Juris on the reality of war — “boredom, booze, and an occasional boom”: “If there is a banality to evil, there is certainly a banality about war. Contrary to the Dick Lit that passes for war fiction and the furious shoot’ em up films and video games, a lot of the time war is actually boring beyond belief. Drudgery. The sun shines and cooks your brain, it rains, you walk, you look, you do your job and any additional work you’re assigned. You sleep, you make your one independent decision of the day – to eat or not to eat – and then you sleep again, and do it all over the same way the next morning. The film that most honestly depicts what war is like might well be Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. Picture him going nuts repeating the same day of his life over and over. And then, imagine when he is the most tired and least alert, something whistles or clacks past his head, something explodes in the barbed wire or falls into the compound and goes crump and all hell breaks loose. The real thing doesn’t come with a soundtrack to give you any warning or a big buildup to a crescendo. Not if they do it right. Then it’s fifteen minutes of utter fear followed by a return to boredom.
“What we didn’t know going there was how long an undeclared war would hold us prisoners. Boredom or madness—take your pick.”