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Why Men Love War (1984)
- ISL 9y agoThis is a compelling long read. If the subject is of interest, the movie Restrepo and this talk from Sebastian Junger [1] may be of interest, too. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn0zEBhvwXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn0zEBhvwXY
- drak0n1c 9y agoStorm of Steel by Ernst Jünger is a WW1 classic that unabashedly explores the primal excitement of war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_J%C3%BCnger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_J%C3%BCnger
- mmirate 9y ago> 42 American soldiers and many more Afghans were killed in the "Valley of Death" before it was finally abandoned, written off as more trouble than it was worth. Only 42 to get that nickname? After the World Wars happened? Wow. We've gotten soft in modern times.
- saagarjha 9y agoMore like, we’ve reduced the casualty rate in armed conflict? Plus, you’re forgetting about those who were killed that were not American.
- mmirate 9y agoThe nickname was American and a symbol of fear/dread, thus I presume it was a result of the American deaths, not the Afghan deaths.
- megaman22 9y agoThe entire butcher's bill from the War on Terror and the Iraq war for the US military, over a decade and a half, would be less than a quiet day during one of the offensives on the Western Front in WW1 or the Eastern in WW2.
- mariodiana 9y agoThe book, "War," from Sebastian Junger is well worth a read. I read it before seeing "Restrepo" (which I also recommend). On Goodreads, I wrote this about Junger's book and his take on men and war after finishing it: "[T]he experience of warfare seems to strike a chord deep within the psyche of the men in combat. The bonding among men, the heroism, the swinging extremes of victory won only by the palpable threat of mortal danger, the adrenaline rush and flood of endorphins during and after battle seem to be almost overwhelming to the human animal, eclipsing any larger moral considerations or even the rest of what we might call everyday life. To the men in the thick of the fight, it's an unrepeatable experience that they find themselves strangely missing years afterwards. What they miss doesn't minimize the horror of what they've experienced, and that's what they find so strange. In some respects once the shooting starts, the soldiers have all the justification they need to continue indefinitely. The immediacy of the experience provides satisfaction enough and requires no further rationale. In some ways it creates a microcosm of life and packs more than a lifetime's worth of living into its fleeting moments. How can life afterwards compare?"
- stevenmays 9y agoThe book Tribe was also good.
- Nzen 9y agoThis reminds me of the comments [0] on skydiving and depression from last month. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840955 > I heard a interview with a vet and climber once who described the appeal of alpinism as "all of the good parts of combat, without the shooting or any conscious thing trying to cause me harm".
- ryanmarsh 9y agoHe was doing his best to self medicate. That’s him trying to convince himself the medicine is good. Nothing comes close to combat. Nothing. There’s such an ocean between the sickening frantic chaotic competition with Death and “oh shit if this rock slips I’m going to end up a paragraph on page two of the morning paper”. Plenty of us combat vets climb, and for the same reasons. Don’t be confused. Climbing can kill you like cigarettes, combat is like smoking crack while trying to land a jet on a carrier deck at night in a storm.
- wufufufu 9y agoI find it ironic that he talks about the power of love after ditching the Vietnamese girl he was going to have a future with "the way all men betrayed the women who helped them through the war".
- sillysaurus3 9y agoSmearing someone's reputation is probably ok, but only with substantive sources. Otherwise it's far too easy to just throw out a half-truth.
- wufufufu 9y agoRead the last 7-8 paragraphs. The talk about "the power of love" cheapens what is otherwise a resonating piece. No where else does love (apart from "loving" war) come into play.
- Mononokay 9y ago> But I believe that most men who have been to war would have to admit, if they are honest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it too, loved it as much as anything that has happened to them before or since. This sounds conspicuously like the conservative version of the people who say "All men secretly desire to rape women."
- 1000units 9y agoThose both sound conservative to me, and I'm very conservative.
- mc32 9y agoIs that really a conservative view? I’ve seen that sentiment on decidedly non conservative sites.
- TimTheTinker 9y agoI welcome the day when ideas stand or fall on their own and are no longer pre-judged and rejected because they are “conservative”, “liberal”, “religious”, “scientific”, or whatever.
