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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (192880)	7/1/2012 2:27:55 AM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 542104

Bentway, re: "I really fail to understand why anyone would want to fight in a war." I don't think you can underestimate the capacity young men have for deliberately putting themselves into dangerous situations where they have to prove themselves. I think you see this in just about every culture and in every era. In some respects I find this acceptable; after all, the young men who put themselves at risk will pay the price themselves. What isn't acceptable is that the old men who send them seem to believe that by sending others to kill and die they've somehow proven themselves. And, of course, once they are actually fighting in a war there are very few men who find that they're "good" at it. The rest would get out if they could but of course wars don't end when the soldiers want to stop killing and dying. That's too bad cause we'd have much shorter wars if we'd let them "volunteer" to quit the war theatre. There are, however, a small percentage of soldiers who are very good at fighting. For them it's like playing a game where the stakes are unbelievably high. It makes gambling look anemic and it takes tremendous mental and sometimes athletic skills, especially mental skills. It's addictive as hell because you'll have a hard time getting that adrenalin rush somewhere else and when fighting a war there are times when the rush is there for days or weeks on end. In addition, the sense of belonging and camaraderie among soldiers fighting to stay alive is very powerful. So, that's why someone might want to fight in a war. I'm not, of course, recommending it for my family, but I have to say that for some it's the thing they did best in their lives, as much as they may have hated the war itself. Ed PS, with all due respect to Stone, you didn't have to smoke dope in Vietnam to stay human, you just had to stay human.