It's easy to fault the military as an organization, as easy as with any other. Most of us have had enough experience with them to know what Dilbert knows, even if we can't quip like the master. What's hard is to know the unexplainable of combat and be unable to convey what it's like to those who haven't had the peculiar disorientation of losing whatever ability you've ever had to tell the difference between living and dying. No book or film or general has ever got right, nor any tale told by skulled out vets sober or not. What's never told is what it's like to lose control of mind and body for days weeks and months. Maybe it can't be told, can't be remembered, can't be related in normal ways of communicating. Maybe that's why some of the best war stuff is created by those who've never been there. Enduring an artillery barrage is beyond comprehension, your body goes to pieces under the crushing sound and concussion, and involuntary reactions overwhelm the normal controls of all organs and orifices. Every part goes haywire, beyond stopping, everybody on the scene can't help becoming beaten meat flopping and scrambling to get underground, trying to scream amidst god's loudest roar of thunder and screeching richocheting metal. Bombing is far worse than that. Even the hit of high speed round will hydraulic-ram your blood into parts of your carcass it was never meant to go, and your senses go numb with shock, and nothing works, body or mind. And that's before you become conscious enough to see the savagery the slug's done to your precious gut, arm, leg, crotch -- if it didn't fly through your helmet and skull leaving you permanently satisfied. There's no way to get ready for the worst you'll ever experience and wish you hadn't. Maybe that's why most vets forget what they actually experienced and fall back on the tired and true lies of war stories. Nobody could possibly believe the other if you could manage to tell the truth, which I doubt anybody's got the courage to do, to relive that, when every instinct of survival is to go blank. Which is why you'll see now and then some who just sit and stare a long way past the horizon, like math geniuses in Princeton deep thought. Anyway, this has nothing to do with recruiting and patriotism which are about wholly believable war stories like you see on tv and hear down at the lodge and bar.