What It’s Really Like to Fight a War | Hacker News Reader

What It’s Really Like to Fight a War

nytimes.com

161 pointssmacktoward64 comments

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.)

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.

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.

I think people don't realize how extreme the two ends are. It can be surreal when the two experiences are in close proximity. I recall returning from a particularly nasty patrol where we were hit pretty hard and almost lost some guys. When trying to enter a dining facility on a big base some POG officer chewed us out for our messy uniforms. His uniform was neatly starched. I have no idea how he managed to do that, we were grateful for electricity and running water. I recall tanks/APCs pulled up in front of a convenience store on one camp, like taking the car up to CVS for some snacks.

I recall showing up to one large base to drop of a prisoner. We were particularly dirty and smelly. It had been a messy week out in our sector and there were perfumed young girls in PT uniform (shorts and t-shirt) wearing makeup and giggling and frolicking amongst the fast food joints. I could smell their perfume. They looked at us like Sasquatch had wandered in from the woods.

I knew guys that had our AO before us, and described a World War Z type battle with bad guys crawling over the walls. I remember our battles there, not seeming as bad, right after we left I heard how that same camp received a nasty VBIED attack. Years later I met some younger guys who'd been on that camp and they complained how boring it was.

Some people were mortared every night, some people spent their deployment missing family and bored to tears. Some people passed out candy, some put parts of their buddies into body bags. All within 20 or 30 miles from each other.

An extra weird thing for me (as a contractor and pretty "free range", since it was in-theater awarded, and multiple parallel contracts) was I could be at a party in the IZ, then sitting in the back of an old BMW with just a Hi Power between bases, working on some weird UNIX network driver issue or RF interference problem, video conferencing with an O-7 and his staff, riding on a medevac helicopter sitting in someone else's blood (always look first), shopping at a huge PX and stocking up on discounted thorlo socks, knives, etc., on a super sketchy Uzbek cargo An-12, and then driving 200kph to a 4.5 star hotel, all in a few days, with basically no one telling me what to do or particularly responsible for me. Plenty of other contractors basically stayed on one base, lived under close control, and had basically one job for 12 months (or on some contracts, especially guys from Asia, they were there for years in the same place). And other contractors were doing convoy security, or vehicle recovery, or other close-to-military jobs.

The lawlessness and chaos of a combat zone can be very freeing for the adventurous.

Nowhere else can you “hitch a ride” on someone’s multimillion dollar military aircraft.

>accurate reporting

War letters are not "reporting". They're human interaction - there is no right or 'wrong' way to report what is happening during war time, censors and military commanders notwithstanding.

>family life related stuff,

IMHO, this is the only real value of commentary about war letters. Nothing belies the futility of war more than the same letter written, in a different language, from both sides of the front line, lamenting the war.

We must never allow ourselves to consider that there is a 'right soldier', writing his letters ...

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.

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.

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.

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...

On this Veteran's Day, thank you for your service.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

> 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

I'm speaking from a decidedly US-centric point of view. Total deaths in all combat theaters from all causes for the US military is on the order of 11000 dead from the first boots on the ground in Afghanistan to today.

France, WW1: ~1,700,000 civilian and military (1.4M is military alone.); ~4.3% of its population. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties)

Iraq's population in 2002 was about 25,000,000 (France in 1911 was 39,000,000); ~650,000 excess deaths (2003-2006, the most I could find in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War) is about 2.6% of the population.

Americans have been carefully conditioned to count only American casualties.

The number of people killed or mauled in recent wars is so horrendous that any American complaining of unpleasantness should be ashamed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

<SARCASM> Spoken like a true expert who has all "credible information"</SARCASM>

And all that started with the US-sponsored coup in Kiev.

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.

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

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.

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/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_u... the soldiers(?) pitched the tents themselves before firing their missile).

"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.

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?

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.

That is an interesting thought. You may be on to something...

They did eventually implement comment folding though.

Yet still they did (will?) not implement comment notifications, which I'm pretty sure will increase engagement significantly.

>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.

  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

Yes, true. I still use Reddit, for those reasons.

  I love that you have to get 500 karma in order to be eligible to downvote. It's a really smart tactic IMO.

Agreed. Still proud of the day I hit that magic number.

Edit: Nevermind. This turned into a weird ego battle I'm not interested in joining.

This comment is out of line. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 for the note that downvotes are allowed to express disagreement.

You're only being downvoted because the thread you started is too off-topic to the actual discussion

Thanks for trying to explain this stuff, I really appreciate it, but I think there was also something else at play here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

FYI: https://www.amazon.com/Live-Iraq-4th25/dp/B000A7ZJVS

Recorded and mixed in Baghdad, in ~2004, by members of the 1st Cavalry Division.

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.

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/

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.

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

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.

Well, it would have avoided to ask the reader to go and check which war is it about.

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.

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

...who don't even know they are are poor.

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?

>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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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