(Part 4) Top products from r/CombatFootage

One major point that people should know about Pakistan is that they are culturally, religiously, historically and linguistically tied to India and to an extent, Bangladesh and Afghanistan (the latter tie being stronger than the former).

India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh were once a single entity under the British Raj. Most Indian nationalists at that time, and some (though a smaller component) of Greater India nationalists see these three countries as one entity.

There are many reasons as to why India and Pakistan split, some of them are very legitimate concerns, whereas there are some issues that were very clearly motivated by personal interests of several leaders.

There is more to the split between India and Pakistan aside from the Republican split from the British Raj, there are other factors playing into the division of India into India and Pakistan, such as those that pertain to the treatment of the many Princely States.

Here are some solid recommendations as far as reading is concerned on this particular part of the world:

Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah and the Battle for Pakistan by Qutubuddin Aziz & Katherine Wang

Makers of Modern India by Ramachandra Guha

A Concise History of Modern India
by Barbara D. Metcalf & Thomas R. Metcalf

The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan
by Yasmin Khan

Shooting for a Century: The India-Pakistan Conundrum by Stephen Cohen

JAWBREAKER was good as well.
I enjoined how this CIA guy on Sept 12 or 13 goes into an REI in Virginia with his CIA credit card and buys all his gear.... pretty wild.

https://www.amazon.com/Crusades-Authoritative-History-Holy-Land/dp/0060787295

There's so much information to convey so this book is very broad strokes. But it does a great job of covering both the Christian and Muslim worlds equally. I love it.

https://www.amazon.com/FREEFALL-Tom-Read/dp/0316643033

He was Rafik Hariris body guard for a few years. Tried to break Felix Baumgartners free fall skydive record. Had some sort of psychotic break and was institutionalised. Really really fascinating read. Very different the "then I slotted three tangos and drank beer" SAS stories you usually get.

Gotta be Patrick Bishops's 3 PARA (amazon UK, amazon US) or The Junior Officers' Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey (amazon UK, amazon US)

3 PARA is a British journalist's account of the 2006 tour of Afghan, focussing on the operations of the 3 PARA battle group, while The JORC is a semi-biographical account of the early career of Patrick Hennessey, detailing his time in training at Sandhurst and Brecon, going on to multiple tours as a Pl Comd with the Gren Guards.

Both well worth a read.

And it wasn't the first time. If you're interested, The Fall of the House Assad and The Struggle for Power in Syria: Politics and Society under Asad and the Ba'th Party were both informative. The second one gives the back story of the rise of the Ba'ath party and the inter-sectarian struggles for power. The first is about the early years of the up rising.

The best book that I've read thus far on the war in Afghanistan is The Outpost by Take Tapper which tells the story of COP Keating. I highly recommend it for anybody who has an interest in learning more about the war in Afghanistan.

One of the best that I've read about combat in Afghanistan is by Jake Tapper, called The Outpost.

The story is about COP Keating in the Nuristan region of Afghanistan, also known as the battle of Kamdesh.

It's a long read though very descriptive about the 173rd Airborne Brigades fight for the base.

I think that someone is going to produce a movie about the battle, if it turns out to be half as good as the book then it will be one of the better movies about Afghanistan.

Here's a story on NPR from Jake Tapper called The outpost that should have never been.

I very highly recommend the book The Liberator by Alex Kershaw about Felix Sparks and his incredible story of fighting through Italy and Anzio. I feel that what happened in Italy is somewhat underrepresented compared to other campaigns of the war; I personally didn't know too much about it until reading this book. The shit that Sparks went through is nothing short of mind boggling.

Sure, I'll help you with the insanely difficult task of googling.

Tim O'Brien "If I die in a combat zone" is the best one I've read recently.

Supposedly Bin Laden was providing arms and training to a lot of the warlords at the time, Aidid included. I have a vague recollection of reading about it in "Jawbreaker" by Gary Berntsen. He was lead on the first CIA team in Afghanistan following 9/11. I think he worked in Africa during his career as well. I may have read it from a different source, this is all just snatches of memory.

Edit: the book I'm thinking of was "First In: An Insiders Account of How The CIA Spearheaded the War On Terror in Afghanistan" by Gary Schroen. Schroen was the leader on the ground. Also he worked in Pakistan, not Africa. It's been a few years and a lot of books since this one. My bad. Good book, recommend it for a read on a flight or train ride or such.

Here's a link to the book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/First-In-Insiders-Spearheaded-Afghanistan/dp/0345496612/ref=pd_sim_b_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=058X5E7FYGJHGVYGW6BY

We were Soldiers once... and Young it's about the first major battle of the vietnam war. probably the most intense media of any form that i've ever consumed.

