I did want to comment, though, that this is a really interesting history lesson. It follows the campaigns of a Russian in what I think was called the 3rd Shock Army, and a Marine in the 1st Division. I forget the details of the Russian, although it ends in the Reichstag, in what was likely something not too different from what actually happened. They really do create the feeling in the game of the world ending, and they really do give you some sense of the SIZE of that war, which was unbelievable. They say World War 2 cost 60 million lives in all. The Japanese killed large numbers of Chinese, particularly. All sides lost many, many soldiers. I want to say I read the Soviets lost some 20 million people alone. The Nazis starved the Ukrainians, again. You have the Holocaust, and pervasive hunger among hundreds of millions of people, perhaps even a billion or more.
The Marine fights in Peleliu and Okinawa, in what was also likely reasonably realistic. Playing the Marine, particularly, it becomes very obvious very quickly how crazy in some ways you had to be to fight that war. Death is everywhere. Death is random. And you can’t be 100% alert 100% of the time. It’s impossible. They say 12,000 men died, I believe in those two battles. You only had a 1 in 5 chance of making it through the war in the Pacific alive, and it is easy to see why. You can do everything right: use cover, fire accurately, and somebody you missed, a random grenade or mortar attack, or lucky or accurate fire from a distance can end your life in an instant.
And it becomes obvious very quickly too how easy it is to shoot your friends and fellow Marines in what is sometimes the literal fog of battle. A moments hesitation can get you killed, but sometimes it takes a moment’s hesitation to avoid a fatal mistake. More than once–OK, quite a few times–I shot the wrong people, and it struck me how hard that would be to live with, even if you knew their chances otherwise of making it through were slim. And it must have happened many times. Friendly fire is not something anybody wants to talk about, but it must happen often in all wars.
So yes, I played video games. No, I did not pursue the Buddhadharma today. But I did still choose to learn from it, a bit, at any rate.