Guerrilla warfare is often mythologised as noble resistance, but in practice:
🔻 Constant fear is normal
Fighters live with the knowledge that capture means torture, interrogation, and execution – not just for them but often for their families or associates.
Sleep deprivation, stress, and trauma are daily realities. Even minor mistakes (footprints, scent trails, intercepted messages) can be fatal.
🔻 Life is brutal and unstable
Food insecurity, infections, and untreated wounds are common.
You must remain hypervigilant, always ready to flee, hide, or kill.
There is little room for personal safety, rest, or emotional comfort.
🔻 Psychological burden is immense
Killing is never ‘clean’ or easy, especially for civilians forced into violence.
Watching comrades captured or executed produces profound survivor’s guilt and trauma.
Fighters face moral injury from harming civilians or being unable to protect them.
🔻 Torture upon capture is standard practice
In most counterinsurgency doctrines (including US, Soviet, and NATO-aligned states historically), captured guerrillas are interrogated harshly to extract intelligence about networks. Torture is employed as a psychological weapon against broader resistance movements.
🔻 There is little glory in it
Success is measured in delays, sabotage, and forcing an occupier to expend disproportionate resources – not in grand battlefield victories.
Many die unrecognised, and if the movement fails, their suffering gains no historical redemption.
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⚠️ Bottom line:
Guerrilla warfare is the realm of desperation – not heroics. Ordinary civilians take up arms when there is no other choice: when the alternative is annihilation or enslavement. It is a path of extreme sacrifice requiring unbreakable conviction and acceptance of torture or death as the probable outcome.