Down the road, a little girl, no older than five and dressed in a pretty orange and gold dress, lay dead in a ditch next to the body of a man who may have been her father. Half his head was missing.
One cannot help but gasp when confronted by such trauma and agony, unlimited in both its gore and its senselessness. The wet sound of living body parts splattering… the snap and pop of limbs dismembered… and the sight of someone’s animated face at the moment of their decapitation… all happening under the shrieking, bellowing, screaming roar of the lethal machines of war. It lifts one–both body and soul–out of the monotonous daily repitition of dull and threatless lives into an experience of the sublime. For those who come through it conscious and in one piece, such an experience transcends ethical judgement, it transports one beyond such petty distinctions as friend or foe, panic or peace, alive or dead, and it plants one firmly in the center of an unvarnished, undiluted, unmitigated, unadulterated experience of being terribly alive.
Until humankind learns to experience life with the same degree of intensity, clarity, and desperate cruciality as when in the throes of mortal combat, until then humans will continue to make war. It really has nothing to do with ideology or politics or even justice; those are merely the pretenses upon which we build our horrific stage of war, and where we exorcize the demons of our unsatisfying lives.