Our wits have long turned

In his new book "The Forever War," Dexter Filkins quotes a Marine describing war: “When you’re training for this, you joke about it, you can’t wait to see the real thing. Then when you see it, when you see the real thing, you never want to see it again.” Although this simple but devastating observation was made by a young Marine who saw combat in Afghanistan, it could have been made by a mud-encrusted Doughboy in the Argonne, a Johnny Reb retreating at Gettysburg or a Roman centurion standing amid butchered bodies on a Carthaginian plain. This time it will be different, the old men pledge. It will be the war to end all wars. And it will surely be over by Christmas. And yet war's result is always the same: catastrophe, win or lose. Over countless millenia, young soldiers have marched exultant into war ― for king, for country, for vengeance, for glory ― only to return home chastened and hollowed by war's ugly reality. But tangible memories of the "real thing," as the young Marine put it, evanesce almost as quickly as the smoke from the last canon fired. Veterans understandably retreat into themselves, fleeing the awfulness they've seen. Stirred by gratitude (and guilt), the citizenry and its impressionable young, both wholly innocent of war's reality, mount their soldiers on heroic pedestals. The war is inevitably pasteurized as the necessary conflict between good and evil, one bravely fought by the latest Greatest Generation. War of course is always most righteous for those not obligated to fight it or for jocular young soldiers not yet exposed to the coppery taste of its bloody reality. Thus the endless cycle begins anew. Realizing he is going mad, Shakespeare's King Lear lamented, "My wits begin to turn." I'm afraid humanity's wits in matters of war turned long ago.