I do not love war. I am attracted to it, though. I have a fondness, a sense nostalgia for war that, I imagine, only one who has never been in a war, nor ever lived in a country that was at war, could possibly have. The military is glossy, idyllic with abstract notions of loyalty, honor, and courage intertwined in a cause worth fighting for, in principles worth defending. Good guys take on the bad guys.
Heroes rise and fall.
This should repel me and it does to a certain extent, yet in that action of repulsion, I am somehow inexplicably, drawn in. I did not grow up on war stories. My father's father was too young for the First World War and too old for second. My imagination had to make do with war posters and a ration book which my grandmother saved and my dad now saves. They do not like to talk about it.