- 1000units 9y agoMy more educated friends go a step further and start calling things 'Hegelian' and such when I'm just trying to get directly at matters.
- dbasedweeb 9y agoA fun drinking game is to ask them to rigorously define what “Hegelian” is, and every time the explanation becomes pointlessly vague or self-referential, drink. I take no responsibility for the inevitable stomach pumping though.
- 1000units 9y ago
- brad0 9y agoI liked reading about the two forces at play here. The ideal self vs the reality of who you really are. Extreme moments such as war can cause you to learn so much more about your darker aspects. Great read.
- bazeblackwood 9y agoNot that this isn't an interesting read (albeit mostly a lengthy rationalization of shared trauma) but they really need some better editors over at Esquire — spelling, spacing and grammatical errors everywhere. Edit: there appears also in the text, frequently, the world "tile" as an adjective. "tile night" "tile blackness" "tile war". Methinks someone needs a better find + replace regex.
- noonespecial 9y agoLoos like a poor OCR of a previous text. All they really needed was a proofreader. Why they didn't even bother is the real question.
- robotresearcher 9y agoI can’t tell if that was funny on purpose or not.
- bazeblackwood 9y agoNevermind, I just finished the second half. A bit necrophilic if you ask me. Author would probably be a lot less romantic were he to come back with life and not limb.
- burfog 9y ago"til" in many cases should be "th" "m" in many cases should be "rn"
- reese_john 9y agoTheodore Roosevelt, an admitted war enthusiast, once said: "A just war is in the long run far better for a man's soul than the most prosperous peace."
- wallace_f 9y agoDo you have any insight or references I could read that would help me understand why someone would feel this way?
- ObeyTheGuts 9y agocause you not be spoiled brat, you be tight sharp and not fagg. man is as good as his capability to kill, u might not kill but you should always be obsessed about improving ur deadliness. anyone who thinks its wrong way of living is dellusional iniside his lil bubble. peace is a balance of deadly forces
- baruchthescribe 9y agoMichael Herr's Dispatches probably comes the closest.
- pryce 9y agoConsider Chris Hedges' "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2002), which examines the way that War creates (or perhaps comprises) a culture of its own, and acts as a transformative experience that has little if any civilian analogue. The work is flawed, and I believe one passage had a disputed claim of plagiarism, but this work still explores these issues better than I have seen elsewhere.
- booleandilemma 9y agoIt is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it. — Robert E. Lee
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- danieltillett 9y agoHumans appear to have a separate thought module when it comes to war - my guess is it is probably biological and has undergone a great deal of selection over the millions of years since the first proto-wars were fought successfully by our ancestors against our non-ancestors. It is quite useful to keep this is mind when trying to organise social unitary to tackle important issues and why calls for a "war on x" fail unless the x is real war target.
- aphextron 9y agoThis is the single thing that freaked me out the most about our military and made me realize it wasn't the place for me when I joined at 17. Being a high school kid and meeting people who will look you straight in the eye and laugh as they talk about murdering someone, or watching their comrade's head explode. And not hypothetically, but in real, gruesome detail. I guess there's a need for that kind of person to exist to do our dirty work. But they are broken human beings and it is an absolute tragedy.
- JackCh 9y ago>"people who will look you straight in the eye and laugh as they talk about murdering someone" Murdering, or killing? I ask because murder refers to a specific sort of unlawful killing, but it's not clear if you're using the term precisely. Most would probably say there's substantial difference between laughing about killing somebody who was trying to kill you (not murder) and laughing about killing a civilian in cold blood (murder).
- aphextron 9y agoOne person's killing is another's murder. The act is the same regardless. There is no innocent self defense in war.
- JackCh 9y ago> "The act is the same regardless." I think most would say context matters.
- drdeadringer 9y agoLegally, at least.
- JackCh 9y agoI think most people would say that context matters ethically or morally too.
