War is Insanely Exciting
During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Amos, a close friend, a tank commander in the IDF, saw combat on the Golan. He fought ferociously for several days without sleep--hello dexedrine!--and only relinquished command when he could no longer see straight.
Witnesses said that Amos was a hero, leading his small force against overwhelming numbers of Syrian tanks and helping turn the tide of battle.
When I asked Amos how many enemy tanks he killed, he just shook his head and murmured, "Many, many..." In fact, smoke on the battleground was so thick it was almost impossible to count enemy wreckage.
Amos returned to his beautiful wife--he looked like Paul Newman and she was, I kid you not, Eva Marie Saint's double--and his job as a landscape gardener on a kibbutz near Haifa. It was a quiet life, almost idyllic.
A few months after the cease-fire, I noticed that Amos was moping around, visibly depressed, sneaking shots of whiskey with his afternoon coffee.
"Are you okay," I asked.
"Not really."
I expected Amos to tell me that he was having combat flashbacks, that he could still smell the sickening odor of charred flesh mingled with burning petrol and melting steel.
He said: "I am bored to death. I miss it. Really miss it."
"Miss what?"
"The war. It was... fantastic."
Which leads me to Sebastian Junger's book War. Junger spent fourteen months in 2007-2008 embedded with one platoon--30 soldiers--of the 173rd Airborne brigade in eastern Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, a blood-soaked landscape that sounds like the far side of Mars or a portion of hell on earth.
This is one of the best records of men in war I have ever read. The focus of the journalistic narrative is the love these men have for one another. As a display of affection--most women will be baffled by this ritual--the soldiers frequently beat each other to a pulp. So intense is this love that soldiers who absolutely hate each other do not hesitate to risk their lives for the one they despise.
Men in combat rarely fight for a cause, an abstract ideal. Rather, men fight and die for their fellow soldiers.
Such a profound connection does not exist civilian life.
Junger's honesty is refreshing as he dares puncture universal pieties about combat:
War is a lot of things and its useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. It's insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sounds it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know. Soldiers discuss that fact with each other and eventually with their chaplains and their shrinks and maybe even with their spouses, but the public will never hear about it. It's just not something that many people want to acknowledged. War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else. Combat isn't where you might die--though that does happen--it's where you find out whether you keep on living. Don't underestimate the power of that revelation. Don't underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time.
