Quote:
Originally Posted by Botnst
Wiping-out the enemy is always going to be a winner. It literally could be no other way.
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You have a narrow definition of courage. I suspect that part of the reason that vets of seriously hard wars (Pacific Theater Vets) don't talk much about their experience was that slaughtering people in hand to hand combat is a seriously taxing experience. It's one I haven't had but I gather that it will haunt you for years. I'm not even crazy about clubbing a rat that was non-lethally caught by a trap. I do it of course but there is some unpleasantness to it.
I can only imagine what might go through the mind of a young man who is not cut from Ollie North cloth in the midst of the Vn War, and some of this was from horses' mouths. After seeing troops from South Vn go through the motions and generally stand back and let the Americans do the fighting, and after getting the impression that we were backing really unpopular people - sure losers most likely, they began to lose stomach for aggressively taking death to the enemy; began to wonder about the designation of the Vietnamese in question as 'the enemy.'
I could see being more enthusiastic about killing the enemy in some conflicts than others. Stepping back and saying "WTF? - I'm not carrying this gun any more, I'm forfeiting the fight," well not in the heat of battle but safely at base would take its own sort of courage. Isn't murder generally thought to be among the serious sins? How does one define murder?