Our adult wars are incomprehensible from anything but the stratospheric vantage point. There, where the grotesque detail of war’s human impact–the blitzed nursery, the mother’s hysterical phone calls, the lifeboats filled with slipper-less corpses–can no longer be made out, a war can be viewed as a conflict of ideas. Close up, however, war is senseless. For civilians, life becomes a series of overlapping scandals and outrages, each one a reaction to some new capricious tragedy.
