhere but "Germany" for 5 years as a contractor, etc. (The biggest truth of modern war, at least from the US side, seems to be that there are massive differences in what the experience is like based on your job, where you're based, luck, etc. This was probably true in previous wars, but with different balance in different roles -- less risk of spontaneous death from indirect fire or green on blue on a US support base in WW2, but inferior logistics, risk of medical problems, etc. From what I saw there were a small number of SOF-types and some smaller combat units, especially in Afghanistan, where there was essentially maximum personal "agency" combined with daily violence, which seemed to be fine, a bunch of people with low agency as far as their own safety but also low risk (people who spent the entire war on one of the biggest bases working in admin/medical/etc. probably were even safer than I was), who were also usually fine, and then some people who had moderate control over their risk but also had moderate risk (truck drivers for most of the Iraq war, etc.) which actually seemed to be the hardest.)
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  I can't vouch for what other people are trying to put out, but this guy is spittin truth. Think about all the psychological issues that come with low agency/moderate risk jobs. Truck driver was a really good example. Then there are the really whacked out situations you could end up being witness to if you were working something like Civil Affairs. List goes on and on. I think one of the biggest needs of our latest generation of veterans is mental health support. Just because of the nature of a lot of what "war" has become.
jdlyga 7y ago
War being quick, cheap, with victory almost guaranteed has been the justification for every major conflict for hundreds of years. You never know when a "quick strike" will lead to a bloody destructive costly war that lasts a generation.
ardit33 7y ago
One of my favorite people on Quora is Roland Bartetzko. He was part of the German army, then he fought two wars during the Yougoslavian dissolution as a volunteer. One in Croatia-Bosnia and another one with the KLA during the Kosovo independence war in 98-99 against yougoslavian forces (mostly serbian). His answers give a very realistic view of the war as combat soldier: https://www.quora.com/profile/Roland-Bartetzko https://www.quora.com/profile/Roland-Bartetzko
- emptyfile 7y ago
  His quora account is a treasure cove of knowledge and experience. As a twenty-something born and raised in Croatia I can say that reading his answers gave me an insight into war and my country's history in a way that makes all the other stories from the front that I ever heard totally inane. The picture he paints of a soldier's mind made me for the first time understand the psychologically damaged people who walk around my country today but are still stuck in the war that's been over for 25 years. I've re read his accounts of the battle of Mostar a dozen times and I get chills every time. In short, the guy is legit, but I'm sure that anyone who will read him will figure that out for himself from the thick morbid reality that seeps from his writing.
  - op00to 7y ago
    Good readin’, up until he said it’s not cool to snitch on your Nazi battle buddy. Just, wow.
    - solveit 7y ago
      I think that gives a great deal of insight to how armies actually work.
ilaksh 7y ago
Also consider some books written by former soldiers? I am curious to know if former soldiers turned author generally still believed the reasons they were given for the wars were true.
- black6 7y ago
  I haven’t written a book (and calling myself an author is a long stretch), but I did write up a series of personal narratives based on the Wikileaks War Diary document dump and I touch on how we (myself and my battle-buddies) felt about the “war” once we had been there for several months. A lot of us started identifying with the Afghan people. https://hornor.space/projects/afghanistan/ https://hornor.space/projects/afghanistan/ One item that didn’t make it into the narratives (because there is no Wikileaks cable) was my CO getting replaced in the middle of our deployment because he began refusing to take the company out on spurious missions.
chriselles 7y ago
I believe letters home from war would be far more likely to provide a sanitised(group average, not the graphic outliers) perspective on war. I know with my personal anecdotal perspectives and those of my peers we simply didn’t want our family/friends at home to worry. So often “everything is fine”. My thoughts mirror those of several others here in the often insane absurdity and dichotomy of conflict. Contemporary “three block war” conflict seems to be increasing the likelihood that one person may be exposed to horrific and lasting trauma while another within the same grid square may be enjoying ice cream while laughing with friends. Polar opposite experiences in quite close proximity.
gumby 7y ago
