/lit/ - Literature

>>19631119
Seven pillars of wisdom

Storm of Steel is the obvious one, but especially if you read the original 1920s edition.

>>19631119
A follow on, what about war literature that is amoral.

>>19631119
>What's some war lit that's not anti-war?
Pretty much everything written by someone who never saw combat.

>>19632398
About the different editions, should I read the first one first?

>>19632475
There seem to be three editions, an older one translated from a 1920s version, the Penguin one which is a translation of the 1960s version, and a newer one made by an indie translator that has lots of typos.

Starship Troopers

Sven Hasel.
He was ww2 Danish veteran who wrote about being on multiple fronts at the same time, even tho that was impossible. He was a real veteran thought. His books reads more like wh40k about khorne warband then storm of steel. Highly entertaining and degenerate.

>>19632560
>Sven Hasel
A well documented liar. If someone claims to be military and claims to have done the actual fighting in their generation's war, if they speak or write of combat in that jingoistic, romanticized way which is evocative of adolescence, then 99 times out of 100 even if they did serve in the military they were probably in the rear with the gear. As a rule, nearly without exception, those who glorify combat and war are the ones furthest away from its reality.

There's nothing beautiful or awesome or fun about your buddies getting torn to sheds by bullets and explosives, and there's nothing romantic about death or dying. Are there some people for whom war is just a carnival? Yeah, but those people are rare, and most who think themselves one of them naively discover otherwise once the chest-beating is long past echoed down and you're staring down at your best friend as he picks at the skin flaps where his lower body used to be.

>>19632594
>It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

"My war gone by, I miss it so"

>>19632604
>404 error : military service of Cormac not found

>>19632604
McCarthy is a hack who allegedly served in the Air Force after WWII, in Alaska, for four years. He saw no combat, was an enlisted POG bitch allegedly. The only thing confirming this is a Wikipedia article citing some bullshit article that states it offhand. No other source confirms he served. Even if he did, and the above is true, only retarded pussies who haven’t seen combat glorify war and speak on it authoritatively

>>19633489
McCarthy is not Holden.

What about war lit that's not anti-war but also not pro-war? War-neutral or objective/detached.

>>19633496
KYS, McCarthfag. Your favorite writer is a glorified Stephen King for mouth breathers who were best by fathers far too many times.

>>19633529
Get a grip, schizo.

>>19632702
He actually was in the Air Force I think. But he never did anything in it and it was during peace time.

>>19633529
Use it.

>>19633545
>was actually
>I think

>>19631119
Your best bet is just reading a history book that focuses on a unit

>>19631119
Start with the Greeks.

>I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.
>>19632604
>the archon is right
filtered

>>19633584
Desperate for (You)s today I see. Here, it's Christmas, I'll let you have one

>>19632594
I disagree. I have not been to war, but friends of mine have. Some of them have a passion for it. They see it as a beautiful thing; what men are made to do. This is why there are mercenaries who work for little or no money. They are good for one thing: killing.

>>19633737
There are no mercenaries that work for little to no money. You are a fucking retard. If you call the 5 or so Europeans and Americans who travelled to Syria to fight with YPG mercenaries, you’re retarded. Any former ZOGbot who works for a PMC makes around $500 a day when they are in-country

>>19631119
Read Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Arrian and Julius Caesar.

>>19633784
$500/day seems like a huge salary but given the circumstances which involve risking your life in a irrelevant war, it really isn't. A decent futures trader can earn that much safely from his home and probably experiences a similar amount of adrenaline.
The only reasonable motive to join a PMC is to advance one's country interests in Africa or some other resource rich shithole, for instance like Wagner Group is doing as a Russian proxy.

>>19633737
>I disagree
I have been to war. I don't give the slightest fuck what you agree or disagree with. I've been in the mood once or twice to play up my experiences as well, because it's a hell of a lot more palatable dinner conversation to talk about the superficial shit than it is to talk about what it's like to stuff chunks of PVT Snuffy into a bodybag. To put it bluntly, unless you're either fucking all these "friends" of yours and coaxing the real shit out of them during pillow talk or are yourself prior service, nobody's going to talk to you about what it's actually like. You really just wouldn't understand. It's not your fault, but it's one of those things where your imagination and empathy are insufficient.

>>19632484
The newer one does have typos but is not so terrible to be as unreadable. It’s probably the closest reasonably available to the original translation.

>>19634068
Oh, did you participate in WWII? No? Then you have never been to war.

>>19634108
War is hell, kid. You wouldn't understand...

