Can we ever truly glorify war?
I was born in 1966. My brother, who is 21 years older than me, was in the Army at that time. He had been conscripted to serve during the Vietnam War. As circumstances would have it, he was badly injured in an accident before he was shipped overseas and was discharged from the Army. Two of his childhood friends weren’t so lucky (if you can call a badly broken arm lucky). They never came home.
I’ve never really had to face the prospect of going to war. The next major conflict that Australia was involved in was the first Gulf War in 1991. I was 25. It’s possible that if things had gone badly, I might have faced the same prospect as my brother, but it was over almost before it began. By the time the second Gulf War began in 2003, I was 37. It’s possible that I could have been called up for war at that age, but historically it’s been younger men who take on the burden of serving their country during times of war.
I’m now 46. It’s unlikely that I will ever have to face the prospect of going to war. Of course, if another country was invading Australia, who knows? Maybe I would try to enlist, maybe I wouldn’t. It’s a difficult thing to answer. By nature I am a pacifist. I hate war and hate the idea of killing another human being, but faced with defending my country, or my city, or my suburb, or my home… who knows what I could be capable of.
In close hand-to-hand conflict, I suspect my survival instinct would just take over and I would kill without thinking about it. Could I shoot someone standing on the other side of a field from me? If they were shooting back at me, maybe. Could I press a button that would shoot a missile over the horizon and kill 1,000s of people? That’s even more difficult to answer. If I wasn’t confronted with the consequence of pressing the button – if I wasn’t exposed to the images of death and destruction unleashed by that one simple action – could I sleep at night? I hope not. I hope I couldn’t press the button in the first place.
I often wonder why we still have wars. Surely no one actually wants to fight in a war, and yet war still happens everyday. The aging hippie in me still wonders why people keep fighting in wars. What if everyone just stopped? If no one was prepared to pull the trigger, fly the plane, sail the ship, drive the tank, or program the drone, all wars could stop. Right now. I know, I know… that’s just as realistic as believing in rainbow-farting unicorns… but I can dream can’t I?
How would you cope with war? Could you kill someone to defend your country?
