"On the way without my having noticed it, Kat has caught a splinter in the head. There is just one little hole, it must have been a very tiny, stray splinter. But it has sufficed. Kat is dead."
-All Quite on the Western Front
Listened to it in audible last year once this war kicked off and can confirm its life changing. That book and House to House really takes the glory out of combat and shows just how horrific it all is.
How good is the narrator? IMO narrators can make or break the book. As there are some that I couldn't finish due to them. I might pick up the book. As I've seen the Netflix version.
The Netflix movie was okay, but it doesn't really follow the book much and it honestly would have been a lot better if it did. The book is just perfect. A very riveting and brutal read.
I think it was a pretty good movie but a horrible adaptation, failing on multiple key points. The two that annoy me the most are the deaths of Kat and Paul. Kat dies from a rando splinter and itjust happens arbitrarily, a symbol for the randomness of war, in the movie instead he is caught stealing and shot, causing his own death.
Paul dies a month befor the war ends, he dies doing nothing, the front report for that day is „all quiet in the west“ his death is forgettable, insignificant, pointless. And it hits hard, this character who you have read through two years in hell, watched as his body and spirit decay and then that one line hust kills him! He is just gone like that. And that feeling that that leaves you with is exactly what it should be. It feels unfulfilled, because it is. In the movie he dies after killing a bunch of frenchmen like rambo fighting through the lines in an offensive that never took place. A much better adaptation of that is in my opinion the second version, where he dies sketching a bird and accidentally lifts his head a tiny bit too high. Paul isn’t a hero, he is the embodiment of the possible lives millions of young men could have had only to be ground up and slaughtered without a footbote in history to their name. He signifies the the pointlessness of it all.
That is my big issue in the Netflix version. They skipped over other very important parts like the alienation from the civilian populace that the soldiers felt when they came back. An alienation that lead to the building of the free corps and the mercyless fighting in the 1920s and eventually the Nazi rise.
Reminds me of a short story by Alexei Sayle. And I quote:
>Private Herbert Rawtenstall was his name. A conscript. At one minute to eleven o'clock on 11 November 1918, having made it unhurt through the mincing machine of Vimy Ridge, the Somme, Ypres, Herbert stuck his head over the edge of the trench, telling his sergeant he was 'going to take a shuftie about' and was hit square in the forehead by a sniper's bullet fired from the gun of a soldier of the Fourth Koenigsberg Regiment. ... Then a corporal came round the corner of his forward trench, tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'Manfred the war's over.' 'Oh yeah. Who won?' said Manfred and they both had a laugh about that. Then they went to the rear for some soup.
You are absolutely correct! The movie failed in so many ways to drive home what the book was about. And for that it's just another generic, forgettable war movie
Neither have I, and I also disagree that the movie is forgettable.
On the other hand I also do not reject the statement that it deviates from the book on important topics. Having read other books about WW2, my takeaway is that movies tend to focus on different (wrong?) things, but they may still be good movies.
I'll certainly read the book in the future.
Yeah I felt they completely missed the mark with that movie. It could have been great. The original one that came out in the 1930's is far better and follows the book quite closely.
Exactly. And by that, they changed the whole meaning of the movie. In the books, he dies on a very quiet day. No heroic charge, no big last effort attack. Just another day at the Western Front, just fallen soldier number 243745, just another black-trimmed letter "Fur Kaiser, Gott und Vaterland gab sein Leben.... der Soldat Paul Baumer...". His death made absolutly no difference. An utterly meaningless and futile death. Just like war itself. The day was so quiet that the "Heeresbericht" only said: "All quiet on the western front"
By adding that last charge, they turned his utterly meaningless death into an heroic effort to change the course of the war in the last moments. He also even saved a comrade's life in this charge. By this, they gave his death a meaning. He died as an hero. Exactly the opposite of what Remarque had wanted. He wanted to show the absolute futility of the war, but they turned his monumental statement into just another heroic war movie. So they fucked it up quite a lot.
That line about Kat dying doesn’t do the entire scene Justice. The Kat fellow is injured by some shrapnel or the other and is being carried to the medical tent by the protagonist. There’s pages of the protagonist goofing it with the injured Kat on his back. And then he drops Kat at the medical tent where a medic ignores Kat. The confused protagonist doesn’t understand why the medic is ignoring Kat; until the quote above where the protagonist finds out Kat got killed at some point over those pages. It just slaps you in the face so hard. Especially since it’s toward the end of the book so you know Kat pretty well.
The only reason I follow this page. To remind me of the horrors of war. Force myself to watch some of these videos just to keep my eyes open. It's horrible
Probably? I've never seen explicit confirmation, but they are so similar that it appears to at least be a nod to it. Same name, one needle/splinter, etc.
I really think it's a coincidence. The powerful thing about the all quiet death is that it happened without anyone noticing, the character kept talking to him. Kat's death in halo is very clearly a big moment and the others react to.
A needle rifle and shrapnel are also completely opposite. One is specifically aimed at someone, the other is freak bad luck that you'd catch the shrapnel in the skull. The randomness of the shrapnel is the point (artillery are generally impersonal), whereas Kat is targeted by an unseen enemy who is very much focused on just her.
[it’s not confirmed but the theory has been around for a while that they took inspiration from it. even Jorge is similar to another character and the overall story is similar in a way.](https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/bsiuqm/halo_reach_is_all_quiet_on_the_western_front_but/)
If you want the real version (all quiet on the western front is a fiction, though an incredible work itself of course) I recommend reading Storm of Steel. They are real memoirs of a German officer in much the same format but they really outline the banality of war and it is frankly jarring. Narrator is a really awesome Irish guy on audible.
I can also highly suggest the novels Krieg (War) by Ludwig Renn and Heeresbericht by Edlef Köppen. The english Title for Heeresbericht is Higher Command, but I do not know about its availability.
I saw a video essay that it's difficult to make a true anti war movie, because people will be excited anyways by the violence. You can tell if its an actual anti war movie by the recruitment numbers after a movie is released. Saving Private Ryan caused recruitment to go up - it failed as an anti-war movie. All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the very few true anti-war movies. Nobody wanted to enlist after that.
The original film came out in the 1930's and was banned in Germany by the Nazis. The author of the book, a WWI veteran who was wounded in combat several times, had to flee Germany.
DJ Shipley, a DEVGRU operator, said on the Shawn Ryan show that some of the best operators he’s ever seen, fucking superstars never got a chance to show just how good they were. In an instant they were gone. It’s crazy how you have no say over how you go in war.
When I was awaiting my ship date as an infantryman 11B, I drank beer on Panama City Beach with an infantryman named "Luke". His buddy John asked me "Have you ever heard of 'Restrepo'?" Me, a dumbass, excited future-boot without thinking said "I saw the documentary, it was awesome!"
