After Combat: True War Stories From Iraq and Afghanistan by Marian Eide & Michael Gibler

Author:Marian Eide & Michael Gibler [Eide, Marian & Gibler, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Iraq War (2003-2011), HIS027170 History / Military / Iraq War (2003-2011), Military, history, HIS027190 History / Military / Afghan War (2001-), Afghan War (2001-)
ISBN: 9781640120235
Google: KA1lDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2018-09-01T23:37:00.952520+00:00

9

Combat

There is a military cliché, as one veteran reminded us, that war is 95 percent boredom and 5 percent action. This chapter is about that 5 percent. In the civilian imagination, fueled by movies and television, the gold standard is the firefight, direct engagement with a visible enemy, even hand-to-hand combat. While some combatants have those stories to tell, for the most part they encountered mortars fired onto a base from a distance and countered by huge artillery from inside the wire, or roadside bombs detonated by a distant mobile phone. Some soldiers encountered insurgent attacks on patrol and fired in the direction of a muzzle flash through a palm grove, an agricultural crop, or a chaotic cityscape. For the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, war was both abstract and extremely visceral. Their memories of combat are both crystal clear and confusing, ordered and chaotic, logical and surreal. As such, these events make great stories and are often the stories told with the most relish and enthusiasm, viscerally detailed, shaped by a satisfying narrative arc, and at the same time haunted by uncertainty. The way a soldier feels in the midst of battle is unexpected even by the person trained to engage. To describe those reactions afterward, at home or among civilians, is challenging because it sounds wrong, perhaps even callous. Yet the feelings veterans describe here are as ubiquitous in the war zone as they are unexpected and unacceptable at home.

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