War

In his best-selling WAR , Vanity Fair ‘s Sebastian Junger explains how war envelops the soldiers who make it.  Some representative quotations:

“Almost none of the things that make life feel worth living back home are present at Restrepo, so the entire range of a young man’s self-worth has to be found within the ragged choreography of a firefight.  The men talk about it and dream about it and rehearse for it and analyze it afterward . . . . It’s the ultimate test, and some of the men worry they’ll never again be satisfied with a ‘normal life’ . . . after the amount of combat they’ve been in.  They worry they may have been ruined for anything else.”

“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 . . . . 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 no one has ever heard of.”

“When men say that they miss combat, it’s not that they actually miss getting shot at – you’d have to be deranged – it’s that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted.  They miss being in a world where human relations are entirely governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life.”

Several reactions to this: First, Junger’s observations help to make sense of the fairly common historical combination of cultural degeneracy and war-making.  When normal life seems pointless and decadent, war is an attractive alternative.  War is a way to make a difference.

Second, what does the US do with a sizable group of committed, well-trained, efficient soldiers who have been “ruined for anything else” but war?  What happens to them when (if?) America is at peace?

Third, the churches should inspire and equip her young men for something like a “moral equivalent of war.”  (“Like” it, because war is not per se immoral.)  The church should give her young men a sense that even in normal life they are “in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted.”  To do that, we have to recover some deeper, real sense of what it means to be a church militant.