Why War Cannot be Generalized

How do you generalize?
War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and
adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love.
War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you
dead.
The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in
truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat.
You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch
in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies.

You admire the fluid
symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shape and proportion, the great
sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white
phosphorous, the purply black glow of napalm, the rocket’s red glare. It’s not pretty, exactly. It’s
astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer
forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the
aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference—a powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war
story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true.
Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any
soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding
proximity to life. After a fire fight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees
are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you
among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin
awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become
by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency.
You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a
kind of largeness to it; a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when
you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love
what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your
foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and
although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things
and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder
and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world
could be and always should be, but now is not
Tim O' Brien "How to Tell a True War Story", The Things They Carried (a set of interrelated stories) (1990)