War

by Sebastian Junger

By cowardice I do not mean fear. Cowardice…is a label we reserve for something a man does. What passes through his mind is his own affair.

The fact that networks of highly mobile amateurs can confound—even defeat—a professional army is the only thing that has prevented empires from completely determining the course of history. Whether that is a good thing or not depends on what amateurs you’re talking about—or what empires—but it does mean that you can’t predict the outcome of a war simply by looking at the numbers.

War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound 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.

The idea that so much could be determined by so little was sort of intolerable. It made all of life look terrifying;

Religion gives a man enough courage to face the overwhelming,

“Firemen are going to get killed. When they join the department they face that fact. When a man becomes a fireman his greatest act of bravery has been accomplished. What he does after that is all in the line of work.”

The dopamine reward system exists in both sexes but is stronger in men, and as a result, men are more likely to become obsessively involved in such things as hunting, gambling, computer games, and war.

Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.