John Duttenhofer, a 24-year-old former customer service rep from Colorado, is making headlines this week after his work fighting ISIS received international attention.
According to the Daily Mail, Duttenhofer quit his white collar job and moved to Syria to fight alongside the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) against ISIS in Raqqa.
The wild part of his story is that he has no formal military training — it all comes from his Call Of Duty experience. He claims playing up to 13 hours a day prepared him for first-person combat situations.
Duttenhofer was in Syria for almost six months but returned home after his combat buddy was killed by an IED. He publicly spoke about his experience abroad for the first time recently.
“I had no guilt about [killing the enemy],” he said. “They 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.”
I’ve heard the argument that playing video games helps soldiers a lot. I used to be pretty skeptical about it until a buddy of mine went to flight school and revealed the instructors actually prefer to take pilots with video game experience. It improves your hand-eye coordination and your reactive thinking tends to be stronger. I’m not saying this guy went through the equivalent of boot camp, but if the Kurds institutionalized some sort of COD training before sending their soldiers off to fight they might be able to help clean this mess up a lot quicker.
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