While playing FPS video games like COD, we have always put ourselves in the shoes of the soldiers. One man actually went ahead and lived the experience live.
John Duttenhofer from Colorado was an avid Call of Duty gamer who had familiarized himself with the basics of weaponry and warfare, but he wanted more. He traveled to Syria in 2018 to join a movement in Raqqa to liberate that city from ISIS.
Duttenhofer said that playing Call of Duty for more than half a day was invaluable.
Video games prepared me in a way for knowing strategies and how not to get killed, like how to use cover and not to stand in the open,They weren’t something I picked up because I was going out there to fight, but as a kid I played every day after school. I could sit down and put 13 hours in like it was nothing.
In Syria, he underwent weapons training and learnt Kudish with the help of other volunteers before being out on the field.
His days were generally spent playing Dungeons and Dragons and chatting with friends, while at night he would help the Kurdish soldiers in liberation by re occupying empty buildings and retaliating the ISIS onslaught.
He returned after 6 months, saying that he has no guilt except for the fact that he did not kill any terrorists.
“I had no guilt about it,” he said.
“[ISIS] are a group worse than the Nazis. They want to live the dark ages out again and I didn’t want to live in a world with them.”
This story first appeared on the Daily Mail on February 22, 2018.
