I had put this on my “to read” list a while ago and when it came up availability at the library I had totally forgotten what it was.

Half-expecting a sci-fi novel this one came as a bit of a shock but once I settled into it I really appreciated the writing.

I didn’t realize so much of it was actual fact until the author’s note at the end.

The best bit for me was the clear connection drawn between what these men from the front lines were experiencing and complaints women had made for years, and how differently they were treated.

Meaty and intelligent,contains a few segments about the horrors of war, but isn't overwhelmingly sad or atrocity-filled.

“If you were born in a country or at a time not only when nobody comes to kill your wife and your children, but also nobody comes to ask you to kill the wives and children of others, then render thanks to God and go in peace. But always keep this thought in mind: you might be luckier than I, but you’re not a better person.”

-Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones

This is war. This is not honor. This is not glory. This is not right. This is not just. This is not a game played with lives and loves and delineations of mind and body, a board set with pieces played on the country level for some concept of 'stability' that takes very little to destabilize. This is war.

This is an experiment on a grand scale, a love-fest for the more academically inclined, 'interesting material' in the battered bodies and broken souls spit up out of a gigantic machine that has no rhyme or reason. This is the result of masculinity bred on stories of adventure and physical expertise, on shutting up and slimming down the emotions into unfeeling heroics and righteous fury, on boyhood dreams of being 'brave', let loose in comradeship in the face of corpses spit up in your face and death walking the grounds and laughing at your pitiful attempts to cope and spurring you on to love, but not too much. This is the immovable object meeting the oh so movable minds to the point of triumphing over matter, legs that refuse to move, tongues that refuse to speak, screams and cries and shrieks bleeding out of consciences that cannot reason out why and refuse to consider anything but the 'rational explanation'.

Tell me, what is rationality? What is sanity? What is the standard of normality you will grade these atrocities on with so much undeniable proof shambling towards you on sewn up sleeves, crawling towards you with so many stories to tell, if they can bear to speak them. If you can bear to listen. If you are capable of sticking to the lines and the rules set down by those before you, no matter how much they stretch and bleed and trap you in nightmares that have no single 'trauma' to explain them. As if humanity can only be broken by a singularity of a specific magnitude of horror, calibrated by those who know nothing of it.

Rationality is taking in these fractured relics, these twisted meshes of screams and bones, these tortured playthings of those who have been permitted to control countries, and fixing them. Focusing on the physical, and belittling the mental. Acknowledging the atrocious hypocrisy of the system, and sending those who have suffered the worst of it right back into its jaws. Seeing the similarities between gradations of neuroses on the battlefield and hysterics during peacetime, and doing nothing. Playing god because god help us there is no other recourse left to take that will end in maintenance of our own 'rationality'.

Let us have those who make the decisions be the ones who must watch those who die. Let us have those who send them out be the ones who must put them back together. Let us have those who love war be the ones to come to grips with the futility of rational thought. Let us have those who believe that violence in the name of one's country and conceptions of masculinity is just be the ones who must cope when all the rules are shredded by the reality and life is a trap between barbed wire and the endless sea. Let us have those who want it, have it. Have all of it. Every last and horrific part.

In today's world, the leading cause of death in active duty U.S. military personnel is suicide. We haven't learned much since in the past century, despite those who have seen the terror before them and the terror behind and have as a last ditch effort left us writing, the truth of the matter. When will we look at these accounts and start to think:

Nothing can justify this, he'd thought. Nothing nothing nothing.

Who knows.

When I’m asleep, dreaming and drowsed and warm,
They come, the homeless ones, the noiseless dead.
While the dim charging breakers of the storm
Rumble and drone and bellow overhead,
Out of the gloom they gather about my bead.
They whisper to my heart; their thoughts are mine.

‘Why are you here with all your watches ended?
‘From Ypres to Frise we sought you in the line.’
In bitter safety I awake, unfriended;
And while the dawn begins with slashing rain
I think of the Battalion in the mud.
‘When are you going back to them again?
‘Are they not still your brothers through our blood?’

-Siegfried Sassoon, 'Sick Leave'