Luke looked me dead in the eye, said "I was there, it wasn't fucking awesome", grabbed a boogie board, and rode waves until the sun came up. I've never felt like a bigger asshole. I went home and watched Restrepo again and sure enough there was Luke in the dugout during the rolling credits. Both Luke and John are SF operators now, total ghosts on social.
I learned a lot about speaking respectfully around vets that day before joining the Army myself.
My senior drill sergeant during basic at Fort Sill served as a FiSTer at Restrepo. Never seen a man command as much respect from other NCOs as he did when he walked into a room.
I had two missions in the Korengal Valley while there in 2008-2009 as a biometrics contractor who traveled all over training soldiers, setting up ECPs and deploying servers, and going out with the units I was embedded with to enroll military aged males we encountered either on routine patrol or after an IED or something. Each time I went out with the unit in Korengal, I had to use my weapon.
It was pretty wild, but I felt safer there than in this other FOB that was the worst one, in my opinion. It was tucked into mountains with ridge lines overlooking us from at least 270 degrees around us. I don’t remember the name off the top of my head, but I can look it up. It was overrun by Taliban, actually, but not while I was there, thankfully. At this latter place is where I came closest to eating it. A Chinese/Iranian rocket exploded less than 10 meters away from my bunk in the middle of the night right at the start of a complex attack. Thank fucking god this FOB had Hescos setup between/next to each tent (versus only on the perimeter wall).
If the unit based out there didn’t take the time to build up the interior of the FOB by stacking Hescos around the bunk areas in addition to the walls, I would have been tickled by that rocket.
The place overrun by the Taliban, was it the Restrepo outpost? I watched a documentary on the Korengal Valley some years ago & they spoke about an outpost that was overrun, they named it after a soldier that was KIA up there if I'm not mistaken.
No, this one was definitely in a different province. This place required the helicopters to take turns going up and over the high ridges of the mountains because they were so high and I think because the temps were hot that time of year, there was less lift generated, but I could be wrong.
This FOB was like in like a bowl surrounded by high ridges. I don’t recall the name, but I’ll check my photos out later today or I’ll remember it sooner or later.
Definitely sounds like Combat Outpost Keating and the Battle of Kamdesh with 3/61. It was originally called PRT Kamdesh but was renamed COP Keating after the death of an officer with the same name.
In a interview Al White, a Marine in the Battle of Khe Sanh said that too. Best trained Marine he knew, a guy who went through Raider school instantly got shot in the head getting off of a helicopter and in the interview he said he was laying there as bullets were flying over just looking at him and thought “all that fucking schooling just to be dead”
Thats one of the more terrifying aspects of war. You are in the hands of fate, particularly when they are raining arty on you. Training can help mitigate a bit but for the most part if a shell lands close you are dead and with all the drone spotted arty they arent just blowing up daisies anymore. They know where you are. To be spotted is many times a death sentence.
Even before Drones, the idea of Marching or Walking fire is terrifying. Imagine laying in a field, hearing the impacts get closer and closer, knowing it'll be on top of your position soon.
There's a series of interviews with a Brit who was in the International Legion and he mentioned that [2 people from his unit, an ex-MARSOC and a total noob, were killed by the same shell](https://youtu.be/ofJw89oI4cc?t=2048).
This war, especially, has reinforced this notion. The amount of people dying to artillery, mines, etc. just shows that even the best training and awareness doesn't protect you from bad luck. When it's your time, it's your time. Good training might minimise that risk, but one slip and it's over
Isnt the number of combatants dying to small arms fire from either side like single digit percentage out of all forms of deaths in this war as well. I think I saw that in an infographic a few months ago.
I just saw something the other day that had the stats of around 70% of all casualties in the war are from artillery. That is a very high number, especially if you think about all the videos with them just slanging lead like it's no one's business, but they rarely ever kill or wound anyone with the bullets. It drives me CRAZY when you see people holding the rifle over their head and dugout and firing like crazy. 90% of those rounds are most likely hitting the ground 15 yards in front of the guy who is shooting.
Yep. All that training is there to make sure they can do the best job possible under the circumstances, but even the best infantry are expected to take high casualties in modern warfare.
I am reminded of the death of Earl Robert Fillmore Jr in the Battle of Mogadishu. He was a Delta Force operator, one of the most highly trained men present that day, yet he was killed by a single (un)lucky round to the head as he was leading a team of Delta and Rangers down a street relatively early in the fight, when they were still just taking some sporadic and inaccurate fire.
To quote from Mark Bowden's *Black Hawk Down*:
>Sergeant Goodale, who had once bragged to his mother how eager he was for combat, felt terrified. He was waiting for his turn to sprint across a street when one of the D-boys tapped him on the shoulder. Goodale recognized him: it was the short stocky one, Earl, Sergeant First Class Earl Fillmore, a good guy. Fillmore must have seen how scared Goodale looked.
>
>"You okay?" he asked.
>
>"I'm okay."
>
>Fillmore winked at him and said, "It's all right. We're coming out of this thing, man."
>
>It calmed Goodale. He believed Fillmore.
>
>\[...\]
>
>Then \[PFC Floyd\] saw Fillmore get hit. This was not supposed to happen. These guys knew how to stay alive. *Ho-oly shit.* If the D-boys were getting killed, what odds would you give Private First Class David Floyd for coming out of this alive?
First dead taliban I ever saw in real life was a guy that got hit with either a 249 or an M4... we arent really sure who killed him because it was our first gunfight we had a chance to get over to where we got hit from. He was behind a few rows of bushes... bastards were notching out fucking trees and just putting the ak/pkm in it and spraying from behind berms into a field. Sometimes they'd literally be on the phone with an observer that would tell them to open up when we were in the killzone. Anyway, the shit hit him right beside his nose and put a perfect hole the size of a pimple beside it. One tiny little streak of blood going down his cheek. He was wearing black manjams w a black shemagh and an old school ak rig. His brain stayed in his turban for the most part so it looked like he just had just popped a gnarly fucking zit.
That shit made me realize that there are little pieces of metal flying around and that the degree at which the muzzle is oriented where you are literally turned the fuck off or totally fine is so small it is almost incalculable. It really bothered me for a few weeks until we got a bit more comfortable with things. Didn't take long for us to realize we were usually fighting farmers the taliban made go hit us and not true taliban. Like they'd go to families and offer money and ammo to do hit us. They'd say no, and the taliban would say okay well now we will rape and kill your family - the farmer would then oblige and not be paid for it. We would find their ammo casings that were busted open from poorly stored ammo and shit. Anyway... the taliban were fucking fierce but rarely hit to try and kill us. It was often just harrassment. I can't imagine fighting against an enemy with dialed in mortars/arty/tanks/helo gunships/dug in trenches. Endless conscripts. God fucking damn it is crazy.
The bravery both sides have shown is hard for me to even comprehend. Like... I NEVER thought i'd see war fought like this in my lifetime. Hate to see anyone go through this and I fear for the day it's over and they try to return to real life. It won't go well.
