A good friend of mine told me a story once of calling in an airstrike on a bunch of NVA regulars in a treeline about 150 yards away.
He spent the next few minutes (minutes he wishes desperately he could forget) listening to the ... consequences when napalm incinerates human beings - men about his age, just as frightened as he was, who were loved by their mothers just as much - screaming their lungs out as they were incinerated. The ones who were caught in the main blasts died pretty quickly, as they inhaled burning napalm which destroyed their lungs and suffocated them. The ones who were on the edge took long, agonizing, screaming minutes to expire.
Killing people didn't make him feel manly or heroic or powerful. He says the way he felt that day gave him a glimpse of what being in hell might feel like.
Umberto Eco talked about one of the features of "Ur-fascism" was a cult of masculinity.
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