By Sebastian Jungar
In his introduction, Jungar has a warning for his readers: "In many cases I have shortened quotes from interviews and texts in order to ease the burden on the reader."
"The videotape I shot during the ambush in Aliabad shows every man dropping into a crouch at the distant popping sound. They don't do this in response to a loud sound - which presumably is what evolution has taught us - but in response to the quieter snap of the bullets going past. The amygdala requires only a single negative experience to decide that something is a threat, and after one firefight every man in the platoon would have learned to react to the snap of bullets and to ignore the much louder sound of men near them returning fire. In Aliabad the men crouched for a second or two and then straightened up and began shouting and taking cover. In these moments their higher brain functions decided that the threat required action rather than immobility and ramped everything up; pulse and blood pressure to heart-attack levels, epinephrine and norepinephrine levels through the roof, blood draining out of the organs and flooding the heart, brain, and major muscle groups." Pg 32 - 33
"Summer grinds on: a hundred degrees every day and tarantulas invading the living quarters to get out of the heat. Some of the men are terrified of them and can only sleep in mesh pup tents, and others pick them up with pliers and light them on fire. The timber bunkers at Phoenix are infested with fleas, and the men wear flea collars around their ankles but still scratch all day long. First Squad goes thirty-eight days without taking a shower or changing their clothes, and by the end their uniforms are so impregnated with salt that they can stand up by themselves. The men's sweat reeks of ammonia because they've long since burned off all their fat and are now breaking down muscle. There are wolves up in the high peaks that howl at night and mountain lions that creep through the KOP looking for food and troops of monkeys that set to screeching from the crags around the base. One species of bird sounds exactly like incoming rocket-propelled grenades; the men call them RPG birds and can't keep themselves from flinching whenever they hear them." Page 54
"Reporters often think that taking cover from small-arms fire is the same thing as getting pinned down, but its not. Getting pinned down means you literally can't move without getting killed." Page 55
"Mobility has always been the default choice of guerilla fighters because they don't have access to the kinds of heavy weapons that would slow them down. The fact that networks of highly mobile amateurs can confound - even defeat - a professional army is the only thing that has prevented empires from completely determining the course of history. Whether that is a good thing or not depends on what amateurs you're talking about - or what empires - but it does mean that you can't predict the outcome of a war simply by looking at the numbers. " Pg. 83
"The idea that there are rules in warfare and that combatants kill each other according to basic concepts of fairness probably ended for good with the machine gun. A man with a machine gun can conceivably hold off a whole battilion, at least for a while, which changes the whole question of what it means to be brave in battle. In World War I, when automatic weapons came into general use, heavy machine gunners were routinely executed if their position was overrun because they caused so much death. " Page 140
"The enemy now had a weapon that unnerved the Americans more than small-arms fire ever could: random luck. Every time you drove down the road you were engaged in a twisted existential exercise where each moment was the only proof you'd ever have that you hadn't been blown up the moment before. An if you were blown up, you'd probably never know it and certainly wouldn't be able to affect the outcome. Good soldiers died just as easily as sloppy ones, which is pretty much how soldiers define unfair tactics in war.
Pg 142
"War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. It's insanely exciting." Pg. 144
"On and on it went, lives measured in inches and seconds and deaths avoided by complete accident." Page 197
"It's a miraculous kind of antiparadise up here: heat and dust and tarantulas and flies and no women and no running water and no cooked food and nothing to do but kill and wait." Pg 222
"Civilians balk at recognizing that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up. War is so obviously evil and wrong that the idea there could be anything good to it almost feels like profanity. And yet throughout history, men like Mac and Rice and O'Byrne have com home to find themselves desperately missing what should have been the worst experience of their lives. To a combat vet, the civilian world can seem frivolous and dull, with very little at stake and all the wrong people in power. These men come home and quickly find themselves getting berated by a rear-base major who's never seen combat or arguing with their girlfriend about some domestic issues they don't even understand. When men say they miss combat, its not that they actually miss getting shot at - you would have to be deranged - it's that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted. They miss being in a world where human relations are governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life." Pg 234
"War is a big and sprawling word that brings a lot of human suffering into the conversation, but combat is a different matter. Combat is the smaller game that young men fall in love with, and any solution to the human problem of war will have to take into account the psyches of these young men. For some reason there is a profound and mysterious gratification to the reciprocal agreement to protect another person with your life, and combat is virtually the only situation in which that happens regularly." Pg 234
"The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly." Pg 239
Book 55