- pryce 9y agoThis writer circles poignant issues but I don't feel like he has enough insight to shed any real illumination on them. I'm actually pretty alarmed that he seems to think society no longer glamourises war and in almost the same breath describes how our cultural depictions are transmuted from showing outright psychopathy to evoking glamour (Wagner being played for the US invasion of Granada in 1983, 4 years after Apocalypse Now hit cinemas).
- baruchthescribe 9y agoHe fought in Vietnam. He has more than enough insight by definition.
- pryce 9y agoInsight and personal experience are not synonyms: as an example, poor coders may possess a great deal of experience, but little insight. This author certainly has thought about this a great deal - I love how he intentionally weaves a kind of incoherence into his own writing while showing why attempting to 'telling it straight' could never communicate what it was like on the ground. I absolutely love Tim O'Brien's writing for this. But deciding 'he fought in Vietnam, therefore his analysis of what War means for Men In General are beyond critique' seems a warped view to have; is this any different from the kind of childish thought-terminating cliches that we see when people defer to the 'Founding Fathers'? the idea that the matter at hand is to be settled by nominating a Person Who Is Always Right? I think it would more more of an insult to him to declare his experiences immune from criticism than it would be to engage with them and try to figure out what does or doesn't stick. And for me the incoherence of claiming that the romantic notion of war died with Verdun and Passchendaele and then demonstrating that this is an outright lie with the Grenada story might even amount to a neat trick if it was done deftly. And deftly would mean not later glamourising it himself towards the end of the same article as the great and eternal Crucible of Manhood.
- kingkawn 9y agoThe unraveling of all prohibition carries primal joy
- tim333 9y agoIt's interesting to read this first hand account after having read some more science focused stuff. >The power of war, like the power of love, springs from man's heart. Both actually almost certainly arise from evolution. Love helps reproduce the species, wiping out the adjacent tribe and grabbing their resources helps also and if you are too nice they may wipe you instead. See 'Demonic Males' and the like for how chimps and early man did much the same kind of thing with of the order of a third of males dying in war like activities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonic_Males https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonic_Males Now we're getting quite good at not having wars (see Pinkers stuff or https://medium.com/future-crunch/the-decline-of-war-8760f9a5b5ce https://medium.com/future-crunch/the-decline-of-war-8760f9a5...) through things like the UN, EU democracy and so on but the warlike instincts remain and come out in football, political battles, video games and the movies. Also I've found things like high altitude mountaineering have some war like aspects - bunch of mostly blokes fighting the mountain with some risk of death - and are quite fun.
- MrBuddyCasino 9y agoPinkers theory about how we have become more peaceful are apparently not backed by sufficient statistical evidence. I always take NNT’s statements with a grain of salt, but the pure stats/math stuff seems solid.
- tim333 9y agoTaleb seems to be criticising stuff Pinker didn't really say. Pinker's arguments are mostly look at this graph / dataset, haven't the numbers gone down, maybe this is why and he isn't really trying to do sophisticated statistical analysis generally. Taleb then attacks and says he hasn't done sophisticated statistical analysis but that's not really Pinker's point.
- MrBuddyCasino 9y agoBut isn't Taleb's core criticism precisely the lack of rigorous statistics backing Pinker's claims? I mean you can't just write a book with claims in it backed by pretty graphs and data and then go "sorry, was never meant to be hard science lol". Because then we're in bullshitting territory, unless I missed your point?
- mcfood 9y agoThat was a pretty narrow viewpoint. It seemed to lack any consideration of Vietnam as a country or the Vietnamese people affected by his love of war. Do those fighting for their countries and lives share that love? So I guess my takeaway of his point is: War is some special experience that Western Men have (and not women, Vietnamese, or anyone else), where they get to fulfil some kind of murderous power fantasy over people who don't matter? Maybe this is the sort of story he has to tell himself to ignore the woman he betrayed, the desecrated bodies he laughed at, the utter disregard he held for everything outside himself and his band of brothers.
