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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DerHauptman" data-source="post: 3078842" data-attributes="member: 39988">Combat...real combat in modern war...It is without a doubt the single event in a man's life that will change him forever.  It brings out the best and worst in men.  Some respond as heroes others as complete cowards but most respond with something between duty and self preservation.  It is a long, seemingly endless period of extreme boredom punctuated with frequent but brief assaults upon ones senses and emotions.     Emotionally, one feels everything in a most vivid and clear way.  One seems to feel all at once; fear and comfort, clarity and confusion, joy and sadness, loss and gain, and the most vivid of all is love and hate.  One can hate and want to utterly destroy another person, erase him from life in the most violent and effective way possible then ironically, at the same time one can find true and unconditional love for one's comrades in arms, the overwhelming desire to fight together and to never let each other down is almost palpable.  There is no greater love than that between two men in on the battlefield they will die before they let each other down.    I have experienced all of the above first hand on numerous occasions - from 1984 to present I have been in every conflict the nation has had.  Actually, I have been in some that we never did have.  Working in special operations for 15 out of my 22 years I have lost friends both in spirit, when a young family dies because of the time one spends away from home, and in body when a friend dies in one's arms. However, none of the first hand remembrances I related above come close to those that below.  Some have the misguided impression that military leaders love and enjoy war and instigate it to justify their own jobs, i beg you to consider this....As a senior leader, (field grade officer) for me the worst of all feelings is that of helplessness.  US Army Special Forces is the best fighting force on the planet, who's members have the best equipment and the absolute best training available.  Combine that with the the best intelligence and plans that me and my expert staff can come up with, then send these wonderful men out to combat the enemy, then realize that regardless, some of them will never return.   That is my new worst, worse than any first hand combat experience I've ever had.  I recently commanded a task force in Afghanistan with a unique mission.  I was the commander of 5 teams, I was told I could neither accompany nor deploy forward of a certain point.  It was my first experience with senior command, I was no longer a shooter, a hard pill to swallow for me.   Now, for me war is to sit and stare at the map and listen to my men in contact, calling for one another, hearing the professional fear (a controlled fear not the crippling kind) or in their voices and in one instance the to hear a man's obvious pain.  The more one listens to the radio, the the more one wants to be there with them, then as suddenly as it all began it ends, the radio is silent for a moment....Then my Captain calls in the SITREP...a simple number on the radio 2 friendly KIA.   Something I will never ever forget....worse, way worse, than getting shot at myself.DH -</blockquote>

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