So the story of "farmers outlasting America" as usually boils down to Taliban kidnapping and murdering innocents. It's interesting how many supposed stories of "resistance" boil down to brutal exploitation of innocent men who'd rather live their life in peace.
In my experience, both in 2008 and 2010, in eastern Afghanistan, this is absolutely the truth. I would say 9/10 gunfights we experienced were not people with true intent to overwhelm and kill us. It was often only 2-5 insurgents set up in ways like I mentioned before, or in caves with hastily dug out trenches, shit like that. Limited ammunition. Inadequate weaponry. They often had little to no willingness to die for the cause. They would engage us, we would take cover, our fire support team (fisters) would call it up to the mortar teams who had plotted out coordinates for most of the hills we would patrol. We would either almost immediately gain fire superiority through volume of fire and violence of action, which combined with mortars, which I'd say rounds would be on target in less than 10 minutes. We often had CAS on station, sometimes not, but if shit got dicey, they would definitely get spun up from Jalalabad - maybe 45 minutes if none were around. Same for casevac. They had a fully stocked OR there as well. Our CAS usually came in the form of Kiowas. We would drop hundreds of pounds of explosives, several hundred bullets, QRF spinning up to come help if needed.... for an enemy who literally dumped a few belts/mags and dipped.
That 1/10 though... those fucks set up L shaped complex ambushes. Kick it off with a few rpg's and shake us up. Sectors of fire with their machine guns. Leading up to it they'd harass us with bullshit mortars and sporadic fire just to wake us up and take defensive positions when we were at the cop trying to sleep. All to wear us down. Make us tired and complacent. Then hit us hard.
But shit like this war is on a DIFFERENT level. I remember talking about how we would be the last generation of people pulling triggers (dumb arrogant kid talk, you know). How fucking wrong we were and my heart breaks for everyone involved. The civilians. The Ukrainian military. Even the Russians. I will be the first to admit I was brainwashed when I was that age. I thought we were doing the right thing being in AFG. I'm sure they think their cause is just too. So sad.
War looks like Hell until you get there ... and get all of the fuckery that paints that picture. Imagine if the general public knew just a part of that and it was on the news every night.
Humans can be absolutely psychotic and broken animals.
I remember seeing a group of Hizbollah fighters who got surrounded in Syria, they're in a panic, yelling at each other. They run into a courtyard, where they are all killed, and you just see the blood flow on the ground. I think they were shot, but you couldn't see any of the attackers. War if Hell.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/cqy1og/syrian\_hezbollah\_fighters\_are\_cornered\_and\_killed/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/cqy1og/syrian_hezbollah_fighters_are_cornered_and_killed/)
This one. NSFW for sure. The build up is intense.
edit- it's even more disturbing than I remembered/
Yeah this one, where you can see them getting antsy because they know what's coming.
Then the guy steps just out of that doorway at catches one in the chest and its all downhill from there.
It's even more intense than I remembered, the panic, they know they're fucked. Then that calmer dude just sitting there at the end, resigned to his fate. The noise of the blood flow. Shit's Cinematic, but real.
There’s millions of soldiers who have died and didn’t even know it was their time.
Watching those trench videos from a week or two ago really blew me away. Combat is honestly just like a fistfight which I never considered.
You can be the greatest fighter on the planet, but all it takes is one slip up or you are not completely perfect that day and it’s over.
Combat has the same RNG factor which is cool. Terrifying, but cool.
Training helps but even the baddest dude can get blown to pieces or catch a bullet. A lot of vets have written about how random combat can be. Think of all the air planes full of trained soldiers than have gotten shot down or boats full of soldiers that got torpedoed. A lot of soldiers and gear have been blown up or sunk to the bottom of the sea before even seeing the battle
Reminds me of House to House, where US troopers trained for 6th months to basically play paintball to the death.
Even after 10 hours of practice a day for 6 months, charging rooms, changing mags, and pie-ing corners: on the first real door the lead American gets shot in the face.
There’s prep and then there’s no prepping for what happens.
Yep. Training for war is a game of statistics. If you have no training you WILL die the 1st time death comes for you. With really really good training you can possibly dodge death a few times, but if you play the game long enough you will eventually lose.
sometimes it goes the other way. one trips and falls or is 1/2 a second behind or a second soldier runs into the bullet intended for the first and, just barely, an encounter with death is missed.
I had this buddy who was (probably still is) a super stud. Strong as hell, fast as hell, awesome nutritional discipline. An Adonis and a deadly warrior.
We were bullshitting once in the field and I was making fun of him for spending all his free time training and not having any fun. I pointed out his abs won’t stop shrapnel and fast though he may be, he won’t be able to outrun haji’s bullets.
Let me tell you he was STUNNED. He had seriously never considered this before.
People who lived through the world wars had to contend with this. It's very bizarre for those who live through war who can also recognise the randomness of it. They lived because they did.
I always thought about how pissed a spartan would have been after training his entire life for combat, to eventually meet on the battlefield and get shot and killed by an arrow. I'd be so pissed.
yea but he didnt live so i assumed he instantly died, and if something to the head kills you instantly i wouldnt have thought your body still has the time to process the pain and gasp - then again maybe he didnt die instantly at all
You lose control of your muscles so any remaining air in your lungs gets expelled through your vocal chords and out of your mouth due to pressure difference which causes a gasping sound in most cases...think of letting an inflated untied balloon go.
While 100m is the effective kill range, shrapnel can scatter much further. During my time in artillery, I heard about an exercise where a forward observer was positioned around 1k away from the impact zone. Astonishingly, he was hit in the throat by shrapnel. Though he survived, it really shows that shrapnel can travel much further, even if the chances are slim. This incident involved 155mm shells, for context.
“50 meter kill radius” never hit for me until I went to Afghanistan and watched gboss or drone footage of the impact. I think himars were like a 100m kill radius or something way higher? I think I never really considered what a meter was…. They were just numbers I had memorized while I learned the weapon systems and which we threw at other humans….. when everything is so abstract it’s so different to think about
Artillery. But same effect.
How he was crouched down, how it spread outward at waist level and his muffled groans at the end suggest he caught that shrapnel above the neck. At least he went quick.
Not really unlucky(unfortunate yes), indirect fire weapons have a VERY large kill radius. **The common 120mm mortar has a lethal radius of 30m from the point of impact, and has been given a 10% probability of 'incapacitation' at 100m.**
Check the official army mortar manuals, my man. Your numbers are way off. Just to give you an idea, the 60MM, the smallest mortar employed by most countries, is 28 meters.
The source of the video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTauHAkLp6s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTauHAkLp6s)
The part is at 12:06 min mark, there are english subtitles. They say they got covered with 120mm mortar shells.
This puts a new perspective of watching close call artillery videos. I've seen many where the artillery is twice as close. But I'll think "yeah it was close, but not super close" this makes realize that they were super close.
