No amount of books read or movies seen allows one to fully understand or express what a soldier goes through, relative to death, coping, or their sense of humor. I myself am not a military man like some on here, or some I know, but I understand the basic principle that there is a difference in simulated experience, and practical, or real world experience, and that everything is fairly relative.
For example, my friends like to write stories from time to time, most of which are about mercenaries. They described the mercenaries taking apart their guns to clean them. A lot of those who read it were impressed because they liked that the author knew that guns were taken apart for cleaning. I wasn't, because I do it all the time, and having done it for real, I saw the passage as ambiguous and vague to the point where it was uninspired and bland.
You also fail to account for human distinction. It might not be hard for a soldier to kill someone, or to joke about what they do. All you have to go on is media depiction, which is more or less bullshit, or secondhand opinions, which belong to someone else. But until you as your own person experience it for yourself, you shouldn't take what you or anyone says about warfare and copy paste it as your own belief, opinion, or interpretation. You can try and understand it with everything you can get, but don't get hard set on it, because most of what you "know" is still, more or less, bullshit, or someone else's opinion.
I don't say this to shit on the real military men or their experiences, quite the contrary. They know themselves and know what they have seen, and they understand their own firsthand opinion, and that's exactly what I'm talking about. None of the civilians know shit, and as soon as we realize that, we can start being more intelligible about this, and everything.
|