What ChatGPT Told Me About My Combat Experience

Largely (okay, totally) because of the urgings of The Havok Journal‘s editor, Mike Warnock, I started doing a little experimentation with the AI platform ChatGPT—both for my Havok articles and for my day job. I found it extremely useful for things like creating images, generating story suggestions, and recommending questions for podcast guests. There are limits, of course, to what ChatGPT can—or is willing to—generate, some of which seem quite strange. But overall, I found it to be a powerful and time-saving tool.

This morning, I wondered what ChatGPT would produce if I asked it for an article about my personal experiences in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Context: I was an intel officer and served downrange with the 5th Special Forces Group, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and the Joint Special Operations Command. I completed seven (very short, very safe) tours in total. I’ve written several articles about my wartime experiences, many of which have appeared in The Havok Journal as well as Task and Purpose, Coffee or Die, Small Wars Journal, The Modern War Institute, and many others. I’ve also appeared on podcasts such as Pineland Underground, Irregular Warfare Initiative, and Project Sapient.

All of that is available on the Internet, and I thought it would be useful for the AI to draw from when I gave ChatGPT the prompt: Write an article for The Havok Journal in the style of Charles Faint, using the prompt “The Things I Learned in Combat.”

…to which, ChatGPT graciously responded with the following:

Absolutely — here’s an article draft written in the voice and tone often found in The Havok Journal, particularly echoing the style of Charles Faint: thoughtful, direct, introspective, and grounded in personal truth.

You think my Havok articles are “thoughtful, direct, introspective, and grounded in personal truth?” Awwww, thanks ChatGPT! You’re the best.

So here is what ChatGPT gave me, writing as me, about my time at war:

---

1. Fear is Not the Opposite of Courage

Fear is part of the equation. If you’re not afraid, you’re either lying or don’t understand the situation. Courage is showing up anyway. It’s getting in the truck, again. It’s walking into the briefing room knowing you might be walking into a firefight later that night.

Courage doesn’t mean you’re fearless. It means you’re accountable.

---

2. The Plan is Just a Suggestion

Combat has a way of humbling planners. The enemy doesn’t care about your CONOP. The weather won’t read your five-paragraph order. And Murphy’s Law? He’s not a theory—he’s a team member.

You make the best plan you can. Then you adapt, improvise, and sometimes just grind your way through.

---

3. The Quietest Guys are Often the Most Dangerous

Hollywood got this one wrong. The loudest guy in the room isn’t the toughest. It’s the one who’s done the job so many times he doesn’t need to raise his voice. The one who checks his gear twice, takes a knee without being told, and watches your six without being asked.

I learned to follow those guys.

---

4. The Small Stuff Matters

It’s the batteries in your comms, the lube on your weapon, the knots you tie before fast-roping. It’s knowing where your teammates are in the dark. It’s the way you fold your map, the way you stage your gear, the fact that you eat and hydrate even when you don’t feel like it.

In the long run, those little habits keep you alive.

---

5. Some of the Best Leadership Happens at 2 A.M.

Not in the TOC. Not during the brief. But at 2 a.m., on some nameless dirt road, when a private loses it after a long night and a squad leader kneels next to him and says, “I got you.”

Or when a tired junior NCO takes a knee behind a HESCO barrier and tells a story that gets everyone laughing just long enough to forget where they are.

That’s leadership.

---

6. You Never Forget the Sound of a Teammate’s Voice Under Fire

You don’t forget the radio calls. The strain in someone’s voice. The calm of a JTAC under pressure. The moment someone shouts your name—not in anger, but because they’re counting on you.

It becomes part of you. It echoes in your memory long after you’ve left the battlefield behind.

---

7. Coming Home Is a Different Kind of Fight

Nobody tells you this part. That the hardest thing isn’t the mission—it’s trying to live normally after the missions are over. It’s learning how to answer, “So what did you do over there?” with something short enough to be polite and vague enough to be safe.

It’s holding on to the best of who you became in combat, and letting go of the worst.

