A very good read on the Battle for Mosul

All special-­forces soldiers, indeed all Iraqi forces, from the most experienced to the greenest, wore flak jackets and helmets only when ordered to by commanders, commanders only when ordered to by generals and generals never. When I asked why, I was told some variation of “it can’t protect you.” This was not an indictment of the gear, it took a while to realize, but an expression of a rich fatalism, an alloy of courage and resignation and faith. It was another way of saying, “If God wants me to die today, so be it,” a sentiment you heard in so many words all the time from the soldiers and everyone else.

The attitude extended to suicide. A soldier told me about an ambush he was caught in: 35 casualties, a dozen vehicles totaled. They were pinned down overnight. He wasn’t scared of dying, he said, but “was scared of them taking me alive. So I spared a bullet. I call it — we call it, all of us — the mercy bullet. When you are surrounded, you kill yourself.”

I remember a comic book, one of those imprints that looked like indrajal but was not, a story about a soldier, who believed he would only die when he was shot with a bullet bearing his name (literally). Read it as a pre-teen, in the era that commando comics were avaialable at ciruclating libraries. The story somehow stuck in my head after all these years. And, today, while reading this NYT piece, that snippet popped into my head.