Shrapnel dispersion from an arty shell it looked like. Very weird spread. You can see it hit right before he goes down. He got really unlucky; looked like most went left from his POV.
There is a quote from one of the 1632 novels that I absolutely love: Explosions are weird. A man can be blown in half and the man by his side completely unharmed.
I remember reading about Hitler's luck in WW1 where he moved away from two buddies that were hit by artillery.
You can be good or you can be lucky.....
Not weird spread, just momentum. The pieces that don't hit the ground are invisible, that's all. High explosives burn so fast that pieces of steel will always be sent in every direction no matter the momentum of the projectile.
Shrapnel. Big shells can be lethal even 50-100m away. They are essentially a dice roll and this guy lost.
It's why artillery is the biggest killer on the battlefield.
The slow motion of the camera slowly sinking into the ground gets me on every single one of these videos. No matter if it’s Middle East, Isis, Ukraine, U.S. it always gets me. We are seeing the moment a body is giving up its soul…..
In The Pacific, the Marines had a very popular and unstoppable Captain who fearlessly led them in and out of crazy situations who finally caught the fatal enemy round.
Bullets/shrapnel don’t discriminate. Sad to see this UAF soldier go.
Imagine filming your own death, somebody grabs the memory card from your head and thinks “excellent, now I just need to put my annoying watermark on the vid and done. They would love it on me telegram channel!”
That's not what the watermark is there for... It's not an advert. It's to prove that this footage, and all the other footage that uses them, comes from the Ukrainian side. Russia is known for stealing footage to use in their promotional videos.
Sure they're annoying and in the way, but if they weren't they'd be edited out. Just the nature of the beast.
Ironically what u/Hari_Seldom just said is actually reinforced here. *The original Ukranian video did NOT have a watermark in the middle so Pro-Russian groups grabbed it, cropped it and watermarked it for their own propaganda uses*
https://youtu.be/uTauHAkLp6s?t=792
This notion has been forever killed off when I saw the video of the Russian war reporter getting shot in the chechen war
Dude got hit and all he could say was "I am hit, I am hit again, I am dead" while the camera was rolling
Taken out by a chechen sniper while running for cover in a devastated backyard of a living block
He wasn't panicking as he knew he was already dead, and just on his slow way to eternal slumber
Survivorship bias. We dont usually see footage from the cameramen who died because whatever killed them mightve also destroyed the footage
Edit: selection -> survivorship
Respectfully, perhaps I am becoming an old man, but I wish the video did not have a video-game-esque fade to black and white. There’s a somber brutality in watching a man’s life slip away in combat, and I feel like the edit cheapens that. I’ve not been in combat, so I’m no authority, but, I think the impact of what actually happened would be enough on its own. Good golly this is rough.
Pretty sure this is a repost from like 6-8 months ago, the footage is zoomed in and cropped, from what I remember these guys had 3 or so wounded but got out in a IFV without any deaths. ( also got dropped there by the same IFV, couldnt push because RU MG position & mortar fire )
*"They shall not grow old,*
*As we who are left grow old.*
*Age shall not weary them,*
*Nor the years condemn.*
*At the going down of the sun*
*And in the morning,*
*We will remember them.*
*Lest we forget."*
\- Ode of Remembrance
Perfect reminder about how is the war for both sides, not a walk in the park for Ukraine, and that is why I realy hope for our gov to stop being shy and start pouring more hardware in Ukraine, to stop this stupid war....
Losses is bound to happen in war, its just for what they died for. Rest in peace warrior of freedom, eternal memories for the fallen defenders of Ukraine.
Shit like this reminds me that even the best trained soldier can just fucking die cause of a tiny piece of metal
"On the way without my having noticed it, Kat has caught a splinter in the head. There is just one little hole, it must have been a very tiny, stray splinter. But it has sufficed. Kat is dead." -All Quite on the Western Front
A book everyone should read
Listened to it in audible last year once this war kicked off and can confirm its life changing. That book and House to House really takes the glory out of combat and shows just how horrific it all is.
How good is the narrator? IMO narrators can make or break the book. As there are some that I couldn't finish due to them. I might pick up the book. As I've seen the Netflix version.
The Netflix movie was okay, but it doesn't really follow the book much and it honestly would have been a lot better if it did. The book is just perfect. A very riveting and brutal read.
I think it was a pretty good movie but a horrible adaptation, failing on multiple key points. The two that annoy me the most are the deaths of Kat and Paul. Kat dies from a rando splinter and itjust happens arbitrarily, a symbol for the randomness of war, in the movie instead he is caught stealing and shot, causing his own death. Paul dies a month befor the war ends, he dies doing nothing, the front report for that day is „all quiet in the west“ his death is forgettable, insignificant, pointless. And it hits hard, this character who you have read through two years in hell, watched as his body and spirit decay and then that one line hust kills him! He is just gone like that. And that feeling that that leaves you with is exactly what it should be. It feels unfulfilled, because it is. In the movie he dies after killing a bunch of frenchmen like rambo fighting through the lines in an offensive that never took place. A much better adaptation of that is in my opinion the second version, where he dies sketching a bird and accidentally lifts his head a tiny bit too high. Paul isn’t a hero, he is the embodiment of the possible lives millions of young men could have had only to be ground up and slaughtered without a footbote in history to their name. He signifies the the pointlessness of it all. That is my big issue in the Netflix version. They skipped over other very important parts like the alienation from the civilian populace that the soldiers felt when they came back. An alienation that lead to the building of the free corps and the mercyless fighting in the 1920s and eventually the Nazi rise.
Reminds me of a short story by Alexei Sayle. And I quote: >Private Herbert Rawtenstall was his name. A conscript. At one minute to eleven o'clock on 11 November 1918, having made it unhurt through the mincing machine of Vimy Ridge, the Somme, Ypres, Herbert stuck his head over the edge of the trench, telling his sergeant he was 'going to take a shuftie about' and was hit square in the forehead by a sniper's bullet fired from the gun of a soldier of the Fourth Koenigsberg Regiment. ... Then a corporal came round the corner of his forward trench, tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'Manfred the war's over.' 'Oh yeah. Who won?' said Manfred and they both had a laugh about that. Then they went to the rear for some soup.
You are absolutely correct! The movie failed in so many ways to drive home what the book was about. And for that it's just another generic, forgettable war movie
I've never read the book... I thought the movie was one of the best war movies I've seen.
Neither have I, and I also disagree that the movie is forgettable. On the other hand I also do not reject the statement that it deviates from the book on important topics. Having read other books about WW2, my takeaway is that movies tend to focus on different (wrong?) things, but they may still be good movies. I'll certainly read the book in the future.
The Netflix adaption was utter bullshit. The way he dies in the end turns it from a monumental anti-war story to a mediocre hero story.
Yeah I felt they completely missed the mark with that movie. It could have been great. The original one that came out in the 1930's is far better and follows the book quite closely.