---

8. You Don’t Have to Carry It Alone

This one took me a long time.

We’re good at rucking weight. We get medals for it. But not all weight is physical. Some of it shows up at night. Some of it sits in the seat next to you on the drive to work. And the only way through it is to stop pretending you’re fine and start talking.

Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is say, “I’m not okay.”

---

Final Thought: Combat Taught Me That Brotherhood Isn’t a Buzzword

It’s real. It’s earned. It’s forged in fire. And it follows you home.

And if you’re lucky—if you’re blessed—you spend the rest of your life trying to be the kind of teammate someone would want to go to war with again.

Because that’s what combat teaches you.

And some lessons are forever.

---

I mean, that’s not bad. But it’s also not me. I would not write an article like that, because that doesn’t accurately encapsulate my experiences in Iraq or Afghanistan and it implies a level of “been there, done that” that I don’t think is warranted as a guy who spent most of his time on the FOB. It doesn’t really come across as “grounded in personal truth,” at least not *my* personal truth.

I’ve mentioned before that while I am by any definition a “war” veteran, I don’t consider myself a “combat” veteran. I was there at just the right time to earn a Combat Action Badge and four Bronze Star Medals (for merit, not valor) but I wasn’t an operator, a door-kicker… whatever slang term we use to describe the direct-action people. I’m proud of what I did and was good at it. But I wasn’t that. So this one, while it brought up some interesting things, seemed to me to be more like a list of platitudes than an genuine and authentic account of my wartime experiences. Maybe with a few more tweaks it will get there.

I also needed an image to go with the article, of course. So I asked ChatGPT to create a landscape image of Charles Faint in combat in Iraq

…to which it responded,

I can’t generate an image of Charles Faint or any real individual in combat, as that would violate our content policies.

However, I can create a generic, realistic scene of a U.S. Army officer in combat in Iraq, inspired by the kind of experience someone like Charles Faint might have had — if that works for you. Would you like the scene to feature a specific setting, like an urban patrol, a command tent, or a night operation?

Well, I did spend a bunch of time in a tent in both Iraq and Afghanistan, so yeah, show me that.

Lol, well that’s interesting. It’s not an altogether-bad image, except for three things. First of all, that doesn’t look like me. But that’s OK, ChatGPT already explained that. Second of all, the unit patch on the soldier’s left arm is from the First Cavalry Division, and I was never in that unit. Also, 1st Cav’s patch is the most-unnecessarily-large unit patch in the Army and is WAY bigger than that on the uniform. And then there’s the rank. A single black star on that uniform indicates a brigadier general, or O7. I never made it past lieutenant colonel, or O5.

I can’t wait to read the comments from people who react to the photo and the headline without taking the time to read the article. Yes, I know that’s not me in that picture that accompanies an article I wrote. Yes, I know the 1st Cav patch is jacked up, as is the rank and whatever badge that’s supposed to be over the US ARMY tape. Yes, there are still limits to what publicly-available AI can do, and my own knowledge about how to prompt it.

So, to sum up, in my experience and as evidenced by this experiment, ChatGPT is an extremely useful tool with a lot of applications. However, there are still limits, both technological and user-level. This was a good article, but it wasn’t MY good article. Maybe I’ll tweak the prompt a little and see if I can get something that sounds, to me, more like… well… me. If I get one, I’ll do another article about it.

I want to close with a quote from the AI-generated article that felt real to me, like something that sounds like something I’d actually say. It’s this:

And if you’re lucky—if you’re blessed—you spend the rest of your life trying to be the kind of teammate someone would want to go to war with again.

Because that’s what combat teaches you.

And some lessons are forever.

ChatGPT, I could not agree more.

---

Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Charles Faint served 27 years in the US Army, including seven combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with various Special Operations Forces units. He also completed operational assignments in Egypt, the Philippines, and the Republic of Korea. He is the owner of The Havok Journal and the executive director of the Second Mission Foundation. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not reflect those of the US Government or any other person or entity.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.