The war paradox!
The strange thing about war is not how it begins. That part is almost always the same. Someone gives a speech. Someone raises a flag. A crowd gathers somewhere in a square and applauds a promise that history is about to be corrected. A wrong will be avenged. An enemy will be defeated. Justice, finally, will take its rightful place. Every nation that enters a war tells itself this story. Every soldier who marches into one carries a quieter version of it somewhere in his mind. The belief that he stands, somehow, on the side of the good. For a while the story holds. People need it to hold. But battlefields are patient things. They have a way of waiting until the noise settles before revealing what war actually looks like. Cities burn in remarkably similar ways. Walls collapse the same way whether the language spoken inside them is familiar or foreign. The smoke that rises from one side of a border is indistinguishable from the smoke that rises from the other. And the prayers, whispered in...