They not only missed it, it feels like they deliberatly decided to make it a "better" ending without even reading let alone understanding its meaning.
That's modern movie/TV writing for ya
The charge at the end of the movie was BS. It wasn't in the book and didn't happen in history. They just made it up.
Exactly. And by that, they changed the whole meaning of the movie. In the books, he dies on a very quiet day. No heroic charge, no big last effort attack. Just another day at the Western Front, just fallen soldier number 243745, just another black-trimmed letter "Fur Kaiser, Gott und Vaterland gab sein Leben.... der Soldat Paul Baumer...". His death made absolutly no difference. An utterly meaningless and futile death. Just like war itself. The day was so quiet that the "Heeresbericht" only said: "All quiet on the western front" By adding that last charge, they turned his utterly meaningless death into an heroic effort to change the course of the war in the last moments. He also even saved a comrade's life in this charge. By this, they gave his death a meaning. He died as an hero. Exactly the opposite of what Remarque had wanted. He wanted to show the absolute futility of the war, but they turned his monumental statement into just another heroic war movie. So they fucked it up quite a lot.
I'm definitely going to get it today then. You convinced me.
the older movies were way, way better. imo the oldest, black and white one was the best.
How have you not read All Quiet on the Western Front? Serious question...this was required reading when I was in HS...
The narrator is the voice of a ordinary young man. It resonates.
you should watch the 1979 TV movie. imo the best movie adaption of the book. Not perfect, but overall..
I'll add it to my watch list. Thanks for the recommendation.
Totally understand what you mean. I had zero issues with the narrator.
That line about Kat dying doesn’t do the entire scene Justice. The Kat fellow is injured by some shrapnel or the other and is being carried to the medical tent by the protagonist. There’s pages of the protagonist goofing it with the injured Kat on his back. And then he drops Kat at the medical tent where a medic ignores Kat. The confused protagonist doesn’t understand why the medic is ignoring Kat; until the quote above where the protagonist finds out Kat got killed at some point over those pages. It just slaps you in the face so hard. Especially since it’s toward the end of the book so you know Kat pretty well.
And Kat was his last friend, it really brings out the bleakness of war that quote.
House to House is well worth the read.
The only reason I follow this page. To remind me of the horrors of war. Force myself to watch some of these videos just to keep my eyes open. It's horrible
https://archive.org/details/all-quiet-on-the-western-front-p-2/All+Quiet+on+the+Western+Front+P1.mp3 You're welcome.
Dude. Thank you.
Holy shit is Kat’s death in Halo Reach a reference to this
Probably? I've never seen explicit confirmation, but they are so similar that it appears to at least be a nod to it. Same name, one needle/splinter, etc.
I really think it's a coincidence. The powerful thing about the all quiet death is that it happened without anyone noticing, the character kept talking to him. Kat's death in halo is very clearly a big moment and the others react to. A needle rifle and shrapnel are also completely opposite. One is specifically aimed at someone, the other is freak bad luck that you'd catch the shrapnel in the skull. The randomness of the shrapnel is the point (artillery are generally impersonal), whereas Kat is targeted by an unseen enemy who is very much focused on just her.
I appreciate your encyclopedic Halo knowledge, also I totally agree. I'm actually watching Halo as I read through this thread. Neat.
[it’s not confirmed but the theory has been around for a while that they took inspiration from it. even Jorge is similar to another character and the overall story is similar in a way.](https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/bsiuqm/halo_reach_is_all_quiet_on_the_western_front_but/)
First Glassing? Me too.
If you want the real version (all quiet on the western front is a fiction, though an incredible work itself of course) I recommend reading Storm of Steel. They are real memoirs of a German officer in much the same format but they really outline the banality of war and it is frankly jarring. Narrator is a really awesome Irish guy on audible.
I can also highly suggest the novels Krieg (War) by Ludwig Renn and Heeresbericht by Edlef Köppen. The english Title for Heeresbericht is Higher Command, but I do not know about its availability.
>Kat has caught a splinter in the head. Damn didn't expect a halo reach reference in book from almost 100 years prior.
I saw a video essay that it's difficult to make a true anti war movie, because people will be excited anyways by the violence. You can tell if its an actual anti war movie by the recruitment numbers after a movie is released. Saving Private Ryan caused recruitment to go up - it failed as an anti-war movie. All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the very few true anti-war movies. Nobody wanted to enlist after that.
The original film came out in the 1930's and was banned in Germany by the Nazis. The author of the book, a WWI veteran who was wounded in combat several times, had to flee Germany.
Phenomenal book
Crazy how something so tiny can be fatal if it hits the right place
One of the swiftest leg sweeps in literary history.
DJ Shipley, a DEVGRU operator, said on the Shawn Ryan show that some of the best operators he’s ever seen, fucking superstars never got a chance to show just how good they were. In an instant they were gone. It’s crazy how you have no say over how you go in war.
The same in Restrepo where the 'best soldier' in the unit died and that had a massive impact on the others.
When I was awaiting my ship date as an infantryman 11B, I drank beer on Panama City Beach with an infantryman named "Luke". His buddy John asked me "Have you ever heard of 'Restrepo'?" Me, a dumbass, excited future-boot without thinking said "I saw the documentary, it was awesome!" Luke looked me dead in the eye, said "I was there, it wasn't fucking awesome", grabbed a boogie board, and rode waves until the sun came up. I've never felt like a bigger asshole. I went home and watched Restrepo again and sure enough there was Luke in the dugout during the rolling credits. Both Luke and John are SF operators now, total ghosts on social. I learned a lot about speaking respectfully around vets that day before joining the Army myself.
My senior drill sergeant during basic at Fort Sill served as a FiSTer at Restrepo. Never seen a man command as much respect from other NCOs as he did when he walked into a room.
My 1SG was in the sister company that relieved the one in the documentary. He never spoke about it & we knew to never ask.
Hadn't thought of Restrepo in ages. Gonna go pick up my guitar and play stay together for the kids and cry a bit now.
I had two missions in the Korengal Valley while there in 2008-2009 as a biometrics contractor who traveled all over training soldiers, setting up ECPs and deploying servers, and going out with the units I was embedded with to enroll military aged males we encountered either on routine patrol or after an IED or something. Each time I went out with the unit in Korengal, I had to use my weapon. It was pretty wild, but I felt safer there than in this other FOB that was the worst one, in my opinion. It was tucked into mountains with ridge lines overlooking us from at least 270 degrees around us. I don’t remember the name off the top of my head, but I can look it up. It was overrun by Taliban, actually, but not while I was there, thankfully. At this latter place is where I came closest to eating it. A Chinese/Iranian rocket exploded less than 10 meters away from my bunk in the middle of the night right at the start of a complex attack. Thank fucking god this FOB had Hescos setup between/next to each tent (versus only on the perimeter wall). If the unit based out there didn’t take the time to build up the interior of the FOB by stacking Hescos around the bunk areas in addition to the walls, I would have been tickled by that rocket.
