Is war a grand adventure?

For awhile, it can be. For the lucky, it will be. For some, it will be worse than death. Fred Reed writes about it:

He grew up in the woods and rivers of the county, fishing and swimming and hunting under sprawling blue skies and driving his rattletrap car insanely and lying on the moss with his girl and watching the branches above groping the sky and marveling as the young do at the strangeness of life, and the war came in a far country. It doesn’t matter which. It was just a country.

His father, an angry man emitting the foul stench of patriotism, said his duty was to become a soldier and kill whoever it was in the far country, wherever it was. His father didn’t know or much care. It didn’t matter. Somebody would know. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. It would be a grand adventure, an uncle said.

Read the rest.