In the last 50 years, where was the worst place
on the planet to be stationed ?
The obvious assumption would be Vietnam, going by the loss of 60,000 + troops, with Iraq being a close second, but there are some pretty unpleasant-looking 'hot zones' in Africa and other places too.
My brother is a Marine veteran retired in Hawaii ( Persian Gulf War 1),
but I've never been in.
In my own personal experience the worst place to be deployed would have to be a tossup between Ethiopia and Bosnia. Before my long range surveillance detachment deployed to Somalia in 1993 ahead of Task Force Ranger, we staged with other US and international relief effort forces in two Ethiopian towns: Dire Dawa and Raaso . While I witnessed no actual violence there outside of street scuffles, the general feeling of the place was one of utter hopelessness set to the backdrop of a geographical paradise amid bombed out ghettos and unimaginable poverty. The desert inferno winds combined with cool sea breezes to form balmy, soothing zephyrs. The people we interacted with were inquisitive about American life and kind, but living under the shadow of extreme oppression. Everywhere seemed to be tokens or reminders that the place to belong more the ancient world than the modern and was absolutely barbaric.
Bosnia, on the other hand, should have made me feel at home. I was deployed there mid-90's as part of the UN Peacekeeping force—on a combined force reconnaissance unit made of up of American Army Rangers, Australians, Belgians and Russians. I should have felt at home there because the Serbian forested hills and mountains with tiny, sleepy villages nestled between them reminded me of, were in fact almost identical to, the mountains of northern Pennsylvania. From the air it did remind me of back home, but down at ground level the place was a meat grinder. It was such a bad place to be deployed because after returning home from there it forever made me jumpy, paranoid in a certain way—the simple act, which I had previously loved, of hiking and hunting the PA mountains, like I could step on land mine at any moment or might stumble upon a half-filled in mass grave. Even the smell of rotting leaves out in the woods still makes me feel weak in the stomach thinking about that place.
In peacetime, the worst place I was stationed (and in some ways also the best) was Ft. Irwin, Ca. In some ways I had never felt such an overwhelming sensation of mental and physical desolation as I did while riding around the Mojave Desert on Irwin. Some of the most remote areas out there are just soul shatteringly empty, devoid of life. I mean, I loved being able to ride down to LA and explore on the weekends, and the desert mountains out there are amazing, but just the overall feeling of emptiness there really got to me for some reason. Strangely enough, I'd like to go back sometime.
