“Everyone tells you that you did what you had to do, and I just hate that comment because I didn’t have to do any of it. I didn’t have to join the Army; I didn’t have to become airborne infantry. But I did. And that comment — ‘You did what you had to do’ — just drives me insane. Because is that what God’s going to say — ‘You did what you had to do? Welcome to heaven?’ I don’t think so.”
— Brendan O’Byrne, quoted in Restrepo co-director Sebastian Junger’s New York Times op-ed “Why Would Anyone Miss War?”
A few years ago, when I was doing some work at the VA in Palo Alto, I was absolutely shocked by the number of terribly injured Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans that wanted to return to the battlefield, return to their units, and go back to war. I came up with some explanations in my head, but none of them really made any sense.
“It’s their home, their family,” the folks at the VA would say, tired of saying the same thing to every visitor who stared at them open mouthed when told how many wanted to go back. “They want to go home.”
Junger brings it more into focus, saying that people in the military may want to go back because they come home to a land that tries to explain away what they just experienced:
“…liberals tend to be scandalized that war can be tremendously alluring to young men, and conservatives rarely acknowledge that war kills far more innocent people than guilty ones. Soldiers understand both of these things but don’t know how to talk about them when met with blank stares from friends and family back home.”