Censorship is considered crucial in war as it is widely believed that if the folks at home knew the "truth" they wouldn't stand for it and your side would "lose". I'm not sure this is correct: widespread targeting of civilians in 20th century conflict didn't seem to shorten any wars.
AcerbicZero 7y ago
I did a few rotations through Iraq and Afghanistan, and one of the few things I really learned is that everyones experience is different....but the same. I think they ended the move 'Jarhead' with a similar quote, and it didn't truly resonate with me until I'd experienced it myself. Some people get deployed and spend the whole time in Kuwait but in some ways they suffer just the same as those of us sleeping in the dirt getting mortared every 3 hours. Its just a different form of the same experience.
- dvdhnt 7y ago
  As someone who spent his entire deployment doing SIGINT in Kuwait, I've always wondered what it's like to have done what you did. Honestly, you spend some time beating yourself up over it, too - which is just dumb.
  - rdl 7y ago
    What amazed me was just how fast people adapt to crazy stuff. I went to some of the COPs briefly in Afghanistan and once got stuck there for 5 days when it was supposed to be just overnight. Day 2-3 was pretty bad (but I didn't want to be That Guy Who Whines, especially as a contractor), but after that it was easy.
    - jngreenlee 7y ago
      The brain is marvelously adaptable...especially in survival situations (regardless of overall politics/geopolitical strength), many of us ended up in a fight or die scenario at one time or another...the tools might change, but the imperative is there...
      - hi5eyes 7y ago
        military is just a frat with access to weapons/tanks
        dvdhnt 7y ago
nickthemagicman 7y ago
There's no better way for human beings...than cycles of violent slaughter? Are we as a human race doomed to continual animal like conflicts? We as a human race haven't figured out a solution to prevent wars yet after 100,000 years? Are we still that hopelessly primitive as a species?
- nexuist 7y ago
  >Are we as a human race doomed to continual animal like conflicts? We are animals. >We as a human race haven't figured out a solution to prevent wars yet after 100,000 years? We have, but the only viable solution - nukes - also kills us too. >Are we still that hopelessly primitive as a species? All of us start out as primitive babies. Some of us are privileged to grow up in safe towns run by responsible civil servants, with responsible parents, who send them to institutions of higher education or valuable trades so they can secure a respectable position society. Some of us grow up with no school, no parents, no society, and all the hate in the world. If you torture any mammal, it bites back. Until we learn to invest in the wellbeing of others we are cursed to deal with other humans who grow up to become cruel leaders or their henchmen.
  - nickthemagicman 7y ago
    > If you torture any mammal, it bites back. Until we learn to invest in the wellbeing of others we are cursed to deal with other humans who grow up to become cruel leaders or their henchmen. Exactly. Seems like ultimately the solution is to reduce inequality and increase opportunity around the world.
    - refurb 7y ago
      There will always be wars. Unless you can get every human being on the planet to agree to something, people will resort to violence to get what they want.
      - Ididntdothis 7y ago
        Especially if the people who start wars to get what they want aren’t the people who have to do the fighting. Which is how most wars are fought.
ganitarashid 7y ago
Wars are started by rich old men and fought mostly by poor young men
- ncmncm 7y ago
  ...who don't even know they are are poor.
Jeema101 7y ago
I think the author of this article is onto something when he says "such euphemisms do not come close to the 'truth' of warfare." But I think that maybe we use the euphemisms on purpose in order to distance ourselves from the reality of what war is, which at it's most basic level... is just ordinary people murdering one another. If you really stop and think about it like that, then I think it becomes clearer how going through the experience of war would mess with you: you're taught your whole life to respect others, be nice, etc., but then you're thrown into a new world where that morality is completely turned on it's head. How does one reconcile that world and it's values with the world of civilian life and it's values? They're completely dissimilar. I think that would mess with anyone.
mirimir 7y ago
FYI: https://www.amazon.com/Live-Iraq-4th25/dp/B000A7ZJVS https://www.amazon.com/Live-Iraq-4th25/dp/B000A7ZJVS Recorded and mixed in Baghdad, in ~2004, by members of the 1st Cavalry Division.
myrandomcomment 7y ago
Days and days of shear boredom followed by hours of 100% adrenaline, days of shaking, weeks of numbness, a bond with those you never would have known and a smell you never quite forget.

