/lit/ - Literature

>>20689983
Yeah np, I like spilling my guts here every once in awhile.
Hard to say. Moby Dick is probably my favorite. I like Dostoyevsky a lot. I like Vonnegut a lot too, definitely more than most guys here. Houellebecq is a recent favorite. Plus I love good military books like The Things They Carried, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Forever War, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

>>20689899
Yeah, exactly. The one that I'm really not sure about however was a close ambush within about 25m. Dude came out his front door as we were walking past his compound heading somewhere else. I heard him rack a round into his gun, and me and the dude in front of me did a quick left turn ready up and both dumped a mag into the silhouette in the doorway. The thing is, I think I might have seen 2 silhouettes. What I assume might have been his wife. idk, we never stopped to check, just kept moving.

>>20689882
No we couldn't go off base, but out of my 5 deployments I was a BAF 3 times, which is huge. There is even a shitty pizza hut there. There is also a bazaar where the locals are selling knockoff Benchmades, cheap suits, and rugs, all kinds of shit. Ill go take a pic of a rug I bought in a second and post it.
The cultural difference is hard to explain. I don't know how exactly to articulate it but there is a big difference between living, training, deploying and partying with a group of young 20's killers 24/7 all year long, to sitting in calculus study groups with nervous softbody zoomers who have no clue the US was even in Afghanistan.
Yeah I have huge respect for a lot of the guys in my platoon. Some of them earned silver stars, really earned them. Some went on to CAG, tons of great guys who I'm still in touch with and would have my back even if we didn't talk for a few years.

>>20689802
We didn't really deal with civilians much. We did everything in the middle of the night and flew right to the target compounds mostly, so the only civilians were the women and children in the compounds and they never really fucked around. All of the guys working in the chow halls were locals, that was kind of weird, but the can make a mean omelet.

>>20689762
Yeah the drones can do this thing called 'sparkiling'. Basically it is a powerful IR laser they shoot from their sensors that puts a massive beam of light right on top of the enemy position and we can walk right to them. So imagine your some Taliban hiding under a tree thinking you are hidden, and you have no idea there is a huge pulsing pillar of light from heaven only visible to the people coming to kill you.

>>20689743
It is always very awkward when people ask me If I have killed anyone. It happened multiple times in college. Once this Asian chick in my group straight up asked me while we where running some compression tests on a part we were making. Like 9 o'clock in the morning, out of nowhere. But mostly I keep my vet status incognito.

>>20689678
Everybody has an LA5 and a flashlight, you can chose between ELCAN or an eotech. I was using a scar because we had a few in the arms room and I wanted to look cool. That is one of the most important rules. I picked up the double mag clip at a gun show and also just had it to look cool. I could justify it at least by doing faster mag changes with it so my squad leader didn't care.

>>20689666
I have posted some war stories before but don't feel like digging them up in the archive rn, maybe later. Acclimating back to civilian life wasn't so bad. There was a point when I was taking trigonometry in a community college class like right after I got out. I was literally sitting next to a 16 year old girl talking about triangles and homework, that was weird.
And don't misunderstand, I never felt like I was in danger. A typical mission was us rolling into some shithole compound near the Pakistan border in the middle of the night in Chinooks to pick up some retard with a hot sim card. For the vast majority of missions no shots where fired. We would just post up on the compound walls and have the interpreter wake everybody up with a megaphone and arrest them. Search the compound, take some pictures, get DNA samples for the database, and maybe take one or two guys back to BAF and hand them off to guys in white vans. Then I would go lift weights, watch pirated movies, and play fifa until the next mission. 70 dudes with the best gear, air support out the ass, every advantage you can possibly imagine. Nobody in my platoon died over 5 deployments. One guy did get paralyzed.

>>20689642
Yes I loved it. Technically I have diagnosed PTSD and now Uncle Sam pays me about $1700 bucks a month - for the rest of my life. I mostly just considered it my Haliburton pension plan. I always thought of myself as more of a mercenary than a patriot. Plus I got a free stem degree (including rent payments during classes). Yeah, I had a great time. I only got out because the deployments slowed down around 2017.

