(The Nationalist, 28 March 2003)
What do soldiers think of war? Here are a few thoughts, all from soldiers:
‘It does not take monsters to commit monstrous acts.’
‘The passions that are to be kindled in war must already be inherent in the people.’
‘The soldier’s greatest fear is the fear of blushing. Men killed and men died because they were afraid not to. They were too frightened to be cowards.’
‘I volunteered for everything that I did. But I didn’t really volunteer for the emotions and the life afterwards.’
‘The Marines say there’s no such thing as an ex-Marine. And it’s true.’
‘War is an environment that will psychologically debilitate 98 per cent of all who participate in it for any length of time.’
‘Estimates of the number of Vietnam veterans who have committed suicide ranges from 10,000 to 120,000’.
‘Violence… is an addiction.’
‘I think there is a good deal of evidence that we [Americans] thought all along that we were a redeemer nation. There was a lot of illusion in our national history.’
‘Unravelling the myth of superiority is crucial to understanding the truth about war and the military, because it is the unspoken consent to myth that has caused fearsome numbers of young soldiers to die needlessly on the battlefield.’
‘Vietnam was more than just a mistake, an aberration. It was part of our national ethos of arrogance, a predictable result of a long history of imperialism.’
‘We [in the West] are imperialistic because we insist on living at a certain level of consumption, a level that is impossible to support unless we steal, collectively.’
‘I do a lot of work trying to get men to give up their definition of manhood as machismo – to start being emotionally honest, to leave the competitive world…’
(From Dan Hallock, Bloody Hell: the Price Soldiers Pay, Plough, Farmington, Pennsylvania, USA, 1999)