Needed: Drill Sargeants, inquire below

I never saw Saving Private Ryan; don’t want to either, but I heard that the real heroes who were there gave that first twenty minutes their blessing as being pretty eye-popping accurate.   Maybe it was just in some other old movie I saw years ago, but a quote stuck in my head.  The scene was inside one of those small, flat-bottomed landing craft as it rapidly approached the beach at the invasion of Normandy in World War II.  To the anxious American soldiers, the commander in charge said, “Men, as soon as you step on that beach, you are a veteran.” 

Despite the popularity of GI Joe and similar movies, games, and consumer junk, there is absolutely nothing nice about war.  Nothing.  But war is part of human existence.   I reiterate what John Eldredge so aptly talks about in his book, Waking the Dead, that the backdrop of all life is, in fact, war.  It’s not what we were originally created for, but it is what it is, and now we are responsible for dealing with it.

Interestingly, the pattern of war started even before the human race came on the scene when Satan gathered his army and mounted his unsuccessful coup (what was he thinking???)  He was, unfortunately,