A recent Newsweek cover story on the war’s most fearless doctor brought back painful memories. As a very young boy I was on the receiving end of Anglo-American bombing while I lived in Tatoi, a northern suburb of Athens where the royal summer palace was situated and next to which my family had a house. Near the summer palace lay a tiny Greek military airport occupied by the German Luftwaffe. By 1942, aged six, I learned what collateral damage was all about.

Not that we called it that, back then. It was called bad luck. Just as the French farmers in Normandy cursed the offshore batteries that turned their houses into bombed-out hovels before the D-Day landing—forget what the movies show—so did the Greeks living near Tatoi fulminate against those dropping bombs on them in defense of liberty, democracy, and freedom. Hollywood types don’t understand what bombs can do to humans, so they show children cheering and adults lifting their glasses to their unseen benefactors, but the truth is somewhat different. The earth trembles, men and women lose their bowels, the noise scares the living daylights out of one, the screams of the wounded remain in the psyche. Even worse is the weeping of the survivors over lost loved ones after the sirens have screeched the all-clear. One thing is for sure: no one looks up to the sky and thanks Ike or Winnie. To the contrary.

These are the facts. The rest is Hollywood and neocon propaganda. Those doing the fighting, of course, have it much worse. As General Sherman said, war is hell, but successive generations with abundant evidence before them still persist in fighting.

Why men fight is a moral issue of great importance, especially today, when non-fighters instigate wars that others fight for them. “I adore war. It’s like a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic. I have never been so well or so happy,” said the poet Julian Grenfell before dying at the western front. Grenfell was killed early on, before disillusionment had the chance to set in. That other wonderful poet, Harvard-educated Alan Seeger, serving with the French Foreign Legion, told his mother that “every minute here is worth weeks of ordinary experience.” He perished two years later at the Somme. I guess some poets have a death wish.

Not the gallant Siegfried Sassoon, who survived a nervous breakdown to fight again and live to a ripe old age. Here’s what he had to say about war: “I knew a simple soldier boy / Who grinned at life in empty joy, / Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, / And whistled early with the lark. / In winter trenches, cowed and glum, / With crumps and lice and lack of rum, / He put a bullet through his brain. / No one spoke of him again. / You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye / Who cheer when soldier lads march by, / Sneak home and pray you’ll never know / The hell where youth and laughter go.”

Hear, hear. Incidentally, when the campaign against French fries was on, I couldn’t help thinking how wrong the sofa-samurais had it. Did you know that from Aug. 4, 1914 to Aug. 29, 1914, 260,000 French soldiers were killed without advancing the front by a single foot? “The more men died, the more urgently a cause had to be found for them to die for.” Does it sound familiar? Like staying the course?

So why do men fight? The question of motivation of the Wehrmacht, the unity of the German army sustained to the bitter end, had little to do with political indoctrination. (That applied to elite Waffen SS units only.) It had to do with the social organization of army units. A captured sergeant laughed when his interrogators inquired about the politics of his men. “When you ask this question, I realize well that you have no idea what makes a soldier fight. If we think at all it is about Heimat [home]. We fight for each other …”

Needless to say, modern-day weapons make for unheroic deaths. Men are blown to tatters. Paul Fussell writes in Doing Battle how red-hot metal tore into his body, while the man next to him turned a whitish green while letting out a subdued groan before dying.

High-explosive projectiles scatter dreadful evidence of mortality. Here’s William Manchester landing on Iwo Jima: “You tripped over strange viscera fifteen feet long, over bodies cut in half at the waist. Legs and arms, and heads bearing only necks, lay fifty feet from the closest torsos. The stench of burning flesh was everywhere…” Flying fragments of the human body themselves cause wounds. Manchester’s father had a piece of one of his men’s tibia buried in his back. Others were hit by flying arms and were temporarily stunned.

But the boys back home tell us to stick with it. Bush says that despite more tough fighting, progress is being made. After all, the mission has been accomplished.

Papa Hemingway comes to mind. In A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry has had enough. “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory … abstract words such as honor and courage were obscene beside the names of villages, the names of rivers …”

Read that you neocons and hang your heads in shame. But I won’t hold my breath until you do.