There is a reason I was unable to watch war movies or action movies for almost five years after getting back from Afghanistan. War-as-entertainment feels profoundly disrespectful—even disgusting—after having seen the thing itself. When barbaric thugs murder your friend, you don’t exactly look forward to seeing it reenacted on the silver screen by pretty-boy Hollywood actors, set to a John Williams score. Some things are cheapened when they are chopped up into commercially digestible bits for a mass audience.
War is not fun. Most of the time, war is boring. It involved a ton of sitting around in brutally hot tents, followed by inane make-work or guard-duty under the brutally hot sun, followed by failed attempts to sleep in other tents. Then war is suddenly sickening, when you see the aftermath of some battle, suicide attack, or IED: strewn body parts, detached faces, charred lumps of smeared offal casually tossed on the road alongside the leavings of somebody’s table, a broken refrigerator, a rusty car.
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