war

he told me about the war in china. he was a soldier all the way, with only grammar school behind him, but he had his own reservations about this messy war on the continent, which looked as if it would never end, and he expressed these feelings honestly to me. "i don't mind fighting," he said. "i'm a soldier. and i don't mind dying in battle for my country, because that's my job. but this war we're fighting now, lieutenant--well, it's just not right. it's not a real war, with a battle line where you face the enemy and fight to the finish. we advance, and the enemy runs away without fighting. then the chinese soldiers take their uniforms off and mix with the civilian populations, and we don't even know who the enemy is. so then we kill a lot of innocent people in the name of flushing out 'renegades' or 'remnant troops,'...i'm telling you, lieutenant, this is one war that doesn't have any righteous cause. it's just two sides killing each other. and the ones who get stepped on are the poor farmers, the ones without politics or ideology. for them, there's no nationalist party, no young marshal zhang, no eighth route army. if they can eat, they're happy. i know how these people feel: i'm the son of a poor fisherman myself. the little people slave away from morning to night, and the best they can do is keep themselves alive--just barely. i can't believe that killing these people for no reason at all is going to do japan one bit of good."
--sergeant hamano

i wouldn't be surprised if some of the american soldiers sent to iraq share the same feelings, although a different time and place. actually, i hope some of them do.