The landmine is eternally prepared to take victims. In common parlance, it is the perfect soldier, the 'eternal sentry.' The war ends, the landmine goes on killing.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Landmines are different from other conventional weapons. When a war is over, the landmines stay in the ground and continue to kill - for decades.
Guns go home with the soldiers, but landmines are designed to kill - mindlessly, out of control, for years.
Even soldiers from the Vietnam War had said that when they were fighting in that war, the landmine was just one of any number of weapons to use in the fighting. It wasn't until they began to think about the aftermath and the legacy of landmines that they recognized the long-term, indiscriminate impact of the weapon.
The United Nations is committed to ridding the world of anti-personnel landmines.
Do you know that every day, 10 people in Afghanistan are injured by landmines? It will continue for the next 50 years, because the country has the largest number of landmines in the world.
Since World War II, most of the conflicts in the world have been internal conflicts. The weapon of choice in those wars has all too often been landmines - to such a degree that what we find today are tens of millions of landmines contaminating approximately 70 countries around the world.
The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.
War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.
Desertion is the army's dirty little secret. Since the beginning of the Iraq war, more than 20,000 American soldiers have given up the fight. Most of them disappear while at home on leave, fading into a network of family and friends, and the army does not typically chase them down.
Landmines distinguish themselves because once they have been sown, once the soldier walks away from the weapon, the landmine cannot tell the difference between a soldier or a civilian - a woman, a child, a grandmother going out to collect firewood to make the family meal.