Books: Combat Trauma and the Commando Life

I keep pestering my commando buddy about what the commando life is like. He declines to comment and instead suggests various books to read. Here are a few I've found really interesting:

Achilles in Vietnam reveals the astounding differences between society's attitudes towards warfighters and between warring nations in the days of Homer and in modern combat. In Homer's time, warriors respected each other and nations understood that returning warriors required and deserved support, sympathy, and respect. In our time, dehumanization of the enemy leads society to recoil from the warfighters, greatly exacerbating the warfighter's trauma, which can in turn inflict terrible violence on the domestic population.

On Killing informs us that lethality of warfighters has greatly expanded in modern combat, even since WWII. During WWII, soldiers tended to aim high and deliberately miss their targets, but by Vietnam, soldiers hit their targets with far greater frequency. The book discusses how this change has come about and what price it exacts on the survivors. There are many hard-to-read first-hand accounts of combat trauma here, and simply reading about them is disturbing. Anyone who dreams of war as glamorous needs to read this book to understand how gruesome war really is. An interesting psychological observation here is that in an abnormal environment, abnormal behavior is to be expected. The combat zone is inherently abnormal, and the appropriate response to it is often to act abnormally. Survivors of these situations may suffer terribly while they come to grips with their actions.

UDT /SEAL Operations in Vietnam blows away the Hollywood mythology of special operations commandos by examining SEAL/UDT operations throughout the Vietnam war. Small teams of highly trained soldiers, supplied with the right gear, good and timely intelligence, and the support of the traditional war machine proved extraordinarily successful against Communist forces. Note: it's out of print, but I got a copy used from Amazon and it was in great condition.

Spec Ops is a fascinating analysis of a number of the more spectacular declassified special operations over the last 50 years from a handful of different countries. It compares each of the operations along a few different dimensions to highlight the common elements to successful special operations missions (rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, for starters).

Blackhawk Down stands in contrast to these books by detailing how a seemingly straightforward kidnapping mission turned into a disaster over the course of about 24 hours in Somalia. The book includes many personal vignettes of the soldiers. Another good related book (also by Bowden) is Killing Pablo, which details the murkier (and I suspect more frequent) relationships between our special operations forces and "friendly" foreign governments.