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As a SAW gunner in Afghanistan on my last deployment, my combat load minus body weight was > 90lbs.

This was for double digit (at least) hours long missions many times per week in mountains around +/-10K ft. Brutal.. lol

The accumulated weight of every little required item needed on missions.. a perpetual source of annoyance.

If you don't mind me asking have you experienced any discrimination in tech because of your background or politics? I have friends that served and one of them moved to Dallas from S.V. because the politics there were hostile to vets. Thank you!

I would say my experience has been the reverse. In Texas you can pretty much assume most folks support the troops and veterans. The only "discrimination" I've received as a vet was in SV. I don't know if you'd call it discrimination though, mainly just people disgusted with me (or horrified?) for fighting in "Bush's war".

I had a woman just flat out turn on her heels and walk away from me upon mention of my service (I forget how it was related to the conversation). We were having a professional conversation at a conference. I've gotten looks of disgust from students (I teach various programming classes) when I tie something back to a lesson I learned in the military. Whatever.

That stuff doesn't affect me. It's more a reflection on them than it is me.

I think you and solotronics are in agreement.

> one of them moved to Dallas from S.V. [emphasis added]

Where is S.V.?

Silicon Valley. Usually no dots between the letters like that but I was quoting another poster.

Silicon Valley, located in the vicinity of San Francisco Bay.

The Bay Area area is noted for anti-military sentiment, especially given the history of UC Berkeley during the time of the Vietnam War. Naturally, some of this spills over into anti-veteran bigotry.

Which is curious since a LOT of the technology they develop is done under gigantic government contracts.

Apparently few people remember back in the 80's when the biggest SV employer was Lockheed Missiles and Space who developed weapons for the DOD.

More recently you can point fingers at the complacency of Facebook, Google and Yahoo who were willing participants in the PRISM scandal.

I mean internet WAS basically created by DARPA. The irony.

The WWII and Cold War technology arms race (in which Silicon Valley got its start) is intellectually interesting and easily justified by clear existential threats to our civilization, whose emotional content we we weren't around for.

US foreign policy since then has been... murkier. I don't think the Bay Area really has a position on soldiers, so much as it opposes the current and previous few wars.

This was posted here, but worth a repost as you might be interested. Most SV VC money, traced back far enough, goes straight to DoD.

https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

That is interesting. A lot of my family served in the military, including both my parents. I was under the impression that there was a complete 180 from the Vietnam era where people blamed draftees for serving. I thought there was enthusiastic support for individual soldiers, but overwhelming condemnation for the quagmire we face in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is crazy to me that people had negative reactions to your military experience. I think it points to a certain stratification of society that people would not have family members or friends in the military to help them empathize.

The broad societal assault on vets is over. But it still happens in some areas and from some subgroups.

I've encountered some hostility when I've said I've been in the Army (I don't volunteer the information out of the blue - people ask me what I did before I did my PhD so I tell them).

As the other person said, some people I've met at conferences have ended the conversation with me or told me they think it's immoral.

One person at a major Ruby conference casually literally asked me if I enjoyed killing babies.

Many people have the craziest ideas of what the military and war is like that have no connection whatsoever to reality. It's scary that civil society understands so little of the military now that it's so small and professional.

>It's scary that civil society understands so little of the military now that it's so small and professional.

I'd say overall it's a good thing. It's a very good thing that 99% of people will never be able to remotely comprehend what we went through.

When a lot of more the population served in Vietnam the country turned against the war. Nowadays nobody seems to care that America's longest war continues on.

That's because they're not even remotely comparable things, as you note. Afghanistan is a security operation, not a traditional war. There's no draft, thousands of US soldiers aren't dying in Afghanistan. Even the cost is a modest fraction of the total US military budget.

There were 15 US casualties in Afghanistan in 2017, and 14 in 2016.

That's not a war. That's a security operation.

> There were 15 US casualties in Afghanistan in 2017, and 14 in 2016.

There were 15 US fatalities, not casualties. I'm sure there were many more casualties - many of them life changing injuries.

> One person at a major Ruby conference casually literally asked me if I enjoyed killing babies.

That's horrible man, I'm sorry somebody was that callous.

I'm sorry this happened to you.

