Robert Fisk: This is not about 'bad apples'. This is the horror of war

[Lydia Leftcoast]

12. War encourages demonization of your adversary--even though

your adversary is probably another terrified 19-year-old, someone you wouldn't normally want to kill.

Years ago, Canadian journalist Gwynne Dwyer had a PBS series called War, and one episode was about basic training. It followed a group of American recruits, and Dwyer said that it was almost exactly what he went through as a recruit into the Canadian army. He noted that all countries with a draft start drafting at age 18. There are two reasons: 1) Eighteen-year-olds are at the peak of their physical strength and endurance, 2) That age group is highly susceptible to peer pressure. I suppose that nowadays, he might add that eighteen-year-olds are still partly in teen-age brain mode (I certainly saw this as a college professor) and haven't really processed the fact that they could get killed in battle.

(I once had an anthropology professor who remarked, after some students expressed uneasiness about talking about funeral customs in different cultures, "Yeah, I'm looking at a roomful of twenty-year-old immortals.&quot