- ryanmarsh 9y agoWar is some special experience that Western Men have ... where they get to fulfil some kind of murderous power fantasy over people who don't matter? No. Nothing about that is western. That’s just history. War is the most human you’ll ever be. I don’t know how to explain it to someone who doesn’t want to believe their own potential for malevolence. It’s like eating from the forbidden tree in the garden. You’re eyes become open to the savage visceral reality that we’re nothing more than primates that talk.
- placebo 9y agoTrue. Nothing about violence is specifically western. Also true that the reality is that humans have evolved from more primitive animals that are totally driven by survival instincts and thus will usually act that way too (though mostly disguised in more subtle forms than war). What you're missing though (or perhaps deliberately ignoring) is the potential of humans to rise above being marionettes of their animal instinct. Acting by instinct has its upsides sometimes. It certainly brings raw animal gratification but rationalising that we're "nothing more than primates that talk" is just an excuse to enjoy the animal gratification while ignoring the consequences (which beyond hurting other sentient beings also blocks one's way to real freedom, which is the real tragedy).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ryanx435 9y agoFucking dickwads in this thread who can't understand that violence has solved more problems in human history than any other solution. Its like, "oh, I live in a peaceful society, therefore all other societies in the history of humanity should have known better" when they don't realize that america is very violent, has always been violent, and has more capacity for violence than any other society in the history of the planet. Don't you realize that your "peace" is literally maintained by the us' overwhelming threat of force? Goddamn it's threads like this that really makes the ignorance of the hacker news community stand out to me in all aspects outside of tech. Source: been commenting here since 2008 and also deployed twice and got out as a sergeant in the US Marine Corps and have literally made the decision on who lived/died on the battle space.
- dba7dba 9y agoI think a lot of young folks (many in HN) know history from what they watch/read/hear in daily news, which is a terrible source. So that may be why. Major nations of modern era (since end of WW2) have not gone to total wars simply because of the availability of nukes. Not because people suddenly became enlightened and refused to fight a war.
- ILikeConemowk 9y ago> in daily news More like what they are told in "political satire comedy shows."
- erikpukinskis 9y agoDo you think telecommunications networks have had a smaller effect than the nuclear threat? Those networks have grown exponentially since the wars.
- dba7dba 9y agoUS did not use all of its arsenals (including nukes) against Chinese troops in the Korean War, despite serious setbacks. I think this was due to Russia also having the nukes. Or maybe US govt thought it should never use nukes ever again after seeing the horrible effect after using them in Japan. Either way, before telecomm network connected populace of different nations as closely as it has, US faced certain instances where some generals requested using nukes but ultimately didn't happen. Most likely because the other side (Soviets) also had them...
- fapjacks 9y agoI was in the infantry for over a decade. I joined before 9/11, but I did reenlist some years afterward, and I deployed a bunch, and fought many times. The thing about the article is that he says right there in the first couple paragraphs... Nobody that hasn't been there will understand the core message here. Worse, it's not socially palatable to embrace your innate human violence, despite it being such an intrinsic biological function of survival. And so even if some people might understand something of what this guy is talking about, they'd never admit it openly, and generally the most appropriate response our culture expects is some kind of pearl-clutching. So that's what people do. Even if they're genuinely curious and want to understand. Even if they do understand this universal truth to some degree. The one thing I discovered that surprised me the most when I joined was how normal everybody was. Soldiers are people, too. Sure, there are psychos and shitheads and scumbags, just like any community. But we were all born on planet Earth. What I mean to say is this: Violence is built into every human being. Or as one of my favorite quotes of Captain Picard goes, "The seed of violence is within each of us". When I joined the army, I realized the most dangerous thing that could happen is for regular people to think that they're not capable of the things they read in the news.
- w_t_payne 9y agoThank you for saying this. Thank you.