161 points by smacktoward 7y ago

Also see r/combatfootage Citizens should aware of what happens without passing through the media's filter/framing. Also, a lot of the value in that sub is also from the comments. It's like the experts we have on HN, but for armed conflicts.

solotronics 7y ago
I was watching a video (helmet mounted gopro) from a small unit doing recon in Ukraine. They seemed disorganized and were in enemy territory in broad daylight. They all died on video and then the Russians who defeated them used one of the cellphones to call the families and let them know they weren't coming home. Horrible. The thing that struck me is how often does your local government make a mistake or have incomplete information? Now imagine this same process applied to your life in a warzone. Everything outside of your control possibly with inept people who don't care about you making all the decisions. What a waste of life.
- ryanmarsh 7y ago
  They all died except one. I think how things were handled with the survivor, also on video, is very telling of the humanity in all of us. Immediately after trying to sneak up and kill his enemy in an ambush he was rendered aid by them.
  - baybal2 7y ago
    I myself grew up in a garrison town in Russian far east, Vladivostok. My early childhood memories were all about seeing gloomy gloomy military men, and hearing weird discussions at public canteens from which I remember phrases like "how much do they pay per body" and "who will be killing those people if not us?" It must've been a shitty thing to be a union's officer. Officer corps' relationship with the state was not easy, in contrast to union's general staff, who were "lardons in uniform" in their majority. It was almost as if the state and general staff was trying to bargain with their conscience.
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  You think about this if you ever watched band of brothers. The autobiography of one of the main people, "The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters" gets into this. The leaders would send them into pointless investigations that would get nothing and lead to them being killed, maybe it was near the end of the war, he wouldn't send his out.
- ttraub 7y ago
  Even in modern warfare, with its surgical accuracy to pinpoint and take out specific targets, hundreds if not thousands of troops will still die in the course of a major engagement, counting tactical errors, accidents, and friendly fire incidents. It's a sobering thought and one that makes me glad we're disengaging from foreign conflicts. War is hell.
  - thrower123 7y ago
    We really have no concept of what a real shooting war looks like. Twenty years of counter-insurgencies around the Middle East has amounted to a US butcher's bill that would be less than one single day during a major offensive in 1916 in France or 1943 in the Ukraine. The generation that was alive during Vietnam is dying out. I'm from a backwoods area that disproportionately sends recruits to the military, and I don't know anybody from the dozens who went over there that actually fired any shots in anger. The fobbit-fighter ratio is pretty absurd.
    - Merrill 7y ago
      It would seem that our soldiers current experience would be most like that of the British Army soldiers of the late-Victorian era from the Crimean War to the Boer War, when they were largely engaged in policing the colonies of the British Empire in mostly small scale and guerrilla engagements. Is there a literature from ordinary British soldiers forming "the thin red line"? Kipling is probably unreliable. "Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Tommy, 'ow's yer soul? / But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes' when the drums begin to roll," https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/tommy.html https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/tommy.html When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, / And the women come out to cut up what remains, / Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains / An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/young_british_soldier.html https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/young_british...
    - idoubtit 7y ago
      > Twenty years of counter-insurgencies around the Middle East has amounted to a US butcher's bill that would be less than one single day during a major offensive in 1916 in France or 1943 in the Ukraine. That's an exaggeration. Iraq 2003-2009 suffered around half the deaths of France 1914-1918. WW I, most deaths in a single day: ~30,000 WW I, total deaths from France, cvilians and military: ~1,400,000 Iraq invasion: ~200,000 verified violent civilian death. Total estimations are 2x-5× that number. These figures were from Wikipedia. From memory, a few comparison points with other Middle East wars were the USA had a minor role (a military minor role, since I doubt Saudi Arabia and UAE would have invaded Yemen if the USA had not provided their full support): Yemen (2015-): ~100,000 deaths. 10 millions suffer from hunger. Syria (2011-): ~300,000 deaths
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  There was an equally good and polar opposite video where the Russians are advancing through some fields using APCs for cover until a Ukrainian tank shows up (unsupported) and wreaks havoc for a little bit. The audio is a combination of the guy in charge yelling at everyone and the lower level grunts making wise-ass quips about how poorly the operation is going the whole time. Everyone involved was well beyond the point of giving a fuck about anything.
- zoomablemind 7y ago
