Reply #28: Bragi, have you ever been in a war?

[tomreedtoon]

I ask this because you're applying angry motives to soldiers in a war. This may come as a surprise to you, but war changes everything.

Soldiers might have all kinds of motivations for being soldiers - serving their country, defending a higher cause, avoiding going to prison, whatever. But when they're in war, and people are shooting at them, they can only respond by shooting back.

A soldier has only one motivation. He wants to stay alive in a place where the person at his elbow has just been killed. He is not the emotionless killing machine that propaganda and presumptuous people like to claim. He is scared and desperate.

Sure, they cheer and scream when they've killed the enemy. They're alive in a moment when they might have been killed. That'd make me happier than a Red Sox fan.

And in a guerilla war, like Vietnam or Iraq, when the enemy melts into a civiian population, and even children can be enticed to carry a live grenade to a soldier, of course they are going to shoot civilians. Of course it's ugly. It's war.

War changes everything. It's not exactly a secret, except in official position papers, but men trapped in combat, especially under heavy fire, quite often have sex with one another. It's not homosexuality or even really sexuality; it's sheer tension and fear and the need to feel alive amidst death. That's also the reason for most rapes committed on the civilian population. That's what war does to people.

Attacking soldiers for being soldiers, and acting like soldiers, is the worst legacy of the American New Left of the 1960's. I personally think it was the frustration of the lefties that they were so impotent at changing American policy, because they didn't understand how politics or people's emotions worked. (The protests at Chicago 1968 got Nixon elected, and brought five more years of war. Good job, guys.) So, they attacked the target in front of them, the poor tortured dogface just off the boat.

How about focussing your anger on the real reason this war is continuing; that Democrats and liberals have all kinds of good ideas, but no way to reach the hearts and souls of most common people? How about understanding how ordinary people are frightened into stampeding, and offering them some hope, some inspiration - some love? The things the Right can pretend to provide, but never really deliver?