Name: What It Is Like to Go to War
ISBN: 9780802145925

What It Is Like to Go to War

Matterhorn, this is a powerful nonfiction book about the experience of combat and how inadequately we prepare our young men and women for war. War is as old as humankind, but in the past, warriors were prepared for battle by ritual, religion and literature -- which also helped bring them home. In a compelling narrative, Marlantes weaves riveting accounts of his combat experiences with thoughtful analysis, self-examination and his readings -- from Homer to the Mahabharata to Jung. He talks frankly about how he is haunted by the face of the young North Vietnamese soldier he killed at close quarters and how he finally finds a way to make peace with his past. Marlantes discusses the daily contradictions that warriors face in the grind of war, where each battle requires them to take life or spare life, and where they enter a state he likens to the fervor of religious ecstasy. Just as Matterhorn is already being acclaimed as a classic of war literature, What It Is Like To Go To War is set to become required reading for anyone -- soldier or civilian -- interested in this visceral and all too essential part of the human experience.

What Hacker News says

thaumaturgyApr 2018

If a country with the resources of the US or most other developed nations wants to send people off to war, the deal should be that those men and women will be made as whole as possible again when they come back.

There are serious shortcomings in veterans' care when returning from combat, and we shouldn't regard any of it as "elective". Spending significantly more resources on veteran care might also help some countries reconsider the costs of war before engaging in it.

For a good book on the subject, read "What It Is Like To Go To War", by Karl Marlantes.

This is what "support the troops" should mean.

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tptacekMay 2014

If only nobody anywhere in the world was trained to kill other people, our country (and yours) wouldn't need to ask people to sacrifice that part of their humanity in service to their countrymen.

You might read Marlantes _What It Is Like To Go To War_. You might find that while SEALs are happy to speak proudly what they've learned in basic training, not so many of them speak happily about what war forces them to do during deployment. Those people trained for the most part to kill other people probably agree with much of your sentiment about their job.

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rdlFeb 2013

IIRC there have been wars where we used "tactical maneuver" but still thought of strategic attrition as the goal -- Vietnam is probably the best example, where the "body count" was the end goal, and "take this hill" was primarily for the purpose of incidentally killing (at a very favorable exchange ratio) the enemy. Karl Marlantes has a pretty good criticism of this in "What it is like to go to war" -- the escalating levels of lying over statistics, as well as the ultimate futility and irrelevance of the body count statistic. Unclear to me if this was due to a lack of possible focal points to attack, or because those focal points were somehow out of bounds (Chinese supply lines, etc.).

Also IIRC the Vietnam war is not considered to have been one of America's finest military successes, either.

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