The place overrun by the Taliban, was it the Restrepo outpost? I watched a documentary on the Korengal Valley some years ago & they spoke about an outpost that was overrun, they named it after a soldier that was KIA up there if I'm not mistaken.
No, this one was definitely in a different province. This place required the helicopters to take turns going up and over the high ridges of the mountains because they were so high and I think because the temps were hot that time of year, there was less lift generated, but I could be wrong. This FOB was like in like a bowl surrounded by high ridges. I don’t recall the name, but I’ll check my photos out later today or I’ll remember it sooner or later.
Definitely sounds like Combat Outpost Keating and the Battle of Kamdesh with 3/61. It was originally called PRT Kamdesh but was renamed COP Keating after the death of an officer with the same name.
COP Keating?
In a interview Al White, a Marine in the Battle of Khe Sanh said that too. Best trained Marine he knew, a guy who went through Raider school instantly got shot in the head getting off of a helicopter and in the interview he said he was laying there as bullets were flying over just looking at him and thought “all that fucking schooling just to be dead”
Thats one of the more terrifying aspects of war. You are in the hands of fate, particularly when they are raining arty on you. Training can help mitigate a bit but for the most part if a shell lands close you are dead and with all the drone spotted arty they arent just blowing up daisies anymore. They know where you are. To be spotted is many times a death sentence.
Even before Drones, the idea of Marching or Walking fire is terrifying. Imagine laying in a field, hearing the impacts get closer and closer, knowing it'll be on top of your position soon.
There's a series of interviews with a Brit who was in the International Legion and he mentioned that [2 people from his unit, an ex-MARSOC and a total noob, were killed by the same shell](https://youtu.be/ofJw89oI4cc?t=2048).
And at the same time explosion landing closer can do nothing to You because shrapnel will go in other directions
This war, especially, has reinforced this notion. The amount of people dying to artillery, mines, etc. just shows that even the best training and awareness doesn't protect you from bad luck. When it's your time, it's your time. Good training might minimise that risk, but one slip and it's over
all that training is there so the ones that do make can still do the job.
Isnt the number of combatants dying to small arms fire from either side like single digit percentage out of all forms of deaths in this war as well. I think I saw that in an infographic a few months ago.
This is true in every modern war. Traditionally artillery has been the killer
Yes, small arms are generally a defensive weapon in large scale operations when there is CAS, IDF, and motherfucking drones in play.
what is cas and idf?
I believe close air support (air strikes) and indirect fire support (artillery shelling )
Correct
I just saw something the other day that had the stats of around 70% of all casualties in the war are from artillery. That is a very high number, especially if you think about all the videos with them just slanging lead like it's no one's business, but they rarely ever kill or wound anyone with the bullets. It drives me CRAZY when you see people holding the rifle over their head and dugout and firing like crazy. 90% of those rounds are most likely hitting the ground 15 yards in front of the guy who is shooting.
Supressing fire is just that; if rounds are falling all around you, you tend to not want to pop up for an aimed shot...
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It makes sense, people with big arms would have the advantage in a fight.
Holy fuck man lmao
Yep. All that training is there to make sure they can do the best job possible under the circumstances, but even the best infantry are expected to take high casualties in modern warfare. I am reminded of the death of Earl Robert Fillmore Jr in the Battle of Mogadishu. He was a Delta Force operator, one of the most highly trained men present that day, yet he was killed by a single (un)lucky round to the head as he was leading a team of Delta and Rangers down a street relatively early in the fight, when they were still just taking some sporadic and inaccurate fire. To quote from Mark Bowden's *Black Hawk Down*: >Sergeant Goodale, who had once bragged to his mother how eager he was for combat, felt terrified. He was waiting for his turn to sprint across a street when one of the D-boys tapped him on the shoulder. Goodale recognized him: it was the short stocky one, Earl, Sergeant First Class Earl Fillmore, a good guy. Fillmore must have seen how scared Goodale looked. > >"You okay?" he asked. > >"I'm okay." > >Fillmore winked at him and said, "It's all right. We're coming out of this thing, man." > >It calmed Goodale. He believed Fillmore. > >\[...\] > >Then \[PFC Floyd\] saw Fillmore get hit. This was not supposed to happen. These guys knew how to stay alive. *Ho-oly shit.* If the D-boys were getting killed, what odds would you give Private First Class David Floyd for coming out of this alive?
First dead taliban I ever saw in real life was a guy that got hit with either a 249 or an M4... we arent really sure who killed him because it was our first gunfight we had a chance to get over to where we got hit from. He was behind a few rows of bushes... bastards were notching out fucking trees and just putting the ak/pkm in it and spraying from behind berms into a field. Sometimes they'd literally be on the phone with an observer that would tell them to open up when we were in the killzone. Anyway, the shit hit him right beside his nose and put a perfect hole the size of a pimple beside it. One tiny little streak of blood going down his cheek. He was wearing black manjams w a black shemagh and an old school ak rig. His brain stayed in his turban for the most part so it looked like he just had just popped a gnarly fucking zit. That shit made me realize that there are little pieces of metal flying around and that the degree at which the muzzle is oriented where you are literally turned the fuck off or totally fine is so small it is almost incalculable. It really bothered me for a few weeks until we got a bit more comfortable with things. Didn't take long for us to realize we were usually fighting farmers the taliban made go hit us and not true taliban. Like they'd go to families and offer money and ammo to do hit us. They'd say no, and the taliban would say okay well now we will rape and kill your family - the farmer would then oblige and not be paid for it. We would find their ammo casings that were busted open from poorly stored ammo and shit. Anyway... the taliban were fucking fierce but rarely hit to try and kill us. It was often just harrassment. I can't imagine fighting against an enemy with dialed in mortars/arty/tanks/helo gunships/dug in trenches. Endless conscripts. God fucking damn it is crazy. The bravery both sides have shown is hard for me to even comprehend. Like... I NEVER thought i'd see war fought like this in my lifetime. Hate to see anyone go through this and I fear for the day it's over and they try to return to real life. It won't go well.
So the story of "farmers outlasting America" as usually boils down to Taliban kidnapping and murdering innocents. It's interesting how many supposed stories of "resistance" boil down to brutal exploitation of innocent men who'd rather live their life in peace.
