The tragedy is that poor unfortunate grunts only get to know it's a racket after it's too late - when half of them are already dead. Unfortunately, it seems to be a chararistic of the human condition that learning about war is a slow prossess and that the horrors of experiencing it cannot passed down from one generation to the next. Experience gathered over millennia has demonstrated that it's essentially impossible…
I live in Maryland and keep a boat at a marina in Annapolis. By chance I meet students from the Naval Academy now and then. Every time I meet one the advice I share with them is I greatly hope no one will have to call them to action and get them or their fellow soldiers killed as a result of more stupid military adventurism. And every single time there's been a look of revelation, if just a brief glimmer, as they rea…
Yeah, let's hope it sinks in, but with some it can be too slow - after the event when they've PTSD.
I recall around the time I was drafted I occasionally got into discussion about these issues (it was never a big or oft repeated topic).
My current stance now has changed very little from my position back then. For some, the 'bravado' mob, perhaps 10% -15% of the platoon, took my position of war being the absolute last resort as me being 'yellow'. It never erupted into serious animosity but I was never part of their in group. Others thought similarly to me but wouldn't say much (or for that matter neither did I), still others said nothing.
The interesting aspect of this was that I developed these views very early when I was a child. My father and my uncles served in WWII and whilst the War was mentioned it was always a muted discussion and I learned quickly that there was something truly rotten about war - I sort of picked the notion up as if by osmosis.
I often wonder what the home environment of the 'bravado' mob was like. In one sense it can't have been too different to mine in that almost every father of kids in my school had also been in the War.
Perhaps it's one's temperament or personality in that I picked up the negative vibes whilst others did not.
I've often thought about it since but I can't say I'm any more informed now than in the past.