I had no idea this was a thing in SV, I can’t imagine anyone having anything but utmost respect for those that have served in the military.

I'm glad you have the perspective that these comments are coming from people who have no clue. Easier to brush off as crazy talk.

> Many people have the craziest ideas of what the military and war is like that have no connection whatsoever to reality. It's scary that civil society understands so little of the military now that it's so small and professional.

I totally believe this, and it makes me very angry.

Volunteer for service, suspend your civil rights, vow to defend the Constitution, develop the technical skills, physical ability, and mental toughness to serve in combat, and lay it all on the line for fellow soldiers -- and return to a universe of people who cannot identify Khandahar on a map, and think they are morally superior... well, I would have issues.

(FWIW I have never served in the military, I don't like the chain of top-level decisions that led to a decade of active military deployment.)

The thing that bugs me is that there's no middle. People appear to either be the type of asshole OP mentioned or they idolize soldiers in an equally terrifying way. I view the military as a job. It's not a job I would want, but there's tons of jobs I don't want. In peace time it's pretty effective at helping people move up the economic ladder. In war time it provides trained killers to take out the bad guys. I don't say that flippantly, that's an important and necessary part of maintaining our civilization. Any beef I might have about things the military might be doing at any given time is better directed at political leadership than the boots on the ground.

Very good point. I think this is objectivization -- exactly the sort of cognitive glitch when I encounter people who look very different from what I am used to.

I like to think that with decades of practice, I can anticipate this reaction, or at least catch myself quickly, or Plan C: apologize. Usually all of the above.

People are not mythological creatures. But getting civil society to stumble along, on a path together, has employed no small amount of storytelling and manipulation.

As American as apple pie, I suppose.

There’s some moral hazard in treating self-sacrifice-and-killing as merely a job. Idealizing what warriors do on your behalf (imagine it was actually to defend your people not the interests of an empire) is an important way that humans deal with the act of killing. I don’t think you want cold blooded killers who do it for a meager paycheck, as opposed to the glory and heroism of defending others.

I would rather cold blooded killers who do it for the paycheck than to the cheers of the coliseum.

No, you do not want to reintegrate a half million cold blooded sociopathic murderers with no regard for human life back into society. No no no. You don’t know what you’re saying.

It is much better for all of us that the ones who we have kill be convinced they’re merely doing it to protect the rest of us. You can mend those hearts. You can’t mend the cold blooded contract killers.

We can't even reintegrate the ones supposedly doing it to protect us. If we, the general population, stopped participating in this delusion that they're protecting us, we'd likely send them out to do less killing in the first place.

Killing for money doesn't require you to be a psychopath, as is evidenced by the countless paid killers in the military and swat teams today.

Interview those paid killers and find out why they do it. If my personal experience as a warrior doesn’t convince you maybe hearing it directly from them will.

If you're suggesting fewer people would sign up to be paid killers if we didn't lavish them with hero worship, then I'm okay with that. In fact, I'll go so far as to state that as an intended consequence. The other, larger component, is that the false dichotomy between hero worship and villainization robs the general public of the ability to rationally consider what our military is doing.

Wow. No connection whatsoever with reality indeed.

It's interesting that Software Engineers here would discuss about the ethics of building mass surveillance software [1] but have no problem with people fighting in foreign lands to advance the interests of capitalism. Why blame Software Engineers for their role in enforcing the interests of the State when veterans get a free pass? Have we really become that hypocritic?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14219384

There's no reason to believe you're talking about the same "Software Engineers" in each case, so questions like this are meaningless and boil down to rhetoric. Different subgroups of people comment on different threads.

Wow, that's a surprising comment to see and on multiple levels.

When you are a soldier you are required to follow your orders, a programmer is totally free to deny any project for personal reasons. The soldier is on some level a policy tool of the state determined by politicians. They can individually disagree but must carry out what the state decides, if the order is illegal they can deny it but the 'big picture' is all set high up.

I personally don't mention my military service at all on resumes or when interviewing. I have no problem talking about it otherwise, but it's simply too easy to be flagged by someone's bias in the hiring process.

This topic deserves (at least) a top-level "Ask HN".

