Hacker News Books

Recently read Band of Brothers - pretty sure this story was one of the ones that is mentioned in passing towards the end of the book.

I hear what you're saying but the problem is that, when retelling the history of a large battle, no foot soldier plays a large enough part to give the reader a good sense of the overall event. An author can try to incorporate the grunts but they run the risk of overwhelming the reader with names that need to be kept track of.

The stories of the foot soldier can be told but they are usually closer to a biography rather than over-arching history. Author Stephen Ambrose was one of the best at it. His books "Citizen Soldier" and "Band of Brothers" (among others) are excellent.

It really is. I can't imagine the havoc that an actually-trained strike team with some real equipment could cause.

I was reading Band of Brothers recently, and the description of how accurate and deadly their mortar-men were in a number of engagements was impressive. A light mortar is not the most high-tech weapon, is mass-produced by every army in the world, and does not take a huge amount of training to handle effectively. Not to mention that it can strike from up to a mile away, from a position without direct line-of-sight to the target; with an accomplice acting as an FO to send adjustments by text. Or skip the accomplice, and use a drone (Is the army doing this? Seems like a natural application). I don't want to imagine the indiscriminate horror that could be inflicted at any kind of open-air event.

A similar example comes to mind from Stephen E. Ambrose's book "Band of Brothers". He interviewed WW2 veterans who talked about how every soldier going into combat for the first time believes that he's going to survive. It's only when he actually starts to see his comrades fall that he realizes "I might actually die here". As he is exposed to more and more death, that gives way to a feeling of "I'm going to die here".

We have to see others fail to believe it to be a realistic possibility for ourselves.

> Fiction: “The Lord of the Rings” (J.R.R. Tolkien); “Game of Thrones” (George R.R. Martin); “Slaughterhouse Five” (Kurt Vonnegut); “Blood Meridian” (Cormac McCarthy); “The Stand” (Stephen King).

> Nonfiction: “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (Tom Wolfe); “Halsey’s Typhoon” (Tom Clavin); “Band of Brothers” (Stephen Ambrose); “Into the Wild” (Jon Krakauer); “Guns of August” (Barbara Tuchman).

about 300 titles (not sure what the proportion of navy specific material, public domain and commercially licensed title are).

Note the high price -- $3k/unit. That is typical in that domain. It is funny because a lot of things they assert to have is actually lack of features -- lack of wifi, lack of cameras. And probably most important -- presumably made in US. In that market there are really ridiculous markups. You just have to know someone who knows someone to get the contract. It (this market) is also mostly immune to being exported overseas -- just due to basic security and trade regulations.

Informally one can say, "a new mac is cheaper than that!". And yeah it is. But this is a mac built to spec, all made in Ohio probably. Interesting what macs would cost in that case if there built to order in smaller batches and made in Ohio, all having strange requirements like FIPS-140-2 compliant crypto libraries enabled and other random red tape restrictions slapped on them....