  Lack of credible information indeed can be deadly, let alone horrifying. For that exact reason propaganda is very much gladly filling in the void. Sure there're different flavors of propaganda, but the one which is able to target masses back home is a lot more potent than the one directed at the front lines. I doubt that the Ukrainian soldiers would be swayed by footage like this, but their mothers sure will be. Perhaps this may also be meant to convince the mothers back in Russia that that their sons are "safe" in hands of "good" COs and are facing "easy" opposition. Being able to recognize BS is as much vital.
  - FpUser 7y ago
    <SARCASM> Spoken like a true expert who has all "credible information"</SARCASM>
- gdy 7y ago
  And all that started with the US-sponsored coup in Kiev.
- turk73 7y ago
  War doesn't suffer fools. Glad something doesn't.
jcranmer 7y ago
While I cannot attest to the accuracy of anything posted on that subreddit, it is worth pointing out that a lot of "combat footage" is selectively presented or staged for effect rather than representing the typical situations that actually occur in combat.
- platz 7y ago
  Sometimes, but Vets also often comment and explain the context. That said, there is no such thing as true objectivity. The best you can do is try to get more evidence and personal accounts
- ryanmarsh 7y ago
  selectively presented or staged for effect rather than representing the typical situations that actually occur in combat Staged for effect? Typical combat? They're certainly selected for being dramatic or kinetic. As far as being staged, I'm not sure what you mean, perhaps you could clarify. I don't know what typical combat means either. "Typical" small arms engagements in Afghanistan vs. Iraq were quite different.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    Perhaps he meant that some of those videos are fully staged, like an ad, in a safe area (for example for this one https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/du4vax/marines_find_an_insurgent_hiding_inside_of_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/du4vax/marin..., for the first part, the marines just found an empty/abandoned house, not in a combat zone and just shot the video. Or for this one https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/dumvcv/nlf_use_a_bgm71_tow_missile_to_eliminate_a_group/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/dumvcv/nlf_u... the soldiers(?) pitched the tents themselves before firing their missile).
  - zoomablemind 7y ago
    "Typical" may be when no one side is overwhelmingly victorious. Where on any advantages you may possess there're handicaps placed. That's what lets the wars drag on for the long times as they do.
tpmx 7y ago
Side-note: it would be helpful if HN turned strings like that ("r/combatfootage") into actual HTML links to that particular subreddit. Reddit is a YC company, so why not?
- nothrabannosir 7y ago
  Lack of features and poor UI is a moderation tactic to keep Eternal September at bay. It’s used aggressively by 4chan (eg setting a fullscreen overlay which can only be removed using user style css), but you see it crop up elsewhere every now and then. Whether intentionally or not, I think HN effectively does the same. Let’s face it: the UI is lacking and laborious. While I only speak for myself, some might agree: that’s a feature, not a bug.
  - tpmx 7y ago
    That is an interesting thought. You may be on to something... They did eventually implement comment folding though.
    - dvirsky 7y ago
      Yet still they did (will?) not implement comment notifications, which I'm pretty sure will increase engagement significantly.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - Enginerrrd 7y ago
    >that’s a feature, not a bug. This! And I believe it's intentional. It's a common pattern actually: A site starts out and has a slight barrier to entry which keeps out the technologically illiterate and those with poor attention spans. The site gets good because all the contributors are, at the risk of sounding like a gate-keeping elitist here, high quality people because that slight barrier has selected for them. Then the site gets sold, bean counters and management want to increase users by enhancing usability and eliminating those barriers to entry, and quality goes downhill until the high quality people give up and find another hub to congregate. Wash, rinse, repeat. Case in point: Reddit. Only obscure niche subs are even tolerable for me anymore where nothing ever makes the front page and its just a bunch of knowledgeable enthusiasts. I love to educate new people and welcome them into a community, but I really like the Buddhist monk or Navy Seal model. They only get in after they've proved they're sufficiently motivated to do their own work by waiting on the door step for 3 days, or going through intense training, etc. That's just the extreme. I've seen so many organizations or sites that have managed to maintain a quality environment by doing really simple things, like charge $1 for entry, require a credit card number with no charge made, require some contribution or a membership fee. Look at the difference between Costco and Walmart for another example where a membership fee that keeps out the riff raff has certainly played an important role. The reality is, it's not always a design failure if your community fails to educate and cater to the lowest common denominator. HN I think absolutely does this intentionally. I love that you have to get 500 karma in order to be eligible to downvote. It's a really smart tactic IMO. You have to really contribute something over a fair amount of time and thus gain a lot of situational awareness before you can start throwing around full voting privileges.