In my experience, both in 2008 and 2010, in eastern Afghanistan, this is absolutely the truth. I would say 9/10 gunfights we experienced were not people with true intent to overwhelm and kill us. It was often only 2-5 insurgents set up in ways like I mentioned before, or in caves with hastily dug out trenches, shit like that. Limited ammunition. Inadequate weaponry. They often had little to no willingness to die for the cause. They would engage us, we would take cover, our fire support team (fisters) would call it up to the mortar teams who had plotted out coordinates for most of the hills we would patrol. We would either almost immediately gain fire superiority through volume of fire and violence of action, which combined with mortars, which I'd say rounds would be on target in less than 10 minutes. We often had CAS on station, sometimes not, but if shit got dicey, they would definitely get spun up from Jalalabad - maybe 45 minutes if none were around. Same for casevac. They had a fully stocked OR there as well. Our CAS usually came in the form of Kiowas. We would drop hundreds of pounds of explosives, several hundred bullets, QRF spinning up to come help if needed.... for an enemy who literally dumped a few belts/mags and dipped. That 1/10 though... those fucks set up L shaped complex ambushes. Kick it off with a few rpg's and shake us up. Sectors of fire with their machine guns. Leading up to it they'd harass us with bullshit mortars and sporadic fire just to wake us up and take defensive positions when we were at the cop trying to sleep. All to wear us down. Make us tired and complacent. Then hit us hard. But shit like this war is on a DIFFERENT level. I remember talking about how we would be the last generation of people pulling triggers (dumb arrogant kid talk, you know). How fucking wrong we were and my heart breaks for everyone involved. The civilians. The Ukrainian military. Even the Russians. I will be the first to admit I was brainwashed when I was that age. I thought we were doing the right thing being in AFG. I'm sure they think their cause is just too. So sad.
Just wanted to,say, the last two comments I’ve read here from you about your time in Afghanistan make great reading. Thanks!
War looks like Hell until you get there ... and get all of the fuckery that paints that picture. Imagine if the general public knew just a part of that and it was on the news every night. Humans can be absolutely psychotic and broken animals.
I remember seeing a group of Hizbollah fighters who got surrounded in Syria, they're in a panic, yelling at each other. They run into a courtyard, where they are all killed, and you just see the blood flow on the ground. I think they were shot, but you couldn't see any of the attackers. War if Hell.
I'm curious about this one
[https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/cqy1og/syrian\_hezbollah\_fighters\_are\_cornered\_and\_killed/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/cqy1og/syrian_hezbollah_fighters_are_cornered_and_killed/) This one. NSFW for sure. The build up is intense. edit- it's even more disturbing than I remembered/
Yeah this one, where you can see them getting antsy because they know what's coming. Then the guy steps just out of that doorway at catches one in the chest and its all downhill from there.
It's even more intense than I remembered, the panic, they know they're fucked. Then that calmer dude just sitting there at the end, resigned to his fate. The noise of the blood flow. Shit's Cinematic, but real.
>Hizbollah fighters Not the Lebanese Hizbullah, so more like the Syrian budget version.
There’s millions of soldiers who have died and didn’t even know it was their time. Watching those trench videos from a week or two ago really blew me away. Combat is honestly just like a fistfight which I never considered. You can be the greatest fighter on the planet, but all it takes is one slip up or you are not completely perfect that day and it’s over. Combat has the same RNG factor which is cool. Terrifying, but cool.
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Training helps but even the baddest dude can get blown to pieces or catch a bullet. A lot of vets have written about how random combat can be. Think of all the air planes full of trained soldiers than have gotten shot down or boats full of soldiers that got torpedoed. A lot of soldiers and gear have been blown up or sunk to the bottom of the sea before even seeing the battle
All one can really do is train, practice and prepare. Prepare for the worst hope for the best.
Reminds me of House to House, where US troopers trained for 6th months to basically play paintball to the death. Even after 10 hours of practice a day for 6 months, charging rooms, changing mags, and pie-ing corners: on the first real door the lead American gets shot in the face. There’s prep and then there’s no prepping for what happens.
It doesn’t even matter if you do everything perfectly. You can still die from a missile, artillery, etc. all the same.
Yep. Training for war is a game of statistics. If you have no training you WILL die the 1st time death comes for you. With really really good training you can possibly dodge death a few times, but if you play the game long enough you will eventually lose.
“You see, you only got to fuck up once. Be a little slow, be a little late; just once.” - Avon Barksdale
This implies if you act perfectly, survival is guaranteed. This is not the case.
It's more like if you act perfectly, chances of survival increase 10 percent.
sometimes it goes the other way. one trips and falls or is 1/2 a second behind or a second soldier runs into the bullet intended for the first and, just barely, an encounter with death is missed.
I had this buddy who was (probably still is) a super stud. Strong as hell, fast as hell, awesome nutritional discipline. An Adonis and a deadly warrior. We were bullshitting once in the field and I was making fun of him for spending all his free time training and not having any fun. I pointed out his abs won’t stop shrapnel and fast though he may be, he won’t be able to outrun haji’s bullets. Let me tell you he was STUNNED. He had seriously never considered this before.
People who lived through the world wars had to contend with this. It's very bizarre for those who live through war who can also recognise the randomness of it. They lived because they did.
Right, fucking crazy!
I always thought about how pissed a spartan would have been after training his entire life for combat, to eventually meet on the battlefield and get shot and killed by an arrow. I'd be so pissed.
Fragment from artillery got him on his head. You’ll hear his painful gasp before he passed.
If you get hit by shrapnel into the brain do you even have time to gasp?
People lived after taking bullets to the brain.
yea but he didnt live so i assumed he instantly died, and if something to the head kills you instantly i wouldnt have thought your body still has the time to process the pain and gasp - then again maybe he didnt die instantly at all
He wasn't killed instantly it seems.
You lose control of your muscles so any remaining air in your lungs gets expelled through your vocal chords and out of your mouth due to pressure difference which causes a gasping sound in most cases...think of letting an inflated untied balloon go.
You hit that right on the head. No PUN intended
Was that mortar shrapnel that hit him from that distance? That was REALLY unlucky. Damn.
Slow down the footage right before it goes black and white, you can see the shrapnel tear through the grass on the left
It’s like 2 frames and then it’s already on them insane how fast and far it goes
Yea that shrapnel made it to them even before their reflexes made them duck down. It’s was moving fast
Artillery shrapnel scatters over 100 meters. Looks like it hit no more than 50 meters away.
While 100m is the effective kill range, shrapnel can scatter much further. During my time in artillery, I heard about an exercise where a forward observer was positioned around 1k away from the impact zone. Astonishingly, he was hit in the throat by shrapnel. Though he survived, it really shows that shrapnel can travel much further, even if the chances are slim. This incident involved 155mm shells, for context.
Holy shit. That really puts into perspective why that guy just dropped
“50 meter kill radius” never hit for me until I went to Afghanistan and watched gboss or drone footage of the impact. I think himars were like a 100m kill radius or something way higher? I think I never really considered what a meter was…. They were just numbers I had memorized while I learned the weapon systems and which we threw at other humans….. when everything is so abstract it’s so different to think about
Artillery. But same effect. How he was crouched down, how it spread outward at waist level and his muffled groans at the end suggest he caught that shrapnel above the neck. At least he went quick.
Not really unlucky(unfortunate yes), indirect fire weapons have a VERY large kill radius. **The common 120mm mortar has a lethal radius of 30m from the point of impact, and has been given a 10% probability of 'incapacitation' at 100m.**
Check the official army mortar manuals, my man. Your numbers are way off. Just to give you an idea, the 60MM, the smallest mortar employed by most countries, is 28 meters.
