To Dakota’s surprise, it wasn’t the shelling that terrified him most. What wasn’t normal, he said, was the feeling of dread while he hid and listened as Russian attack helicopters strafed the position his team of tank hunters had just fled. Foreign fighters from the United States and elsewhere described glaring disparities between what they expected the war to be like and what they experienced. (...) By the end of the second night, eight of the 20 volunteers in Dakota’s unit had abandoned their posts, including a fellow Marine veteran who appeared to break his machine gun with a rock...