I probably won't visit the site regularly, but today I ran across a blog by a soldier that was seriously injured in Iraq. Some of his posts are very funny. One, however, reminded me of Prince Andrei in War and Peace.

If you didn't slog through War and Peace, you can find a brief introduction here (or the whole thing here, although I'd recommend getting it from a bookstore).

Unfortunately the summary doesn't say much about Prince Andrei who, after being captured and released by the invading French force goes back to the front lines and is wounded. Luck brings him to his evacuating wife, who does her best to care for him in the back of a carriage. Prince Andrei gives up on life and eventually dies. But before dying, says many wars should never be fought, and suggests that if every country refused to take prisoners (that is, shot the wounded) nobody would go to war for trivial reasons.

Our wounded Iraqi war vet dismisses the humane treatment provisions in the Geneva conventions in similar language:

We’ve yet to see what warfare would be like if both sides played by the rules. Hell, it’d probably last forever, given the POW swaps, and knowing that if you surrender, you be given food, clothing, care, and treated better than you were in boot camp. We wouldn’t have war, just armies surrendering to each other all the time.

Please realize, I'm not agreeing with this position. I'm simply noting the parallel. Maybe I can send this to my high school English teacher and see if he'll raise my grade. Of course, my memory's gone bad, and I can't remember his name right now.

UPDATE That's right. His name was Mr. McNeil. Apparently he doesn't work there now. Not much of a surprise, it's been a while. In fact, they've got about 200 more students there now than when I was a Ram, and the racial breakdown has changed from 30% white, 30% black, 30% Hispanic, 10% Asian to 33% white, 9% black, 53% Hispanic, and 5% Asian.