War

by Sebastian Junger

Reaction times have been studied extensively in controlled settings and have shown that men have faster reaction times than women and athletes have faster reaction times than nonathletes. Tests with soccer players have shown that the “point of no return” for a penalty kick—when the kicker can no longer change his mind about where to send the ball—is around a quarter of a second. In other words, if the goalkeeper waits until the kicker’s foot is less than a quarter second from the ball and then dives in one direction, the kicker doesn’t have enough time to adjust his kick.

At some point a call came in over the radio that the Scouts were watching a guy crawl around on the mountainside without a leg. They watched until he stopped moving and then they called in that he’d died. Everyone at Restrepo cheered. That night I couldn’t sleep and I crept out of my bunk and went and sat on the roof of the ammo hooch. It was

Nearly fifty American soldiers have died carrying out those orders. I’m not

saying that’s a lot or a little, but the cost does need to be acknowledged. Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war (for some reason, the closer you are to combat the less inclined you are to question it), but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders.

There are other costs to war as well—vaguer ones that don’t lend themselves to conventional math. One American soldier has died for every hundred yards of forward progress in the valley, but what about the survivors? Is that territory worth the psychological cost of learning to cheer someone’s death...