I came across this 1997 piece by Lee Sandlin in a discussion on the WELL, started reading it, and was absorbed all the way to the end. Like the author, I grew up playing WWII soldier with the neighborhood kids, and the enemies were always the Germans or the Japanese — since then (the 1960s), this fashion in soldier-play has faded, but it took a couple of decades to do so. That once-pervasive but now-vanished fashion in boys’ games was just one small indicator of the impact World War II had on our culture.

We may assume that the war in Iraq has its own horrors, some very different from those of WWII, and some exactly like them. One thing we’ve got to keep in mind is that, although casualty reports from Iraq may sometimes be characterized as “light,” that’s partly because of improvements in the field treatment and subsequent care of wounds. Fewer of our soldiers die, but lots of them are still wounded.

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