Sheepdog Tip of the Day, After Combat tip 70
In my fiction book, The Two-Space War, there is a young private who has had all the bad experiences of most green recruits in combat. At the end of the book, he tells his captain, "The part that bothers me is the lies. It's all a lie. The poetry and the glory and the honor, it's a lie. I've seen war, and it's not like that." The captain replies, "No, my friend, it's not a lie. It's men making the best of a dirty, nasty job that has to be done. There are times when evil comes, when darkness falls, and good men must fight. Then we make a virtue of necessity. Pain shared is pain divided. Joy shared is joy multiplied. Every night around the campfire, or with our mess mates over dinner, we talk about the battle. Each time we divide our pain and we multiply our joy. Until in the end we've turned combat into something we can live with, something we can keep on doing. It would be a lie if we completely forgot the pain, the suffering and the loss. But it's not a lie to recognize that there is good to be found in battle. And it's not a lie to focus on the good parts, to magnify the joy and divide the pain so that we can live with it. There is glory, if we give it to them. There is honor, if we honor those who do it. Sometimes wars have to be fought. It destroys enough, it harms enough during the war. It is foolishness, it is madness to let it destroy us after the war. So we turn it into something we can live with. And we turn ourselves into creatures who can do this dirty, desperate job, do it well, and live with it afterward."
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Combat
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