I have a friend that is a WWII buff, and we sat and talked a lot about stuff like the war and the reasons behind it, and you now it's all in the uniform. Once you're in it, it usually does all the work for you.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.
I always give much attention to military character and to psychological and morale conditions.
I grew up in a military family, and there's something about that military-style uniform, all cleaned up, a brutal control effort the military necessarily breeds.
Statistics have shown that mortality increases perceptibly in the military during wartime.
When I first went to school, I was fighting all the time. The soldier mentality was still in me. I kept getting expelled. I found it hard to take instructions from anyone who wasn't a military commander.
The combat environment has the effect of flattening out civilian identities. If you're young or old, or a graduate from Harvard or the son of a farmer from Alabama, or if you're gay or straight or good-looking or ugly: none of those things matters much in combat, as long as you can conform to the group expectations.
Soldiering is a very important profession, is it not?
It's important to study and understand your responsibilities within any profession, but it's particularly important for military officers to read, think, discuss, and write about the problem of war and warfare so they can understand not just the changes in the character of warfare but also the continuities.
The thing that strikes you most about being a soldier in a war zone and in action to the small extent that I was, when actually people start shooting, which happened to me a couple of times, everything goes on automatic and there's a feeling of tremendous elevation and even elation.
Oh my God, you look at all the uniforms in Star Wars, and it's all Nazi iconography.