>>20689617
My diary desu. I killed 3 to 5 people in Afghanistan. Good times.

>>20582358
Pizza hut in BAF
Tripping on Ambien on a c17 to Rammstein (every deployment)
Getting used as a test dummy for Nasopharyngeal Airway Tubes
Chemlight rave party in BAF with the boys
Codenames for every fuckable woman in Bagram
Dick exposure during obstacle course race (I won, pic related)

>>20582328
more:
Piss bottle fiasco
Shit ponds
towed jumpers
dog chewing on dead guys
stepping on rotting body
smoking private on a 5mile run (rip, he was /lit/ too)
poison ivy during ranger school
Dog city with the regular army
being threated to be skullfucked to death Somalia vet 1st sergeant on first day of RASP

>>20582274
note to self:
drop guns and training the Kteh Khas (afghan commandos)
Accidently smuggling a flashbang back from Israeli
Getting roofied in Munich
Guy breaking leg during fast rope
Recycling ranger school (twice)
Envy at peer getting a kill before me
Carrying and firing the goose
People heat cat'ing on missions
drinking tea with the afghans
parachute failure during training (webm related, i know its small af)

>>20582129
Let me get a few more beers in me an I'll try to write a new part of my 4chanistan memoirs. I have a few floating around the archives already.

>>20581243
Man, I wish we had kino, era-defining music when I was in Afghanistan. On one mission I was rolling thru Kabul in an MRAP (more like MBRAPP ha) and my team leader was blasting Boss Ass Bitch by Ptaf over the speakers, link related.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6ihCQZK-r0
Imagine your rinky vegetable stand gets sideswiped by a tank blaring that shit.

>>20573369
I was, dropped it around when slothrup got a new identity and met the niggerkommando on top of a train. Not a fan at all.

Rambo III was produced by the CIA.

>>20568560
Blood Meridian in Afghanistan.

>>20568032
Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, easily.

I learned how to drive stick on my first deployment when I had to take a shitbox bus to pick up the guys from the airfield when they returned from a mission. Me, a cherry ass little bitch, picking up a bus full of killers in full kit who regularly smoked the fuck out of me, and the only stick I'd ever touched was the one stuck between my legs. Needless to say they ridiculed me as the bus stalled and lurched its way back to the hooches. It was pretty funny. Later a Russian immigrant corporal took me out in a Hilux and gave me a more thorough driving lesson. He had an economics degree and would berate me for reading fiction because he didn't see and practical reason for doing so. He insisted I was wasting my time and should be reading textbooks instead of Dumas.

>>20562355
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/why-the-disabled-do-talibans-deadly-work/article18138707/#:~:text=Sayed%20Azimi%20of%20the%20World,higher%2C%20at%2085%20per%20cent.

To be fair, there is at least a 50% chance the members of the Afghan Health Ministry are retarded.

>>20562355
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/why-the-disabled-do-talibans-deadly-work/article18138707/#:~:text=Sayed%20Azimi%20of%20the%20World,higher%2C%20at%2085%20per%20cent.

https://theowp.org/reports/humanitarian-crisis-and-neglect-in-afghanistan-puts-people-with-disabilities-at-risk/

https://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/model-disability-survey-afghanistan-2019

I'm not a liar bro, but I did pick the highest number for effect.

>>20562133
Ever been to Kabul? You'd fit in.

There are a shocking number of retards in Afghanistan, literal retards. So many in fact that we had a code name for them during missions - Renegades. During a multi-click infil through the sparsely populated countryside it wasn't unusual for some renegade to be heard howling from the inside of a compound as we strolled by. I just looked up the numbers and the Afghan Health Ministry estimates that 85% of the population suffers from some form of mental disability. We had a lot of code names to categorize the people. Squinters, MAMS, Feathers, Chargers, Crows, Falcons. I swear the Renegades would hear us coming and start barking before the dogs would, they must be light sleepers.