War: A Summary
I post here a recent note from a cousin, a daughter of my uncle Duane. You will recall he was crippled by a fighter attack while serving as a navigator in B-17 raid over Norway in 1943.
"When I was growing up my Dad would have nightmares and we would here him yell out. I always thought that he was re-living when he got hurt. However, years later I found out that he was yelling for the people on the ground who would be killed.
I don't think that people ever get over war."
posted by JAB at 7:02 PM
2 Comments:
Dr. X posts this from the Erich Maria Remarque Center for Holy Fuck Never Again Studies:
"Even the bad guys have a hard time with it. From Wikipedia's article on the Holocaust:
" 'Early mass murders by German soldiers of thousands of Jews in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, by shooting, had caused widespread reports of discomfort and demoralization among the German troops. Commanders had complained to their superiors that the face-to-face killings had a severely negative psychological impact on soldiers [citation needed].' "
The incidents tend to demonstrate that training and social expectation can overwhelm an individual's deepest sense of what is moral action.
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