Let’s try a contrasting possible definition. War is a wild all-out melee between 2 or more nations, guerilla groups or terrorist organizations, which may require nearly the total resources (i.e. not just military) of the involved group or nation (meaning that civilians as part of the military-industrial complex are also involved), and in which almost all rules except winning have failed or been abandoned. But even that more cynical definition is rather academic and sanitized. So let’s be blunt. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about war? It’s killing. It’s purposeful killing. It’s killing on a large scale. We hear about killing in the news and see it portrayed so casually in media and games that we are easily desensitized to it. But did you ever think about how hard it is to kill? I mean real close-up killing in which you see the fear in the man’s eyes, you see the messy blood, you bludgeon, you plunge in the knife or bayonet, you hear him beg for his life for the sake of his children.... A shudder of revulsion overwhelms most of us when we even think of it. That’s because God did not create us to kill. Moses says in Gen 9 that when we kill we are destroying the image of God. It is as if we are trying to destroy the closest thing we see to God. It’s like burning Him in effigy. That doesn’t come naturally. We are not created to do that. Yet the sad reality is that in this time between the Fall and Christ’s return, some evil is so powerful and threatening that it has to be opposed by deadly force. So, until Christ returns, we call on armies to make ordinary people into killers. That’s not easy to do. Let’s look at some of the evidence of that. A baffling discovery was made after battles during the US Civil War 150 years ago. The guns of the dead and wounded were collected from the battle fields to be used again. Remember that these were single shot muskets. After each shot powder and bullet had to be pushed in from the front of the barrel. Many of these guns were found loaded, but not fired. Some were loaded with numerous bullets. How could that be? They discovered that soldiers had pretended to fire and reload as ordered, but, of course, with the noise of battle no commander could hear which soldiers were not really firing. They also found that many other soldiers were purposely aiming to miss. All of this because they could not find it within themselves to kill. They actually found it easier to take a greater risk of being killed rather than to kill. Even as late as WW II studies showed that only about 15-20% of individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier. (Killology, Dave Grossman) That is alarming for an army. If 85% of your soldiers really don’t want to kill, it’s hard to win a war. It’s worse than if 85% of librarians were illiterate. So armies had to fix that problem. By the time I was in Viet Nam, the figures had reversed. About 90% could kill. That’s an astonishing change. You could call that behaviour modification, but it’s much more than that. It comes close to psychological dna change. With a bit of exaggeration you could almost call it a devolutionary species change. You have modified the person, the self, at a very deep level into a creature God never intended that creature to be. How can that be done? At one level, armies and nations tend to do that by demonizing the enemy. In Viet Nam we were fighting godless communism, perceived, with some justification, as a deep threat to christianity and all the freedoms we enjoyed. Of course, nations and armies can also manufacture demons where there are none as Hitler did with Jews, gypsies and others. Real or imagined, totally evil creatures are easier to kill than people. Similarly, armies tend to dehumanize the enemy. We were out to Defeat gooks in black pajamas. It’s easier to kill a gook than a person—even an evil person. Perhaps demonization and dehumanization could be seen as two forms of hate. When I took bayonet training we were told to imagine we were stabbing the hated imaginary man back home in bed with our wife or girl friend. My father fought against the Japanese in WW II. Sixty years later he still talked with bitter hatred about the Japs being a devious species and speaking almost with relish about asphyxiating and incinerating them with flame throwers in the caves to which they had retreated. It’s easier to kill what you hate. So armies find it convenient to inspire hate. But let’s go a step deeper, getting back to definitions of war we earlier talked about. Is war really a game played by nice law-abiding gentlemen under clearly defined rules? It settles us comfortably and shields us partially from the horrors of war to tell ourselves that. Most casualties are then simply the cost of war. What we call atrocities can be simply dismissed as violations of the rules, unusual exceptions, a few bad apples in the barrel like the boy in our story. But I’m going to contend that beneath this public and accepted set of rules there is a powerfully functioning alternate set of rules more deeply indoctrinated than the official ones and that this set of rules explains a lot of what actually happens in the military. If that is true, then the story I told you is not so much a matter of 50 men complicit in a war crime as it is of 50 men working under alternative rules so deeply indoctrinated into them that they are mainly subconscious.