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No Greater Love
No Greater Love is a documentary by a 101st Airborne chaplain interviewing his fellow soldiers about their time in Afghanistan. It is currently included with Amazon Prime for streaming. It’s the best insight into modern soldier experience as I’ve seen.
No dramatizations. Just the soldiers’ own accounts punctuated by pictures and the chaplain’s video camera footage. From combat and strategy to difficult recoveries and processing memories, it is brutal (though no violence or injury is shown) but worthwhile.
Being fired on by invisible insurgents from all directions… until it feels “normal” and can be temporarily ignored. Falling 300 feet down a mountain and returning, months later, to fight again. Rules of engagement preventing one from shooting a suspicious 14-year-old girl before she explodes just yards away. Being engulfed in fire by a misplaced incendiary bomb; then having to painfully scrub the skin every day back at the hospital. Medically treating enemies. Horror, miracles, heroism, fraternity.
The documentary ends with discussion of PTSD and soldier suicides. One soldier proposed that a reason for the frequency is that modern American gear and medical treatments have advanced so much our soldiers survive many horrific events that would have killed them decades ago. The film has plenty of anecdotes to verify that claim. Injured soldiers can also be evacuated by helicopter before a battle has even subsided.
We are blessed to live in a country where relatively few people are needed on battlefields. Veterans are not often comfortable confiding in non-combatants. No Greater Love is a good source of insight for civilians.
Published in Military
Sounds interesting.
No doubt about it. This sort of thing was noticed in WWI after the introduction of helmets. The number of head injuries went up. When they looked into why, the answer was that without the helmets, the soldiers would have died, rather than merely being injured.