A violently true depiction of what war really is 
I am very tempted to flag this. the sociopath thing really rubs me the wrong way -- there are logical flaws with using that label. War is a part of society. If society tells you to go kill somebody and you do, you can't be a sociopath.<p>Having said that, it's a great first-person account of what real combat is like, at least for this one guy. I am concerned the effect on HN discussion will be negative. Hopefully I'm wrong.<p>The United States made a huge mistake in moving to an all-volunteer army in the 1970s. With a draft and mandatory conscription, <i>everybody</i> had the common experience of serving and perhaps doing really bad things in the line of duty. As it is now, the vast majority of civilians have absolutely no idea what military service is like, as the author points out.<p>In this lack of context everybody becomes really impressionable. Not only can the military manipulate public opinion through selective release of information, other soldiers like this one can also. When the majority of people don't have context, they'll believe anything.<p>This is why you couldn't get away with writing a really negative article about WWII right after the war. It wasn't that somehow the war wasn't terribly horrible, it was that the average Joe reading it would immediately say something like "yeah, but that's not the way it was for most people" or "you think that's bad? I remember when..."<p>We don't have that kind of audience now. Once again, as the author points out, most of the readers only know cartoon violence and have never even hunted an animal. So people are left substituting other experiences and trying to draw rough analogies. The one thing I know for sure is that different people in different units can have vastly different impressions of a conflict. In my mind, this article would have been better with less "I'm the sane one and the other soldiers are crazy" and more "Here's another view"<p>I would also note that it has become fashionable for authors to say they have all sorts of combat experience when they don't. I'm sure this author isn't one of those people, but I've learned over time to be suspicious of people who wear the grisly warrior mantle as a way to get around my critical thinking skills. This area is just really difficult to discuss, especially when it's about an ongoing operation.