baud147258 7y ago

When talking about "A Farewell to Arms” why did the author called WW 1 an "earlier war in Italy"? I don't really see the point

shantly 7y ago
That it was also about war in Italy was more important than that the war in question was WWI. I guess they could have written "WWI in Italy" but that seems to ask more of the reader without much benefit, I'd say.
- baud147258 7y ago
  Well, it would have avoided to ask the reader to go and check which war is it about.

deleted 7y ago

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rdl 7y ago

Basing things on soldiers sending letters home doesn't seem generally likely to show a very unbiased view, either. Almost everyone I knew in Iraq/Afghanistan would send only very sanitized letters (well, emails, generally) home, except for a small minority who would send over the top insanity with little basis in reality. The only exception I saw was people sending letters to friends/relatives who had already been deployed in this specific conflict (not usually even Gulf War I or Vietnam or whatever era parents). The most accurate reporting seemed to be people who kept journals and then reported on it after they left. Without the journal fallible memory would be a serious problem, but in the moment it also seemed to be difficult. There were also a lot of efforts at 1) opsec 2) consequences if you DID share something, like "my 1SG is a dick..." etc. The VAST majority of everything is family life related stuff, mundane basics of life, interpersonal issues, etc. (Especially among units where families knew each other, like various NG units in smaller towns.) There was probably a bias in what I saw (I often got asked by people working around me to help proofread or phrase things, as I was often the one providing the Internet connection and there), but I mean my own experience was to not tell parents/etc. that I was anywhere but "Germany" for 5 years as a contractor, etc. (The biggest truth of modern war, at least from the US side, seems to be that there are massive differences in what the experience is like based on your job, where you're based, luck, etc. This was probably true in previous wars, but with different balance in different roles -- less risk of spontaneous death from indirect fire or green on blue on a US support base in WW2, but inferior logistics, risk of medical problems, etc. From what I saw there were a small number of SOF-types and some smaller combat units, especially in Afghanistan, where there was essentially maximum personal "agency" combined with daily violence, which seemed to be fine, a bunch of people with low agency as far as their own safety but also low risk (people who spent the entire war on one of the biggest bases working in admin/medical/etc. probably were even safer than I was), who were also usually fine, and then some people who had moderate control over their risk but also had moderate risk (truck drivers for most of the Iraq war, etc.) which actually seemed to be the hardest.)

bilbo0s 7y ago
I can't vouch for what other people are trying to put out, but this guy is spittin truth. Think about all the psychological issues that come with low agency/moderate risk jobs. Truck driver was a really good example. Then there are the really whacked out situations you could end up being witness to if you were working something like Civil Affairs. List goes on and on. I think one of the biggest needs of our latest generation of veterans is mental health support. Just because of the nature of a lot of what "war" has become.

jdlyga 7y ago

War being quick, cheap, with victory almost guaranteed has been the justification for every major conflict for hundreds of years. You never know when a "quick strike" will lead to a bloody destructive costly war that lasts a generation.

ardit33 7y ago

One of my favorite people on Quora is Roland Bartetzko. He was part of the German army, then he fought two wars during the Yougoslavian dissolution as a volunteer. One in Croatia-Bosnia and another one with the KLA during the Kosovo independence war in 98-99 against yougoslavian forces (mostly serbian). His answers give a very realistic view of the war as combat soldier: https://www.quora.com/profile/Roland-Bartetzko https://www.quora.com/profile/Roland-Bartetzko

emptyfile 7y ago
His quora account is a treasure cove of knowledge and experience. As a twenty-something born and raised in Croatia I can say that reading his answers gave me an insight into war and my country's history in a way that makes all the other stories from the front that I ever heard totally inane. The picture he paints of a soldier's mind made me for the first time understand the psychologically damaged people who walk around my country today but are still stuck in the war that's been over for 25 years. I've re read his accounts of the battle of Mostar a dozen times and I get chills every time. In short, the guy is legit, but I'm sure that anyone who will read him will figure that out for himself from the thick morbid reality that seeps from his writing.
- op00to 7y ago
  Good readin’, up until he said it’s not cool to snitch on your Nazi battle buddy. Just, wow.
  - solveit 7y ago
    I think that gives a great deal of insight to how armies actually work.

ilaksh 7y ago

Also consider some books written by former soldiers? I am curious to know if former soldiers turned author generally still believed the reasons they were given for the wars were true.

black6 7y ago
I haven’t written a book (and calling myself an author is a long stretch), but I did write up a series of personal narratives based on the Wikileaks War Diary document dump and I touch on how we (myself and my battle-buddies) felt about the “war” once we had been there for several months. A lot of us started identifying with the Afghan people. https://hornor.space/projects/afghanistan/ https://hornor.space/projects/afghanistan/ One item that didn’t make it into the narratives (because there is no Wikileaks cable) was my CO getting replaced in the middle of our deployment because he began refusing to take the company out on spurious missions.

chriselles 7y ago

I believe letters home from war would be far more likely to provide a sanitised(group average, not the graphic outliers) perspective on war. I know with my personal anecdotal perspectives and those of my peers we simply didn’t want our family/friends at home to worry. So often “everything is fine”. My thoughts mirror those of several others here in the often insane absurdity and dichotomy of conflict. Contemporary “three block war” conflict seems to be increasing the likelihood that one person may be exposed to horrific and lasting trauma while another within the same grid square may be enjoying ice cream while laughing with friends. Polar opposite experiences in quite close proximity.

gumby 7y ago

Censorship is considered crucial in war as it is widely believed that if the folks at home knew the "truth" they wouldn't stand for it and your side would "lose". I'm not sure this is correct: widespread targeting of civilians in 20th century conflict didn't seem to shorten any wars.