- agumonkey 9y agoAbout violence: I often feel that there's an "art" or a skill to master violence. As you say it's incarnation of survival; but emotionally and socially too. As a guy who naturally submits peacefully even if I feel aggressed. At some point I had enough and started to be able to embody my internal violent reaction. Not as an act but as a communication device. You're pushing me, you're about to get pushed, you can read it on my face, my tone, my posture / body language. If you didn't mean it then fine, let's keep it at that, apologies are welcome. That's something that most people can't really learn and get stepped on by others. (the recent woman movement displayed part of that, they stood silent, now they stopped doing so). Society tries to tame violence, all good, but by supressing it we're not really improving things, we need people to master it in a way. ps: a few years back some guy wrote a piece about why he loved war; title being counter intuitive, you'd expect a violent idiot but it was not. His point is that war is mentally easier than society, where every body lies, and confusion is normal. In war he said things become binary, friend or ennemy, inaction = death, decision = life. I found it very interesting.
- arca_vorago 9y agoIt provides a sense of purpose, it builds comraderie, and actual combat is more addictive than any drug. There ya go, the basics in easily digestible civilian form.
- agumonkey 9y agoI often wonder if economic competition is not a re-emergence of that need into a non physical manner. Kinda like sport. You try to kill your opponent but symbolically (team or alone).
- fapjacks 9y agoIt absolutely is, and it's at the core of everything else we do -- even if it doesn't seem that way on the surface -- because violence is a core component of what it means to be human. Not only human, but an animal from mother nature. Violence is just nature asserting itself. Anyone that thinks they can beat mother nature is fooling themselves.
- Pica_soO 9y agoIt provides the missing counter-piece to human civilization, ever since we started farming. You can not be intellectually honest with yourself and against war(before the invention of fertilizer and the atomic bomb) if your lifestyle produces x^2 kids every generation. So war always was the other part of the cyclus civilization was ramping up towards. And this cycle deformed us - the culture as a total down to the individual whose psychological variations and epigenetics are basically barely hidden adaptions to these cycles. So even the most seemingly peaceful society is one recession away from becoming a emotionally hardened band rallying behind some leader to wage conflict upon whoever is foreign and in reach. Which is one of the reason why the economic mill must be kept going, no matter what- the alternative is not some settled down hippie life- but a war of all against all. Respect to whoever coerced the current path (cell-phones with cameras, internet) into being. It seems to be pretty reliable when it comes to instilling self-control and preventing the war mode partially. And of course, thanks goes to Los Alamos, the atomic egg that prevents the best at power-grabbing from sending millions to die like in the iran-iraq war or the WorldWars.
- jeandejean 9y agoThat's a very personal testimony based on the own author experience, not an overall study on all army veterans. I doubt all veterans are "playing by the rules" by saying publicly how horrible the war is but secretly recalling the great moments. If we go that way, are all PTSD victims phonies part of the show? They're all part of making this narrative credible? Be serious one minute... What this guy enjoyed was the brotherhood and exceptional means mobilized for the purpose of the war, not the killing itself.
- DanielBMarkham 9y agoThis article resonated with me. I was a Marine (no combat), didn't like it, but knew and respected the hell out of people who made a career out of it. I learned several lessons in the service, many of which people don't want to talk about. It takes only a few armed and motivated men to dominate hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. So disarmament and pacifism is not a workable strategy until the day we start programming people as if they were machines. Somebody has to have the job of being the most violent person in the room. Everybody is violent. We are violent as a species. I think this is the thing that bothers so many people. They'd rather just turn away, pretend it's only others, and so forth. There is a ton of disgust and denial about who we are. We confuse who we aspire to be with our actual state. There may be Ghandis and Jesuses in our midst, but they are an extremely small percentage of the population. We are monkeys that kill things. War is bad because of what is does to all participants, not just because it involves hurting and killing others. War slowly erodes our civilization, making more and more extreme things "normal". It doesn't matter who wins, who loses, or what the cause is. War harms everybody -- perhaps especially the ones who win, who view war as a logical remedy for whatever the next problem that they have. Those who have served avoid war not out of kindness for others, but because of the terrible destruction it will bring on our own society every time it is used. (This, by the way, is another argument for the citizen soldier. Making war a separate profession that most people never experience just makes the self destruction that war does to civilization even worse, by isolating it and keeping it hidden. It also causes all sorts of misunderstandings and prejudices. The volunteer armed forces was a hack in the middle of Vietnam. It worked for a while, but it is having horrible long-term effects. Very bad stuff.) I think the analogy that stuck with me most about this was that war may be the male version of motherhood, that is, the closest we come to being true to our biological selves. Somehow this feels right, although that's just intuition on my part. Note: I am as non-violent as a person can get. I'm not trying to say that any of this is okay, simply that it appears to exist, whether it's okay or not.