The vast majority of people in the vast majority of companies are as reasonable as one would expect another human being to be. But there are some standout experiences I've had. I mean, this is definitely the exception and not the norm, but I was once told that I'm "not the right kind of diversity" by someone who actually worked in a diversity and inclusion working group.

And then some people make some crazy assumptions when I tell them I was in the infantry for many years. I have interestingly been the target of a number of "jokes" about watching Fox News and supporting Trump, even though I'm actually strongly anti-authoritarian to a fault, and I want something like the Nordic model for the United States, and I supported Bernie Sanders in the last election. I just don't talk about politics at work, so people run wild with their assumptions. The hypocrisy runs deeeeep in the urban in-group left, man. I've honestly sometimes had an easier time talking about my time in service at Hippie Hill than I have in some tech companies. Of course this isn't information I'm eager to volunteer, obviously. But the conversation does come up sometimes, unfortunately.

And this doesn't even begin to touch on the totally disconnected delusions some people have about what the world is like in a lot of places on this Earth (and throughout history). We are so lucky to live in the time and place we're living in, the majority of people reading this.

At least Iraq was flat. I feel you brother. Glad you made it back alive.

my combat load minus body weight was > 90lbs

I assume that's why you hear of so many veterans in their 20's and 30's with bad backs and trashed knees?

Even 50 lbs would be brutal.

A huge number of people are 50 lb overweight or more. That's probably why bad backs, hips, and knees are so common generally.

I go backpacking recreationally. My base weight (everything but food and water) is under 10 lbs. Even 50 sounds awful.

I read once where a 70-90 pound kit has been normal since Napoleon's army. Cramming more functionality into fewer cubic centimeters and fewer kilograms doesn't lighten the load, and never has. It hopefully gives the soldier a more functional kit.

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1985/...

According to that, in the 1920s the British Army "discovered that armies in the past had on the average issued the soldier between fifty-five and sixty pounds". Investigations by the British, Germans, Russians, and US into how much infantry should carry throughout the 1900s all end up around the same number of 30% of the soldier's body weight (48lbs) being the ideal load, and that the maximum load a soldier should carry shouldn't exceed 45% of their body weight (72lbs, and will degrade their combat effectiveness for the next few days no matter how physically conditioned the soldier is).

If you take into account that the average American infantryman today is bigger than your average 1920’s soldier then yes this sounds about right. A 200lb soldier is, on average, carrying 80lbs.

This reminds me of the situation with software. When writing a program today, I've got dozens of great tools that I didn't have 10 or 20 years ago, but the flip side is that I've got to learn and use all these new tools.

You could always limit yourself to the old ways, if weight/complexity were your only criterion, but the world moves on, and we're (apparently) not yet hitting the point where piling on more technology doesn't provide an overwhelming advantage.

>I'm convinced there will never be a day when the infantryman isn't carrying too much weight. There is a limit to how much weight a fit infantryman can carry and still be able to fight and they will always have us carrying stuff up to that limit.

That day will be when we have sustainable mechanized body armor. When the suit can carry more than the man wearing it, the man is no longer the bottleneck.

The question will be whether we just send drones at that point.

They will send drones. But they'll also send people in suits too. By the time iron man suits are ubiquitous, the battle space will be 99% drone anyway. But people still need to be there sometimes. So they'll have suits.

When I did some work with the defense industry, I was told many soldiers carried more weight in batteries than in ammo nowadays

Huge argument in favor of interoperability of subsystems: if all the gadgets could recharge one another or had a common battery type, then your spares could be split among gadgets.

Bonus points if other bits of hardware could be shared. Extra bonus points for software interoperability (long shot).

They do have the same battery, the bb2590.

It's completely standardized for all modern military equipment.

The problem is that if you are going on a week long mission you need enough batteries to last a week plus extra in case something goes wrong.

Source: I'm a veteran.

The Vietnam era PRC77 for comparison: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/PRC-77_Portable_Transceiv...

The typical soldier's kit has been 70 lbs going back to Roman times.

That day will arrive if running becomes more important than the weight of the gear. But, for right now, fighting seems more stationary than ever so mobility isn't as important as medic supplies, communication and weapons. And if there's an empty pocket on the vest, there's a huge military budget that wants to fill it.