AcerbicZero 7y ago

I did a few rotations through Iraq and Afghanistan, and one of the few things I really learned is that everyones experience is different....but the same. I think they ended the move 'Jarhead' with a similar quote, and it didn't truly resonate with me until I'd experienced it myself. Some people get deployed and spend the whole time in Kuwait but in some ways they suffer just the same as those of us sleeping in the dirt getting mortared every 3 hours. Its just a different form of the same experience.

dvdhnt 7y ago
As someone who spent his entire deployment doing SIGINT in Kuwait, I've always wondered what it's like to have done what you did. Honestly, you spend some time beating yourself up over it, too - which is just dumb.
- rdl 7y ago
  What amazed me was just how fast people adapt to crazy stuff. I went to some of the COPs briefly in Afghanistan and once got stuck there for 5 days when it was supposed to be just overnight. Day 2-3 was pretty bad (but I didn't want to be That Guy Who Whines, especially as a contractor), but after that it was easy.
  - jngreenlee 7y ago
    The brain is marvelously adaptable...especially in survival situations (regardless of overall politics/geopolitical strength), many of us ended up in a fight or die scenario at one time or another...the tools might change, but the imperative is there...
    - hi5eyes 7y ago
      military is just a frat with access to weapons/tanks
      - dvdhnt 7y ago

nickthemagicman 7y ago

There's no better way for human beings...than cycles of violent slaughter? Are we as a human race doomed to continual animal like conflicts? We as a human race haven't figured out a solution to prevent wars yet after 100,000 years? Are we still that hopelessly primitive as a species?

nexuist 7y ago
>Are we as a human race doomed to continual animal like conflicts? We are animals. >We as a human race haven't figured out a solution to prevent wars yet after 100,000 years? We have, but the only viable solution - nukes - also kills us too. >Are we still that hopelessly primitive as a species? All of us start out as primitive babies. Some of us are privileged to grow up in safe towns run by responsible civil servants, with responsible parents, who send them to institutions of higher education or valuable trades so they can secure a respectable position society. Some of us grow up with no school, no parents, no society, and all the hate in the world. If you torture any mammal, it bites back. Until we learn to invest in the wellbeing of others we are cursed to deal with other humans who grow up to become cruel leaders or their henchmen.
- nickthemagicman 7y ago
  > If you torture any mammal, it bites back. Until we learn to invest in the wellbeing of others we are cursed to deal with other humans who grow up to become cruel leaders or their henchmen. Exactly. Seems like ultimately the solution is to reduce inequality and increase opportunity around the world.
  - refurb 7y ago
    There will always be wars. Unless you can get every human being on the planet to agree to something, people will resort to violence to get what they want.
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      Especially if the people who start wars to get what they want aren’t the people who have to do the fighting. Which is how most wars are fought.

ganitarashid 7y ago

Wars are started by rich old men and fought mostly by poor young men

ncmncm 7y ago
...who don't even know they are are poor.

Jeema101 7y ago

I think the author of this article is onto something when he says "such euphemisms do not come close to the 'truth' of warfare." But I think that maybe we use the euphemisms on purpose in order to distance ourselves from the reality of what war is, which at it's most basic level... is just ordinary people murdering one another. If you really stop and think about it like that, then I think it becomes clearer how going through the experience of war would mess with you: you're taught your whole life to respect others, be nice, etc., but then you're thrown into a new world where that morality is completely turned on it's head. How does one reconcile that world and it's values with the world of civilian life and it's values? They're completely dissimilar. I think that would mess with anyone.

mirimir 7y ago

FYI: https://www.amazon.com/Live-Iraq-4th25/dp/B000A7ZJVS https://www.amazon.com/Live-Iraq-4th25/dp/B000A7ZJVS Recorded and mixed in Baghdad, in ~2004, by members of the 1st Cavalry Division.

myrandomcomment 7y ago

Days and days of shear boredom followed by hours of 100% adrenaline, days of shaking, weeks of numbness, a bond with those you never would have known and a smell you never quite forget.