Why Men Love War
Editor's Note: William Dodson "Bill" Broyles, Jr. is an American screenwriter, who has worked on the television series China Beach, the films Apollo 13, Cast Away, Entrapment, Planet of the Apes, Unfaithful, The Polar Express, and Jarhead. He also assisted in the screenplay of Saving Private Ryan.
In 1968, Broyles's career was put on hold when he was drafted into the United States Marine Corps. Between 1969 and 1971, he rose to the rank of First Lieutenant and served in Vietnam, first as an Infantry Commander, and later as an aide-de-camp to the Assistant Division Commander, 1st Marine Division. Due to his educational background and experience, his assigned duties included social issues with an emphasis on the refugees in the Quang Nam Province. Broyles received the Bronze Star.
Broyles's experiences in Vietnam inspired two of his most critically acclaimed projects. In 1984, he was one of the first veterans to return to Vietnam. His book "Brothers in Arms: A Journey from War to Peace", recounts his visit and his impressions of the aftermath of war on himself and his fellow soldiers, as well as on the country he fought against in battle. In 1988, Broyles once again drew upon his memories in Vietnam when he co-created the award-winning television series, 'China Beach,' a weekly drama for ABC about the doctors and nurses stationed at an American military base in Da Nang.
I read "Why Men Love War" shortly after it was published in an issue of a 1984 issue of Esquire. For me, it captured the essence of war and what it does to those of us who experienced it. 
I expect readers are going to either hate the article or love it. I recommend those of you who to elect to read the article with an open mind, you too may find much truth it what Broyles wrote.
To get you started, I have posted the first three paragraphs. Below that is the internet site for the entire nearly 7,000 well-grafter, provocative words.
- Editor, Michael Christy
I last saw Hiers in a rice paddy in Vietnam. He was nineteen then - my wonderfully skilled and maddeningly insubordinate radio operator. For months we were seldom more than three feet apart. Then one day he went home, and fifteen years passed before we met by accident last winter at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. A few months later I visited Hiers and his wife. Susan, in Vermont, where they run a bed-and-breakfast place. The first morning we were up at dawn trying to save five newborn rabbits. Hiers built a nest of rabbit fur and straw in his barn and positioned a lamp to provide warmth against the bitter cold.
"What people can't understand," Hiers said, gently picking up each tiny rabbit and placing it in the nest, "is how much fun Vietnam was. I loved it. I loved it, and I can't tell anybody."
Hiers loved war. And as I drove back from Vermont in a blizzard, my children asleep in the back of the car, I had to admit that for all these years I also had loved it, and more than I knew. I hated war, too. Ask me, ask any man who has been to war
about his experience, and chances are we'll say we don't want to talk about it - implying that we hated it so much, it was so terrible, that we would rather leave it buried. And it is no mystery why men hate war. War is ugly, horrible, evil, and it is reasonable for men to hate all that. But I believe that most men who have been to war would have to admit if they are honest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it too, loved it as much as anything that has happened to them before or since. And how do you explain that to your wife, your children, your parents, or your friends?
That's why men in their sixties and seventies sit in their dens and recreation rooms around America and know that nothing in their life will equal the day they parachuted into St. Lo or charged the bunker on Okinawa. That's why veterans' reunions are invariably filled with boozy awkwardness, forced camaraderie ending in sadness and tears: you are together again, these are the men who were your brothers, but it's not the same, can never be the same. That's why when we returned from Vietnam we moped around, listless, not interested in anything or anyone. Something had gone out of our lives forever, and our behavior on returning was inexplicable except as the behavior of men who had lost a great perhaps the great-love of their lives, and had no way to tell anyone about it.