Amelia Halgren’s Reviews > War > Status Update

“Fighting another human being is not as hard as you think when they’re trying to kill you.”

“In the Korengal the soldiers never talked about the wider war —or cared... And the big bases had the opposite problem; since there was almost no combat everyone had kind of a reflexive optimism that never got tested by the reality outside the wire. The public affairs guys on those bases offered the press a certain vision of the war, and that vision wasn’t wrong, it just seemed amazingly incomplete.”

I found this relatable:

“The primary factor determining breakdown in combat does not appear to be the objective level of danger so much as the feeling, even the illusion, of control. Highly trained men in extraordinarily dangerous circumstances are less likely to break down than untrained men in little danger.”

“There are different kinds of strength and containing fear may be the most profound; the one without which armies couldn’t function and wars couldn’t be fought— god forbid.”

“As a civilian among soldiers, I was aware that a failure of nerve by me could put other men at risk. And that idea was almost as mortifying as the very real dangers up there. The problem with fear though, is that it isn’t any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomy —anxiety, dread, panic, foreboding— and you can be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another.”

“Journalistic convention holds that you can’t write objectively about people you’re close to. But you can’t write objectively about people who are shooting at you either. Pure objectivity, difficult enough when covering a city council meeting, isn’t remotely possible in a war. ...Objectivity and honesty are not the same thing though...”

“The moral basis of the war doesn’t seem to interest soldiers much and it’s long term success of failure has a relevance of almost zero. Soldiers worry about those things about as much as farmhands worry about the global economy— which is to say they recognize stupidity when it’s right in front of them, but they generally leave the big picture to others.”