To me, the most devastating thing about war is the spiritual devastation wrought in its participants - the soldiers themselves.
You cannot simultaneously love a man (in the Agapē sense) and kill him; a precondition of being able to kill a man is that you must dehumanize him first. Acknowledge the brotherhood in him, and you are incapable of really harming him.
The thing is, a deeper part of you is intrinsically incapable of denying the brotherhood of the “enemy” and thus recognizes the appalling nature of what you have done: you have wounded or killed your brother.
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