>>19634116
I read and watched enough WWI content to have an idea. Fighting desert goat herders with decades old AKs can't compare so stop acting like a pussy.

>>19634037
This plus US war college publications and memoirs like Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat are worthwhile but if you are not in your country’s military you are wasting your time. There is nothing more pathetic than anons reading Evola and pretending they’re tantrically connected to the warrior spirit when they can’t make eye contact with a cashier.

>>19634108
>Oh, did you participate in WWII? No? Then you have never been to war.
t. never heard a noise louder than his refrigerator door slamming shut

>>19632594
>>19634068
Based. Thanks for these posts friend.

>>19634108
How retarded do you have to be to even think of saying this
Holy shit I am sharing a literature board with this person?

>>19634108
Lmfao the absolute state

>>19631119
There's a memoir written by a Vietnam War veteran who wrote of missing the thrill of war and how the peaceful civilian life wasn't suitable for a soldier who yearns for more action as well as adrenaline. I can't for the life of me remember the name though.

>>19634193
This is closer to the truth of it, in my experience. The human brain is pretty astoundingly adaptable. It can get used to the cycling between adrenaline surges. It can even get used to the death, the killing. This is, however, not dissimilar to how a clean heroin addict will remember fondly on the drug which—often—completely destroyed his life. War junkies exist too, in a very real way. They romanticize combat to themselves and others before drinking themselves to sleep over all the unprocessed trauma. In the same way we don't take a heroin user at his word on how romantic a lifestyle it is because we don't trust him to balance the good with the bad due to the way his brain has changed to accommodate all that intensity of experience, neither should we take the war junkie as expressing any kinds of cosmic "truths" about combat.

I miss it sometimes too. I know that I'll most likely never experience anything as visceral and immediate as war, and for a long time that hurt really, really badly. With a lot of work, you can eventually integrate it all into yourself and see it all in a certain perspective.

I will maintain to my dying day both the horror of war as well as its occasional necessity. It's a complex subject, and this is just a toe dipped into it, but it's what I can give in this context. People have written books on it since the dawn of writing, after all.

It's always weird to see people who insist nobody anywhere has ever enjoyed war, when we have memoirs that say otherwise. But some fobbit in Iraq didn't like it, so nobody else did either.

Junger has already been mentioned, but should still be considered by anyone looking for works on enjoying war. You should also check out Adrian Carton de Wiart, another WWI vet that insisted he enjoyed the war for the rest of his life. Also take a look at An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare by Joanna Burke, which found that many soldiers actively enjoyed their time in combat.

And to cap it off, here's a piece written by a Vietnam vet about enjoying his war.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a28718/why-men-love-war/

Bernard Cornwell's novels are always set in wars and they're pro wars. Or pro soldiers, at least.

>>19632426
I saw combat twice, patrolling, and I'm pro war. I think modernity has corrupted it, and stripped it of any virtue. I think this explains about the post-wwi phenomenon of ptsd too.

>>19634497
>I think this explains about the post-wwi phenomenon of ptsd too.
I think it's simpler. Domestic life used to be pretty bad: your kids would die young, you would see very injured or sick people, your own life had difficulties to it, etc. Now, it's much more pleasant, at least in material terms. At the same time, war because much more gruesome, much more destructive. The transition from one to the other became traumatic.

>all this arguing and nobody mentions the most obviously accessible answers
The Bhagavad Gita for something with a narrative, and Metaphysics of War by Julius Evola for a meta study of war attitudes in history and culture.

>>19634193
This. There is a purpose to things that is understood by all in war, even the purposeless things take on this meaning. It makes things make sense, even the nonsensical things if that makes any sense. When you get home you immediately notice that sense is gone. I like to imagine this is the metaphysical meaning when people sat ptsd is the realization that you will never be that cool again.

>>19634519
Agree, that's a very good point. I do think there's more to it though, at least in my perspective. Just woke up, will post more in a bit, ironically was thinking about this all last night in bed for some reason

>>19634497
>post-wwi phenomenon of ptsd
There are so many corrections across so many disciplines I'd need to make to address this simple little sentence that I don't know where to begin.

I think the best way to say what I want is that PTSD didn't just "appear." It wasn't some sort of creation by which psychologists delineated the ways in which their patients feel and experience the world. PTSD isn't a "thing" at all in the first place. It's a collection of behaviors representing a pattern which is significant enough to warrant its categorization in abstract. The behaviors themselves had to—at the very least—exist at the time of the conception of PTSD. Because these are human behaviors and human beings haven't really biologically evolved all that much since the dawn of history, it stands to logic that these behaviors have been seen before someone came along, saw a pattern, and decided to call it PTSD so we could figure out what the fuck was going on and what to do about it.