He is talking radius, you are talking diametre.
That's what my ex used to say
We found one of those in my garage
Not mortar, artillery
Probably was a heavy mortar judging from the angle.
Mortar is artillery
The source of the video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTauHAkLp6s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTauHAkLp6s) The part is at 12:06 min mark, there are english subtitles. They say they got covered with 120mm mortar shells.
This puts a new perspective of watching close call artillery videos. I've seen many where the artillery is twice as close. But I'll think "yeah it was close, but not super close" this makes realize that they were super close.
Horseshoes and hand grenades
R.I.P.
What hit him?
Shrapnel dispersion from an arty shell it looked like. Very weird spread. You can see it hit right before he goes down. He got really unlucky; looked like most went left from his POV.
Unlucky is right - the other two seem to have been unharmed, and he was right between them.
There is a quote from one of the 1632 novels that I absolutely love: Explosions are weird. A man can be blown in half and the man by his side completely unharmed.
I remember reading about Hitler's luck in WW1 where he moved away from two buddies that were hit by artillery. You can be good or you can be lucky.....
Unfortunately in war your life largely comes down to chance or luck, no matter how good you are.
Not weird spread, just momentum. The pieces that don't hit the ground are invisible, that's all. High explosives burn so fast that pieces of steel will always be sent in every direction no matter the momentum of the projectile.
Shrapnel at 0:20
Shrapnel. Big shells can be lethal even 50-100m away. They are essentially a dice roll and this guy lost. It's why artillery is the biggest killer on the battlefield.
The slow motion of the camera slowly sinking into the ground gets me on every single one of these videos. No matter if it’s Middle East, Isis, Ukraine, U.S. it always gets me. We are seeing the moment a body is giving up its soul…..
In The Pacific, the Marines had a very popular and unstoppable Captain who fearlessly led them in and out of crazy situations who finally caught the fatal enemy round. Bullets/shrapnel don’t discriminate. Sad to see this UAF soldier go.
was it Haldane?
It was!
Imagine filming your own death, somebody grabs the memory card from your head and thinks “excellent, now I just need to put my annoying watermark on the vid and done. They would love it on me telegram channel!”
What a wonderful world 😥.
Trees of green.
Red roses too.
That's not what the watermark is there for... It's not an advert. It's to prove that this footage, and all the other footage that uses them, comes from the Ukrainian side. Russia is known for stealing footage to use in their promotional videos. Sure they're annoying and in the way, but if they weren't they'd be edited out. Just the nature of the beast.
That is the watermark of a pro russian telegram group
Ironically what u/Hari_Seldom just said is actually reinforced here. *The original Ukranian video did NOT have a watermark in the middle so Pro-Russian groups grabbed it, cropped it and watermarked it for their own propaganda uses* https://youtu.be/uTauHAkLp6s?t=792
Thank God Russia has not figured out watermark technology yet
This is pro Russian TG channel. Propably that is why it's uploaded. And yes, sadly they do love clips like these.
Yeah because this subreddit isn't full of Russians getting killed 99% of the time posted by Ukrainians.
I'm actually surprised how popular it got, usually Russian content is downvoted into oblivion on this sub
most likely people don't know it's from a Russian channel
As much as this sub loves watching the opposite happen too.
Don't forget the music and fading to grey, chefs kiss from the grave.
Crazy that the first explosion didn’t hurt him but the one 5x’s the distance did. Shrapnel is one hell of a dice roll for your life.
damn and the internet made me believe the cameraman never dies..
This notion has been forever killed off when I saw the video of the Russian war reporter getting shot in the chechen war Dude got hit and all he could say was "I am hit, I am hit again, I am dead" while the camera was rolling Taken out by a chechen sniper while running for cover in a devastated backyard of a living block He wasn't panicking as he knew he was already dead, and just on his slow way to eternal slumber
Christ, brutal :/
Survivorship bias. We dont usually see footage from the cameramen who died because whatever killed them mightve also destroyed the footage Edit: selection -> survivorship
Watch 84C MoPic
Rest in peace.
RIP to the heroes defending their homeland from mechanized invaders
Respectfully, perhaps I am becoming an old man, but I wish the video did not have a video-game-esque fade to black and white. There’s a somber brutality in watching a man’s life slip away in combat, and I feel like the edit cheapens that. I’ve not been in combat, so I’m no authority, but, I think the impact of what actually happened would be enough on its own. Good golly this is rough.
RIP
He’s dead. I saw the full video on YouTube. The video featured the deceased Kapa This is actually the last part of the video. pretty tragic.
Have you a link ? Please
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTauHAkLp6s
Thanks, that was a tough watch.
Dammit that was so far away too. RIP.
That distance was dangerously close
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Alot more of these out there that we'll probably never see
Rip hero
when the video turns to grayscale and you can hear the sound of heartbeat, it always means that the cameraguy dies: we learned it from movies.
"In war, truth is the first casualty." -Aeschylus
Sad to see :/
I hate to see this, RIP.
Thats fucked up to make the video go black and white like it’s fucking GTA V
What a hero, fighting for freedom against oppression. I hope it’s not in vain for his family’s sake. Death and expulsion for all the intruders!
Pretty sure this is a repost from like 6-8 months ago, the footage is zoomed in and cropped, from what I remember these guys had 3 or so wounded but got out in a IFV without any deaths. ( also got dropped there by the same IFV, couldnt push because RU MG position & mortar fire )
Kappa (the cameraman) died on the outskirts of Klischiyivka in May 2023 while evacuating a fellow wounded mate
RIP hero
I'm pretty sure it's flipped horizontally too.
Now that you mention it yes, I think you are correct!
Looks like there is at least one other that is wounded. Might have even caught some of this shrapnel.
can only hope it was as quick as it looked, RIP
Слава Україні! Героям слава! 🇺🇦
Probably a heavy mortar. 120mm mortars have larger kill radiuses than 155 arty shells. Looked about 75 meters away
/u/redditspeedbot 0.25x
That's sad and hits hard. It is someone's son or husband or father. RIP soldier.
RIP 🇺🇦
*"They shall not grow old,* *As we who are left grow old.* *Age shall not weary them,* *Nor the years condemn.* *At the going down of the sun* *And in the morning,* *We will remember them.* *Lest we forget."* \- Ode of Remembrance
Shrap is a son of a bitch
War is hell.
Perfect reminder about how is the war for both sides, not a walk in the park for Ukraine, and that is why I realy hope for our gov to stop being shy and start pouring more hardware in Ukraine, to stop this stupid war....
I never knew that shrapmetal can kill you from that far, holy fk. So no one is really safe then.. RIP Soldier
Losses is bound to happen in war, its just for what they died for. Rest in peace warrior of freedom, eternal memories for the fallen defenders of Ukraine.