December 9, 1999
today i ate dinner with a german soldiar.
this struck me as being such an odd thing. i started a conversation and i told him how strange the situation seemed to me. if this had been 50 years ago we would not have been having a meal together, but instead we would have done everything possible to kill each other.
if ,say, i had met him during world war II and i succeeded in killing him as my "enemy" i would never have known of his life.
how he has been in the german army for over 10 years and he still had 35 more to go.
how was raised and still lives in Bohn germany(which is only 50 km from my home in mannhiem) by his single mother who raised 6 children on her own.
how he is engaged to be married to his high school sweetheart.
how he has a small child that he loves more then anything on earth.
how he is just an average joe just like me. just tryin' to make it through the craziness this is life on this planet.
what makes war?
i don't.
what makes war important enough to die for and to kill another for?
i guess maybe the idea that your "enemy" is tryin' to kill you first.
this man was not an evil person.
i'm really struggling with this.
war is not a personal thing.
it's bigger then that.
but if these men are not evil. if these men, that we are trained to hate, are no diffrent from me.
then the only reason they want to kill me or the men who served in that great, horrible thing we call war is because i want to kill them?