I think the idea that there's been some great "modern change" that "created the phenomenon of PTSD" is pretty ludicrous. It doesn't fit the evidence. Unless you want to show me (Nobel-worthy) evidence of some massive genetic drift delineating an enormous change in the structure of human beings' brains with respect to emotional processing, I'm probably just going to call bullshit, and keep calling bullshit in progressively more and more technical, specific language until you either agree with me or, more likely, stop replying.

>>19634559
It's not a genetic shift that would cause it, it's a cultural one. Emotional/Psychological disorders are defined by deviation from a norm, generally to such an extent that it has a negative effects on multiple domains in a person's life. But the norm is defined by one's culture, not by some genetic baseline. Clearchus of Sparta is sometimes held up as an example of proto-PTSD, but the only evidence given of is is that Xenophon describes him as preferring war to peace, and of sometimes chastising his soldiers too harshly. I find it hard to view that as clear cut evidence of PTSD.

While there's research that suggests that, at least among modern cultures, there is cross-cultural validity to PTSD diagnoses, we do have to remember that the past is a different country, and the cultural differences between say, an American and an Italian, are minuscule compared to any modern person and a Greek 2500 years ago. It's also important to note that, even supposing PTSD was common among the ancients, there is a difference in how it's expressed between people of different cultures. Again, deviation from the norm is based on what a culture considers to be the norm, not on genetics. There's no reason to assume that ancient PTSD would even be expressed in a way which is recognizably PTSD to modern people.

>>19631119
>not anti-war
Chud fag larp detected. Have sex incel and touch grass disgusting neet.

>>19634559
I don't have any data except my own experiences, but I think it's somewhere in between both physical manifestations and what we have decided to categorize as "ptsd". My personal belief is that in pre-gunpowder warfare what we would today call ptsd was less observed, and that comes from wars, culture, and economics being a little more straightforward. I think there were just less opportunities for warfighters back then to ask why about things, stuff just made more sense. Things are ambiguous now because war is big and ambiguous, and anyone who has ever had ask themselves that why question knows it can drive you off the deep end, you don't need to have been in war to understand that, although you can imagine that feeling compounded in a war.

I would say that PTSD today is an actual thing though. If you've ever seen hand washing guys or cleaning guys you know exactly what I mean.

I thought Anatomy of Courage was a super great book on this, WWI era evaluation of the idea, before we threw labels onto it.

>>19634323
Damn Kirby was a badass

Dispatches by Michael Herr

Jarhead by Anthony Swofford.

Bump

>>19634497
These previous decades long goat herder shooting contests were not "wars" lmfao modern military fags are such fucking pussies.

You fought against people who weren't even professional soldiers you whiny fucking faggots.

It wasn't even anywhere near as bad as Vietnam. Fuck you idiots.

How do war lovers cope with the fact that they will inevitably burn in hell for all of eternity?

>>19636403
Simple. They only fight the people God wants them to fight. Holy warriors don't go to hell, anon.

>>19634704
>If you've ever seen hand washing guys or cleaning guys you know exactly what I mean
I've been found out

>>19636446
Murder is still murder, retard.

>>19636465
Exodus 2:11-12
>In the course of time Moses grew up. Then he went to see his own people and watched them suffering under forced labor. He saw a Hebrew, one of his own people, being beaten by an Egyptian. He looked all around, and when he didn’t see anyone, he beat the Egyptian to death and hid the body in the sand.

Try harder christfag

>>19634068
everything you’re saying rings true. i haven’t been to war but my dad was an anti-war vet and he talks about his experiences in much of the same way e.g. not going into specifics of combat. it’s easily the worst thing human beings are capable of. sorry you had to go through it man

>>19634068
Thanks for your "service" faggot. Sleep tight at night knowing you personally contributed to the downfall of America.

>>19638824
You are a far more pathetic excuse for a human than he is, faggot

>>19638857
What's pathetic is worshiping and sucking cock of "patriots" who fought in illegal wars that weakened the USA. You are all fucking traitors.

Book recommendation for OP: The Civil War by Shelby Foote.

>>19638880
Nobody's worshiping anyone, retard. The black and white world you pretend to live in is a fantasy. There is a middle ground you're willfully disregarding.

plenty of officers write memoirs about their wars or keep notes on them. you should read George Washington's notebook from his time as a British officer, the one that kicked off the 7 Years War