‘THE HORROR'

'Blood-racked barbed wire
Politicians' funeral pyre
Innocents raped with napalm fire…'

-- King Crimson, 21st Century Schizoid Man

Rough men guard the gates of peace. But there are moments when the gates are shut and we send the men out to destroy what won't harm us. They aren't bad men, and the civilised man owes them much, but there's no honour in war. A young man with the passions and frailties of his species is thrust into mortal peril without really knowing why. Against him are set men whom he has been assured are perfect demons, for only a sociopath would pull the trigger otherwise. There was a time when combat involved weapons that needed years of training and raw strength to wield, but what could be simpler than twitching your finger just so and suddenly someone some meters away drops dead? Hold down that trigger long enough and swing the barrel back and forth, and good job! You've won a shiny medal to pin to your chest and a dozen ghosts to haunt your dreams. That is if you can sleep again.
Stories trickled back home; of wholesale slaughter of combatant and civilian, genocide and excessive force, the bombing of children's hospitals and the incineration of swathes of jungle. A mad world where shooting at a farmer is a smart move because you really never know, son. Someone you know has died in a country whose name he'd never heard before, and why was that? Oh, because some people there think land and riches belong to everyone and we can't have that, it's unnatural. So of course we send our boys there to die, teaching the little bastards that consumerism is worth the price. Politicians smile, grimace and cajole. They want you to go to the jungle too: there's a bayonet with your name on it.
Can't sympathise with the enemy either, they tortured any of us they got their hands on, for information or just for plain fun. Arming the aged and the children, hiding among civilians, so you could either let yourself get shot in the back or you can empty your clip at every gook you see and answer to your God later. In the old days you could point at the panzer divisions rolling into French villages and photos of Japanese soldiers beheading prisoners and say, 'Clearly this is evil, and to go to war against this is not only right but necessary.' But that black-and-white world evaporated with Hiroshima and suddenly we knew that heroes and villains are the same people. And to the people who watched their kids run screaming as the flames stuck to them like liquid, what righteous condemnation can you utter?
So we called for the boys to come back home and to let the bombs stay in the hangar bay. We played guitars at the suits that held the puppet-strings, hoping to change the tune of the dance. But it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be. The streets and universities thronged with angry youth who refused to go to war, and the new music roaring out of the speakers spoke of a people lost, angry and disillusioned. Our leaders lost our faith and we never trusted them again. For the first time man became sick of killing man, but it made no difference.
In the jungle new magazines were fitted into M-16s. The Stones blared in the trenches and our helicopters fired rockets at villages. They were fighting for peace, and that's the hardest of all fights because each bullet seemed to take them farther and farther away from their goal.