What It’s Really Like to Fight a War
Basing things on soldiers sending letters home doesn&#x27;t seem generally likely to show a very unbiased view, either.  Almost everyone I knew in Iraq&#x2F;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&#x2F;relatives who had already been deployed in this specific conflict (not usually even Gulf War I or Vietnam or whatever era parents).<p>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 &quot;my 1SG is a dick...&quot; etc.<p>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.)<p>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&#x2F;etc. that I was anywhere but &quot;Germany&quot; for 5 years as a contractor, etc.<p>(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&#x27;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 &quot;agency&quot; 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&#x2F;medical&#x2F;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.)