Part 2: Deleted Appendix for 'Bad War Stories'- My Upcoming 4th Book

Bad War Stories will be out NOV 2025 through Helion & Co

This is the second part of the Appendix; you can find Part 1 here.

***** Also: News on ‘Bad War Stories’- Helion & Co. have moved up the publication timeline. Instead of Spring 2026, this book will come out November 2025, just in time for the Holiday Season! More to follow on the book release, final cover art, artist proofs, and more! You can register for interest on the book here: https://www.helion.co.uk/military-history-books/bad-war-stories-.php

Part 2 of 3:

…When it comes to war, our societies configure many ontological and epistemological assumptions that form our preferred frames for what we say war is, and how we know what war is also not. This leads to how we are encouraged to be introspective about specific conflicts such as the counterinsurgency wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, yet these assumptions also force us down certain pre-determined pathways. We go into a war knowing who is ‘good’ and therefore, who must be ‘bad.’ We expect, perhaps broadly and acknowledging variation in politics, ethics, ideologies that there is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, just as there is ‘up’ and ‘down.’ Our social frame helps us navigate the social reality, even when we encounter the ‘fog and friction’ of war. Even when we go astray and need to rectify our position, we still believe that we know what our left hand is compared to our right. This provides us necessary clarity so that we understand our identity (individually and as part of a social collective) and our purpose. We then try to do as we should and adjust things gradually as life throws curve balls at us along the way. Holding our mirror up as we go helps us adhere to our social frame and remain in ontological and epistemological check.

These assumptions comprising our social frames become not just a mirror that inverts things while preserving clarity; we are more appropriately walking through a circus ‘fun house’ where mirrors distort what we think we see.^[1]Often, our compliance to the social frame is more important than whether that frame is giving us accurate information. I find the metaphoric device of ‘mirror,’ if taken too literally, sidesteps what Weick was driving after. The mirror functions in how we look upon history and make collective frames that then can be remembered, and the same mirror acts as the approved framework for divergent thinking and imagination when gazing ahead toward the future. We apply the mirror and determine “am I remembering correctly” and “am I imagining correctly”, both convergent acts that conform to the social frame shared by our societies. This social frame is complex and dynamic enough to support many different ideas and beliefs, but it still has clear and powerful guidelines dictated by those invisible ontological and epistemological assumptions. We value imagination and ingenuity when dealing with wickedly complex challenges such as war, yet in practice we tend to eliminate most avenues except for those well-established and institutionally sanctioned for deliberate action and reaction. The social code runs in the background, including how we understand war and decide how to engage in it.

There is something metaphorically that could provide readers with how we experience war in ways that abandon the mirror construct. The Möbius loop, band, or strip is a fascinating mathematical construct that is adapted here metaphorically for how Bad War Stories acts as a reflective critique of modern warfare. The Möbius loop is called a non-orientable surface, meaning that if you are within it, you cannot distinguish what direction or way you are in terms of some fixed topological space. Or, you cannot ever know your left hand from your right while inside the loop. The way to create a Möbius loop is to take a rectangular strip of paper and put a twist in it and then join the ends to form a loop. Mathematically formalized in 1858, the idea of the Möbius dates to Roman times, if not earlier. We see it everywhere, from recycling logos to specialized drive chains in certain machinery. People are entertained by them whether they are viewing many of M.C. Escher’s mind-bending drawings or taking a ride on certain dual-track roller coasters. Here, we apply it instead of the proverbial mirror to consider how our social collective tends to distort our understandings of war and conflict.

Experiencing the Möbius is better than reading about it. Readers can form a Möbius loop with paper and then trace along the middle of it as if they were walking on the surface. Taking one trip around puts your finger on the opposite side of the paper from where you first started, and taking another loop around will reverse that once more. Returning to modern war and Bad War Stories, I offer that humans engage in organized violence not using some mirror to guide them along, but through a Möbius loop, if just metaphorically. This loop constitutes the geometric shape not of our physical world, but that of our social one. There are both literal and abstract examples of this throughout the chapters. A literal one is found in ‘On Death and Carpets’, where one Afghan victim is carefully wrapped in an expensive carpet, and another dead body merely receives a sheet. In “A Night Filled with Problems”, an abstract offering is how the military unit pursues insurgents on a carefully planned raid that not only results in the unfortunate death of a lieutenant, but the two insurgents miraculously survive despite the vast technological overmatch of American military power. Keagan’s death occurs as a freak accident in war where a lucky shot hits perfectly between the ample protection and countermeasures designed by the military to mitigate most hazards in combat. Both are Möbius loops, although they function in different manifestations. This requires a bit more explanation.

