There's No Reason To Do

Maybe The Ultimate Wound Is The One That Makes You Miss The War You Got It In.

Society Can Give Its Young Men Almost Any Job And They'll Figure How To Do It. They'll Suffer For It And Die For It And Watch Their Friends Die For It, But In The End, It Will Get Done. That Only Means That Society Should Be Careful About What It Asks For. ... Soldiers Themselves Are Reluctant To Evaluate The Costs Of War, But Someone Must. That Evaluation, Ongoing And Unadulterated By Politics, May Be The One Thing A Country Absolutely Owes The Soldiers Who Defend Its Borders.

Often People Who Live Through The Trauma Are Nostalgic When It's Over. When I Went Back To Bosnia 20 Years After The Brutal Civil War, Even People Who Had Been Badly Wounded Told Me They Missed Those Times. They Were Missing Their More Courageous Selves.

I Think Human Society For Tens Of Thousands Of Years Has Sent Young Men Out In Small Groups To Do Things That Are Necessary But Very Dangerous. And They've Always Gotten Killed Doing It. And They've Always Turned It Into A Matter Of Honor And A Way Of Gaining Acceptance Back Into Society If They Survived.

In Some Ways, Risk-taking Is The Ultimate Act Of Self-indulgence , An Obscene Insult To The Preciousness Of Life. And Yet, How Can One Dismiss Something That Persists Despite Every Reasonable Theory That It Shouldn't?