- tomxor 9y ago> Everybody is violent. We are violent as a species. I think this is the thing that bothers so many people. They'd rather just turn away, pretend it's only others, and so forth. There is a ton of disgust and denial about who we are. We confuse who we aspire to be with our actual state. There may be Ghandis and Jesuses in our midst, but they are an extremely small percentage of the population. We are monkeys that kill things. I agree with the sentiment of your post about the denialism in the modern world, but I slightly disagree that people are one or the other in extreme proportions, I feel like a good analogy is to view those potentials more as phenotypes that can be expressed to varying degrees along side each other (simultaneously), and a phenotype can change from one moment to the next depending on the environment. In other words - I think we are both Gandhi and the violent monkey and many other things. I say this not from philosophical or psychological musings, I say this simply because with the slightest introspection I feel the potential for it all in me simultaneously - there's the part of me that arrogantly "knows" he can be the most bad ass muthafucka alive if needed, and part of me who has a more rationally minded world view and looks down upon mindless and pointless violence, and a great many things in between. > I think the analogy that stuck with me most about this was that war may be the male version of motherhood, that is, the closest we come to being true to our biological selves. Absolutely, I don't think I need to argue this one for any man, but perhaps I can just resonate this: i'm not a very social person, I didn't learn these traits, but I definitely feel the propensity for violence given the right conditions, be it something admirable i.e "protective", or not i.e "vengful". As usual understanding these things rather than rejecting them out of some miss-placed shame of humanity is the correct way to move forward, accept who we are and understand why. Understanding them should gives us the power to either follow or reject the emotion that drives them to be expressed, rather than being led by them blindly like an animal.
- Ritsuko_akagi 9y agosounds like cocaine
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Nimitz14 9y agoThat was fantastic. It is rare for someone to speak so publicly about such feelings. I felt that it was coming from the heart. A real connection. I immediately checked whether he might have written anything else but was disappointed to find nothing. For others looking for more I very strongly recommend Dispatches by Michael Herr. That book is probably the most beautiful of the 20th century.
- forkLding 9y agoGuy sounds like an asshole, I'm pretty sure theres plenty Vietnamese during the Vietnam War who didn't love the "war". War sounds sexy from afar because theres relief to soldiers with guns who can later on just leave that life and rest with their actual kids while Vietnamese civilians wander around trying to survive and not die from bombings, shootings or to be played around by soldiers from any side. One can ask any Syrian refugee about how much they love the Syrian Civil War to understand this. My consensus is basically if you have some kind of power or can be relieved later on, war is a great experience. If its your actual life, then you dread walking outside to gather supplies and food to survive. War is only fun when you actually have some decent control over it.
- microcolonel 9y agoI think unfortunately no distinction has been drawn between combat and war. War sucks, but apparently combat is very compelling.
- supergirl 9y agoit is more like why men with tanks love war against people with sticks. if this guy got horribly injured he would still love war? if his city back home was bombed into the ground he would still look back with joy at his shenanigans in vietnamese whorehouses?
- theredking 9y agoIn way yes, it is not really about winning it is about being truly at the edge of your abilities mentally and physically though I understand your sentiment there is something innately human about war, about being on your limits, facing death and standing tall surely it is not beautiful and we can argue the ethics and motivations but it is a part of what makes us human.
- supergirl 9y agoI'm not saying it's about winning, I'm saying he will find it too painful to remember "being on his limits, facing death, etc." if he was in a real war where his side also suffered losses or he was injured, captured, etc. those painful memories would dominate his view
- jacquesm 9y agoNo need to look for the winners, just go ask the injured. Plenty of vets in the US came to their senses after getting injured chasing some foreign adventure under the guise of defense.