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I'm happy to talk to people about my experiences in Afghanistan, but yeah, I only have a few minutes worth of "war stories" to tell. One of the things that mos

I'm happy to talk to people about my experiences in Afghanistan, but yeah, I only have a few minutes worth of "war stories" to tell. One of the things that most non-veterans don't grasp is just how mundane day-to-day military life can be, even in a combat zone, like how people without a security clearance can't imagine how mundane most SECRET material really is. I find it hard to explain, but life is both different in quirky ways (various restrictions on freedoms, being judged professionally by your height/weight and 2-mile running time, random attacks by mortar fire, etc.) and dominated by many of the same experiences and concerns of civilian life (time spent just acquiring and eating food, dealing with traffic and bureaucracy, being frustrated by your assigned Windows machine on the enterprise network, etc.). One of my personal takeaways from my time in Afghanistan is just how widely variable everyone's "combat" experience can be. I flew helicopters, so I saw the whole range of living conditions on a daily basis: everything from the smallest observation posts where squads lived in filth and got attacked routinely by well-aimed direct fire, to the large airbases like Bagram where people worked 9-5 in a cubicle and had many amenities that were even nicer than what was back home at Fort Bragg. And where you ended up on that spectrum seemed quite arbitrary and luck-of-the-draw. Some otherwise interchangeable helicopter units just flew VIPs back and forth between Bagram and Kabul while others flew SEAL teams on very-high-risk raids every night. So when someone says they did a tour in Afghanistan (even if they earned a Bronze Star or a Combat Action Badge), that doesn't mean much to me, in itself. Edited to add: I think the variance among people who "served in WWII" is orders-of-magnitude greater. There were just so many millions of people in uniform in so many diverse places.

RalfWausE 4y ago
I heard a similar story from a relative of me: He was in the Waffen SS and fought the war basically behind a typewriter in a depot.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  In WWII, "combat troops" made up only 20% of US military personnel, with the rest running support, logistics, etc. For the Germans it was closer to 60% for infantry and 50% for panzer divisions. So if you were drafted, even as a German you had a nearly 50% chance to be assigned a position where you weren't expected to see combat. And on top of that there's the combat troops defending targets that weren't attacked by the enemy. But with some bad luck you might have ended up fighting at Stalingrad. War isn't fair, on so many levels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth-to-tail_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth-to-tail_ratio

RalfWausE 4y ago

I heard a similar story from a relative of me: He was in the Waffen SS and fought the war basically behind a typewriter in a depot.

wongarsu 4y ago
In WWII, "combat troops" made up only 20% of US military personnel, with the rest running support, logistics, etc. For the Germans it was closer to 60% for infantry and 50% for panzer divisions. So if you were drafted, even as a German you had a nearly 50% chance to be assigned a position where you weren't expected to see combat. And on top of that there's the combat troops defending targets that weren't attacked by the enemy. But with some bad luck you might have ended up fighting at Stalingrad. War isn't fair, on so many levels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth-to-tail_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth-to-tail_ratio