Armistice Day

[Brian37]

I was just watching a documentary on D-Day, holy mother fucker, the German machine guns in the pill boxes on the top of the bluffs.  An AR-15 looks at them and says, "I need to speed up a bit." How the fuck anyone survived that.

R. Lee Ermey (RIP) tests the MG-42.

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It's rather simple, at least in theory: detach yourself from your emotions and get the job done. Why, yes, that is a Hell of a lot easier said than done, especially for someone who feels as much as I gather you do, but for a lot of people, it's a lot easier than you think: If you can think of the dead guys on your side of the battlefield as just some miscellaneous grunts and not, say, Jerry from New York, and the people you're shooting at as "The Enemy" and not human beings like you who just happened to be born into another country, you can pull it off.

This may strike you as callous. That's kind of the whole point.

Never achieved that.

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Be happy the Germans did not have crack troops defending those positions.

Some of the troops were, indeed, second rate. But some of them were "stomach troops", men with ulcers and the like. Good troops with problems. And sections were occupied by "rest troops", units taken out of the Eastern Front and sent to the Channel coast to rest and reorganize. High percentage of combat veterans in those units.

I used to find "beauty" in weapons like tanks and jets when growing up. But it is not the same "beauty" one finds in the destructive nature of say, a volcano. A volcano isn't cognitive, humans are.

Firearms and tanks and jets and nukes may demonstrate human creativity, but unfortunately it demonstrates our species failure of diplomacy. 

I find no beauty in our species unfortunate ability to destroy.