We know war is filled with sorrow and loss. And yet, we turn to books, films, and relics of war to remind ourselves of the human potential for heroism. Homer’s Iliad, a myth, is among the most unforgettable tales of war, and its heroes — Achilles, Hector, Odysseus — become real the moment we hear their names.   The technology of warfare evolves, but how individual people confront death in combat remains largely unchanged.  Unlike Star Wars, there is no digital finesse to the horror of the Trojan War, no special effect to smooth over the aggression of close combat. You won’t find a heartwarming anecdote about teamwork or doing the right thing when the going gets tough, or about patriotism and loving your country so much you’ll die for it. Instead, you confront fundamental truths, including that war is brutal; it’s real blood and real bones. In the world of The Iliad, what had been a talking, living man can, in an instant, become merely a thing — more like a stone than someone’s father or son. The poem’s greatness lies in its simplicity — how we kill and, more importantly, why we kill. It opens famously: Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath of great Achilles It’s Achilles’ story but he sulks in his tent for most of the poem, inconsolable after the Greek king takes from him a young woman named Briseis, a war prize won by Achilles in an earlier conquest. Achilles is more like a petulant teenager than the Terminator, lounging in his room and playing his lyre while comrades suffer against prince Hector and the high-spirited Trojan warriors. (READ MORE from John Waters: Out Here, War Is a Precious Memory) Not until his friend is killed does Achilles rouse himself to fight. In the world of heroes, justice amounted to personal vengeance, and so Achilles enters battle to avenge the killing of his friend Patroclus, a second self. He slaughters Trojans, one after the next, piling their bodies so deep in a river it dams up, until the river god himself appears to fight back a raging Achilles. In each spear thrust through a man’s throat or chest, Homer obsesses over the body, the blood draining from a wound, the darkness covering a dead man’s eyes. Returned to action, Achilles embodies the hero’s gamble that, in single combat, he is the one who will kill first and stand over the dead body of his enemy.  ***** I began at Annapolis in the summer of 2005, suffering through the mid-Atlantic humidity as I marched from one end of base to the other, climbing ropes, crawling through mud, sweating my way through what was, in hindsight, a mild initiation into the military. That first year on the Yard, I watched the upperclassmen — with shaved heads and crisp creases in their khaki uniforms — as they moved a step quicker than the plebes. The Iraq War was in the news and on our minds. The Academy’s most ambitious Midshipmen wanted their share of the action. I remember a particular first-class Midshipman who happened to share my last name. He was a captain of the crew team, intense but easygoing among friends, expected by his classmates to be a future leader of a combat arms unit. For young men with his combination of athleticism and confidence, to serve aboard Navy ships or submarines — really, to be anything other than a Marine or Navy SEAL — was a disappointment. I wanted to be like him. I commissioned into the Marines and completed specialty training as an infantry officer and, later, in ground intelligence. By the time I left training in 2011, the action had moved from the urban desert of Anbar Province, Iraq, to the rural desert of Helmand Province, Afghanistan, where I joined thousands of infantry Marines in a place roughly the size of West Virginia. I provided them with intelligence, maps, satellite pictures of roads and mud-brick compounds, as well as answers to whatever questions were on the minds of 20-to-25-year-old Marines walking foot patrols. Question: “When will the war end?” Answer: No idea. Question: “Will we ever see a real Taliban fighter?” Answer: Possibly. Question: “Has anyone ever been killed by the rabid dogs who roam the village?” Answer: No, but don’t be the first. Marines poured into the country ahead of the summer fighting season as part of President Obama’s surge, and they patrolled constantly during daylight hours. But the real action, I discovered, happened at night. A nondescript plywood office was operation central for an elite troop whose mission was to capture and kill terrorists. Visit the office during the day and you might find a few people sitting at desks. After nightfall, however, the troops loaded into a white school bus parked outside their office, made the mile or so drive to the flight-line, then boarded helicopters destined for terrorists’ homes and hideouts, where they fought up-close. After capturing or killing their targets, the men would gather up whatever intelligence treasure they could find and head back to camp. (READ MORE: World War True) On one occasion, I located a compound used by Taliban fighters, then provided the details to someone who occasionally worked out of that nondescript office. He wrote me an email a few nights later: “Dude, thanks for the grids. We called a HIMARS shot on the position. Check it out and keep ‘em coming.” I opened the PDF to find photographs of three dead Afghan males. They looked to be in their late teens, tufts of facial hair along their cheeks. It was my first glimpse of dead enemy fighters, and they were younger than I imagined. Somehow, I hadn’t expected this would happen when I found the fighters’ hideout or passed along its grid coordinates. It was strange looking at their pictures on my computer screen.  ***** Men waged war first with blunt objects and tools. Then came swords, spears, javelins, and arrows. The invention of gunpower ousted the knight and put the killing weapon in the hands of commoners. Gone was the duel, and with it the rules of a fair fight. Whichever side was better organized to the mass application of violence had an often-decisive advantage in the wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the blaring sirens, the whistle and crash of an artillery bombardment in World War I, came the whisper of drone strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, then the return to bombardments in present-day Ukraine and Gaza. The technology of warfare evolves, but how individual people confront death in combat remains largely unchanged.  In the myth, when Hector and Achilles meet, we get the crux of a human life in Hector’s final moments. First, he leaves behind the safety of Troy’s defenses for the open plain, so the Trojans gathered along the city’s walls can watch and cheer. Then, when Hector sees the great Achilles approaching, he panics and runs, feeling he is trapped in a nightmare. Finally, he stops running. Hector faces the greater Achilles, and says: And now my doom has come at last. But never let me die without a struggle and without acclaim. Let me achieve some greatness and be known to people in the days to come. Let me at least die gloriously, with a struggle, and do some great deed that men will praise for all time. For most of us, the reality of war doesn’t match what we expect, just as our own lives don’t unfold exactly how we intend. And still, in each new generation, young men voluntarily risk death to prove themselves worthy of a legacy that can be raised to the heroic, to achieve with their lives what Hector sought in the final moments of his. To speak only of war’s horror and brutality is to avoid an inconvenient truth: the reason we seek battle has not changed in 3,000 years. John J. Waters is the author of the postwar novel River City One (Simon and Schuster). He lives in Nebraska, where he was born.  The post War: Where Men Win Glory appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.