Taking that slip of paper readers are using to form the loop, they might write two oppositional ideas about war on each side of the paper. This might be ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘wrong’ and ‘right’, ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’, or any other pairing of ideas that represent clear tension in reality where conflict and crisis manifests. If readers then reform their Möbius loop and trace their finger along, they will experience how the transition from one to the other occurs in an iterative and cyclic manner. This is not some half-witted attempt to morally justify arguments that war is entirely ambiguous or that any belief system is relatively equivalent to any other one. Rather, we go about experiencing reality moving through the social construction that defines our world where the Möbius loop itself is invisible, and our position within this loop prevents us from ever stepping out of it to gain some ultimate high ground of neutral objectivity. War becomes disagreement between two organized groups of humans where the application of violence is directed to resolve said debate by force. Using Möbius as a metaphoric device, we can now make several theoretically enabled conclusions about the bad war stories offered.^[2]

First, war carries the phenomena of absurdity despite our species’ ontological assumption that control and rational thought should create some form of order in even the most chaotic periods in war. Most societies that embark upon or are the recipients of other aggressors using organized violence do this with a clear sense of efficacy. We want to achieve this goal, and by engaging in war, we expect that we can get to it as desired. This in turn causes us to rationalize many things during the execution of a war that are entirely irrational, making many institutionalized activities absurd. Yet we still go about doing these things because questioning them would create paradox in our unshakable world view. Institutional adherence to a strategic vision becomes a form of societal blindness. Such absurdity abounds and forms the foundation for many bad war stories. In ‘On Death and Carpets’, Lodhi’s brutal and grief-fueled execution of an innocent Afghan boy happens merely due to an errant phone call, and potentially some homophobic and culturally specific issues Lodhi had with his deceased brother. That the special forces unit readily accepts his false version of the event illuminates another Möbius twist where rational alliance building between American and Afghan forces loops iteratively into games of deceit. Afghans take advantage of the system, and American combat units readily present false data that boosts their reputation and sense of self-worth. In the last chapter, the continued absurdities involving Afghan values being written by westerners, QWERTY keyboard debacles, the upside-down pen photo fiasco, and the staged graduation activities where Afghan students parrot the same sentences to maintain the illusion of progress are all absurd. They also were all taken with great seriousness by organizations preferring the illusion over the unvarnished truth.

Absurdity becomes an essential ingredient in every bad war story. When they might be present in a ‘good’ war story, authors or producers carefully edit them out, least they spoil the grand narrative about war itself. As this book exists as a critique and a call to action on such one-sided endeavors, these stories span from the tactical to the strategic so that all levels of war are integrated systemically. Throughout every chapter, absurdity prevails. In ‘Eighteen Hours’, the French officer repeatedly firing his weapon into the clearing barrel while continuing his intense discussion is a tactical instance, coupled with how the incident unfolded at a sanctioned area to improve weapon safety. In ‘Invasion and Inversion’, the gold bar fiasco initially satisfies military fantasies about plunder in war, and only after several people risk their careers to steal bars do we learn that they are worthless hunks of brass. In ‘Their Cups Runneth Over’, the bargaining for C-130 aircraft the Afghans cannot possibly sustain yet desire for national competition against Pakistan is a strategic absurdity that later became yet another multi-million-dollar waste for the international community investing in their government.^[3]

The staged literary results of Afghan Police by NATO senior leaders represented not just individual deception to advance one’s career, but an institution-wide fetishization that increasing literacy must cause subsequent security enhancements. For two decades of counterinsurgency, the notion that only a literate, educated and well-trained police force might stabilize Kabul and surrounding regions was upheld as a core and overarching goal. The absurdities throughout those decades were marginalized or omitted in serious organizational debate and reflection. Only in the aftermath of the Afghan government’s collapse in late 2021 would things finally come into view. The current police chief, a former bomb maker, now running Kabul for the Taliban government uses Sharia Law and a mostly illiterate policing force to maintain local security. His complete lack of formal education or training yet his ability to maintain local security for the city produces yet another Möbius twisting from the earlier two-decade strategic pathway.^[4]Further, the duality of Afghan military and police trainers and students violating or circumventing the NATO strategic goals of this long-term professionalization and training suggests yet another Möbius was operating throughout that time. These war absurdities highlight flawed logic and paradoxical thinking which undermines the institutional adherence and confidence of their social frame. When NATO’s social media gets far higher traffic and ‘likes’ due to an errant ‘worst fucking birthday ever’ post, the operator is punished, and the organization attempts to return to the original plan without reflection. All other NATO social media until the late 2021 chaotic withdraw sustained a false and overly positive strategic narrative.

When the institution’s best efforts to increase prediction, control, and efficiencies unintentionally lead to greater chaos and dysfunction, we find ourselves in yet another paradox in how complex reality and war resist simplistic or linear-causal treatments. The absurdities that manifest in war are most apparent when the institution denies that anything might be in error in policy and process; the operator is most likely at fault instead of the system. Individuals or specific contexts are usually blamed or critiqued while the institutional frames and socialized assumptions remain off limits. This is how even in military training, the unit may be directed to repeat an exercise over and over until it succeeds in ways that reinforce existing beliefs, whether encoded in military doctrine or enshrined in historic rituals that clarify military identity and purpose in war. In ‘An Imitation of War Without the Original’, the army training center sought unrealistic levels of control despite also desiring a cunning, unrestrained opposing force to spar against. Whether the training unit took unexpected actions due to the night letter incident or the commander’s preference for reenlistment ceremonies to be sanitized of things that celebrate the gritty and messy truths about training for war, the modern military training apparatus favors simplified order and a false sense of control over everything else.