Definitely Generation Kill, to look into the dynamics of modern war. It's a seriously good, impartial, truthful and entertaining account of the first stages of the second Iraq war seen from the eyes of a battalion of first recon marines. Very well written, too.

War Nerd. Gary Brecher is a tongue-in-cheek military amateur analyst. His views on modern and past warfare are very lucid, albeit controversial and leftfield. His writing style is pretty original, kinda like the Hunter Thompson of war pundits. A backlog of his articles is also available online.

Making A Killing. It's the first person account of a British private security contractor in Iraq. I was expecting the worst when I read it, but it's actually very well written, informative and entertaining. Some of the lingo and drills described in the book actually helped me understand a lot of these videos.

Das Boot is my favourite war book, and it's an embedded reporter's account of a year in a german U-boat during the second world war.

Most books pertaining to the American war in Vietnam trace its origin in the French conflict, though. If that leaves one longing for more, Street without Joy and Hell in a Very Small Place were recently reprinted, and Fredrik Logevall's Embers of War fills any holes left by Bernard Fall, really.

Samashki demilitarized itself (fulltime fighters left after some 4 months of resisting and harassing Russian convoys and not letting trains go through), then got massacred when they were practically defenseless (only a selfdefense group like in many other every villages). Hundreds of people got killed in 2 days.

Reportage style full story is in https://www.amazon.com/Chechnya-Diary-Correspondents-Story-Surviving/dp/0312268742 by the eyewitness reporter who's been there all the time. His Georgia Diary and Azerbaijan Diary are also superb.

>Clive Gordon duped everyfucking one with a Peace & Love & Ishkeria kind of BS (stuff that was par for the course at the time, with the USSR just out of the window and Yugoslav Civil war ongoing).

​His Yugo docu is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45YrhuGb5jQ (hanging out with Serbs at Zvornik and around the besieged Srebrenica in 1993, especially a Serbian mother whose son was kidnapped and very cruelly killed). That same case continuing over 2 decades later in 2017: https://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/bosnian-ex-soldiers-charged-over-serb-boy-s-murder-06-08-2017/1458/218

Pointing out a historical fact is not being a Nazi apologist. The majority of German soldiers were apolitical.

​

Sorce- Soldiers: German POWs on Fighting, Killing, and Dying

bySonke Neitzel

Yes. That is: I recall there were two - fundamentally different - schools of thought within the RN/FAA's SHAR-units as of 1982.

• Skipper of HMS Invincible-based NAS.801, Nigel 'Sharkey' Ward, was convinced the SHAR is fully developed and an excellent platform, and taught his pilots to make use of its nav/attack system - including the Blue Fox radar. They acted correspondingly. They also flew CAPs at low altitude, where the Argentinean fighter-bombers operated. Correspondingly, they repeatedly caught and destroyed entire formations of incoming Argentinean fighter-bombers before these could cause any harm.
  
  
• Most of other RN/FAA officers haven't held the SHAR FRS.1 in high esteem. Indeed, it seems there was deep mistrust for its nav/attack systems within the HMS Hermes-based NAS.800 (to which Dave Morgan was assigned, too). Between others, SHARs from that squadron flew their CAPs at medium altitude - which is one of reasons why they missed the first formation of the Skyhawks that 'caused' the 'Catastrophe of Bluff Cove', and why Morgan then missed the second one too (arguably, he and his wingman then at least killed three from that second formation, 'but only after' these could've caused even more damage to British naval and ground units).
  
  For related discussions, see Ward's Sea Harrier over the Falklands.
  
  Curiously, Morgan didn't even try to discuss this issue in his Hostile Skies.

There’s an interesting book written by British a Apache pilot who fought in Afghanistan . He said he found it traumatic how easy it was to kill people. Drone pilots say they suffer from similar problems.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apache-Ed-Macy/dp/0007288174/ref=nodl_

I'm going to recommend this book:

On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society from Dave Grossman

The book is based on SLA Marshall's studies from World War II, which proposed that contrary to popular perception, the majority of soldiers in war do not ever fire their weapons and that this is due to an innate resistance to killing. Based on Marshall's studies the military instituted training measures to break down this resistance and successfully raised soldier's firing rates to over ninety percent during the war in Vietnam.

Grossman points out that there are great psychological costs that weigh heavily on the combat soldier or police officer who kills if they are not mentally prepared for what may happen; if their actions (killing) are not supported by their commanders and/or peers; and if they are unable to justify their actions (or if no one else justifies the actions for them).