War

In the early 1990s, an English anthropologist named Robin Dunbar theorized that the maximum size for any group of primates was determined by brain size — specifically, the size of the neocortex. The larger the neocortex, he reasoned, the more individuals with whom you could maintain personal relationships.

What interested sociologists at the Research Branch, however, were non-combat losses — men who went mad from trauma and fear. For every four men felled by bullets there was, on average, one removed from the battlefield for psychological reasons.

As a result, much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. It sounds dishonorable only if you imagine that modern war is about honor; it’s not. It’s about winning, which means killing the enemy on the most unequal terms possible. Anything less simply results in the loss of more of your own men.

Combat units typically suffer one psychiatric casualty for every physical one, and during Israel’s Yom Kippur War of 1973, frontline casualty rates were roughly consistent with that ratio. But Israeli logistics units, which were subject to far less danger, suffered three psychiatric cases for every physical one.

One of the most puzzling things about fear is that it is only loosely related to the level of danger.

As far as I could tell everyone up there got scared from time to time, there was no stigma to it as long as you didn’t allow it to affect the others, and journalists were no exception.

Only once did I know beforehand that we were going to get hit, otherwise I was: about to take a sip of coffee, talking to someone, walking about a hundred meters outside the wire, and taking a nap. The men just never knew, which meant that anything they did was potentially the last thing they’d ever do. That gave rise to strange forms of magical thinking.

The Korengal Valley is sort of the Afghanistan of Afghanistan: too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, too autonomous to buy off. The Soviets never made it past the mouth of the valley and the Taliban didn’t dare go in there at all.

Almost no one acted on their own to avoid a fate that was coming to the whole group. When I asked Hijar what it would mean to get overrun, he said, “By a brave man’s definition it would mean to fight until you died.”

According to their questionnaires, the primary motivation in combat (other than “ending the task” — which meant they all could go home) was “solidarity with the group.” That far outweighed self-preservation or idealism as a motivator.

One of the beguiling things about combat and other deep games is that they’re so complex, there’s no way to predict the outcome. That means that any ragtag militia, no matter how small and poorly equipped, might conceivably defeat a superior force if it fights well enough. Combat starts out as a fairly organized math problem involving trajectories and angles but quickly decays into a kind of violent farce, and the randomness of that farce can produce strange outcomes.

“The Koran offers us two choices, revenge and forgiveness,” he said. “But the Koran says that forgiveness is better, so we will forgive. We understand that it was a mistake, so we will forgive.”

The Taliban burned down a school in the Korengal, for example, and by accident also burned a box full of Korans. The villagers were outraged, and the Taliban lost a minor battle in the human terrain of the valley.

Human terrain is essentially the social aspect of war, in all its messy and contradictory forms. The ability to navigate human terrain gives you better intelligence, better bomb-targeting data, and access to what is essentially a public relations campaign for the allegiance of the populace.

Journalistic convention holds that you can’t write objectively about people you’re close to, but you can’t write objectively about people who are shooting at you either.

To function effectively, the soldier must allow his vital signs to get fully ramped up without ruining his concentration and control.

Pure objectivity — difficult enough while covering a city council meeting — isn’t remotely possible in a war; bonding with the men around you is the least of your problems. Objectivity and honesty are not the same thing, though, and it is entirely possible to write with honesty about the very personal and distorting experiences of war.