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Question: Why Do Iraqi Soldiers Love To Dance “The Robot”?

I was flipping through Max Hasting’s wonderfully edited Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes this morning and it got me thinking how tricky it would be to publish a newer version of his superb anthology, one that would include, for example, the wars in Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq…

The edition that I own was purchased in 1993 and printed in 1985. It begins with snippets from Livy, Herodotus, and other classical sources and moves through Voltaire and Gibbon en route to Fuller and Sassoon. It finishes strong with some Vietnam stories and Hasting’s own riveting account of the last days of the 1982 Falklands War, Altogether, it weighs in at exactly 500 pages (almost as heavy as the content). It provides fascinating and sometimes heart-wrenching personal screenshots of horrifying moments before, during, and after some of the world’s most terrible battles, and is required reading for those seeking unique insights into the worst of them.

But since the OBMA came before the dawn of the Internet Age, my copy is a testament to how different the new anthologies will be. The real anecdotal gems of today are now on soldier’s blogs and not “embedded” under the bylines, datelines, and banners of The New York Times or The Jerusalem Post. They are on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, where today’s crop of historians are still too ill-equipped.

They won’t, for example, be telling you that Iraqi soldiers totally rock the robot. I have no idea why (I’m not a historian), but clearly, they do, even when it’s dark out and the only way their moves can be appreciated is with the aid of a military grade night vision camera…

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