[Webstral]

I liked it.

I didn't worry about whether it was perfectly believable because it's fiction. It's not meant to be a documentary. One takes it on faith that fighting men do stupid things, along with smart things, brave things, and cowardly things. Foolishness in combat is common, from the private solider through every level of leadership. Events like the raid on German 88s in Normandy during "Band of Brothers" are remarkable specifically because technically proficient application of principles in combat are much more rare than anybody thinks they ought to be.

When it comes to behaviors in combat, realism is a hard thing to gauge because people who have been fighting for more than 100 days behave very differently than people who have been fighting less than 100 days, who behave completely differently than people who have not been fighting at all. My unit was relieved by a brigade from the 101st Airborne. They came out to the checkpoint acting like every window had a sniper. We laughed about that. They looked so green, even though some of them had been in Iraq during OIF1 or 2. In some ways, their behaviors were better than ours. Any window could have been hiding a sniper. After a while, we got acclimatized to the idea that we weren't going to get shot from the windows, and that the handful of guys we had in overwatch had the situation sufficiently under control that guys on the ground could worry about threats coming from the ground. Looking back, I think this attitude could have been exploited. We got lucky, I guess. Still, it does make me laugh that the Regular Army heroes just arriving flinched every time they heard automatic fire from a kilometer distant when in Baghdad that might as well as well be on the Moon. People in combat are different.

We lost a guy to a car bomb in an incident that should have been preventable. Again at the checkpoint, a civilian car was parked just outside the checkpoint watching cars go in and out. This is a no-no. It should have been challenged. It was not. Finally, the guy tried to get into the military lane and get through the checkpoint. One of our guys stopped him and asked for ID because no civilians go in through the military lane. Long story short, car bomb. Several civilians, several Iraqi troops, and one of our guys. Had we been on our game, we would have sent someone forward to challenge the driver while he was sitting and observing. During the the third year of the war, it's hard to imagine how we just let him sit there watching the checkpoint. Were I writing fiction, I'd be shouted down for portraying unrealistic behavior. Yet it happened.

I did not allow anyone to just hang out in view of the checkpoint when I was in the tower thereafter. A single tracer into the ground or the pavement near the offending party is the universal language for "F*** off!" Nobody failed to get that message on my watch.

The point is that unrealistic things happen all the time in combat. People make bad decisions all the time for a variety of reasons, and those decisions get people killed in all different numbers and manners. The kind of combat I saw on a small scale was maddeningly hard to manage. Amp that up to WW2 scale, and the inexplicable becomes routine. The characters of "Fury" were veterans. While they probably got some rest after North Africa, we know for a fact that they fought at Falaise 9-10 months beforehand and quite possibly in the Bulge. They were on the verge of coming unglued. They were coming unglued. It's difficult for us with full bellies and a relative lack of life-or-death moments in our lives recently to say which behaviors executed by men who have been in high tempo combat for the better part of a year are realistic. If we walk away with the idea that we must not embrace any more of this activity lightly, then we may have gleaned what needs to be gleaned from this story. At this moment in history, we can stand to have a reminder that war is 1 part glory, 4 parts mud, and 7 parts unhuman brutality. Maybe "Fury" is just what the chicken hawks clamoring for a renewed American effort in the Middle East need to see.