Observations on War, Media, and Men as a Woman

I am surrounded by war all of the time. I don’t mean I am “in the trenches” and bullets are flying overhead, no, I left that world over a decade ago. However, I still work for the U.S. Department of Defense as an engineer and the lead of a project that I have hesitated to speak on or write about because of its nature. Every day I am inundated with decisions that I have to make that could impact how a war is fought and won (or lost). Luckily I don’t make these decisions in a vacuum and I can get in certain areas with trusted individuals and have conversations about “what if” in regard to how we are engineering. However, the decisions are mine to suggest to the people who hold the purse strings, and they are entrusting my expertise with how I want to proceed when they agree to execute.

So every day I think about war. Like a computer whose task manager has multiple processes running, there is always a thread in my brain that is thinking about my work and the implications of my choices. And I despise war and the people who glorify it. I struggle with modern media’s presentation of war through movies or TV shows, and I struggle to understand the men who become obsessed with war time documentaries and history. Disclaimer, I also wonder if my rejection of war media is negatively impacting my ability to properly do my job. But I feel like I have to draw the line with work and my personal life sometime. I did watch The Hunt for Red October recently and spent the majority of the movie thinking about my job. If Sean Connery can’t break my train of thought, you know something is wrong.

Now, I work with mostly men. 97% if I roughly do the math. My experiences with men are colored and enmeshed with war. I have dated, married, befriended, and be-enemied men who have some connection to war. And I know one thing very well:

Men love war; at least, there seem to be three camps of men regarding war. There are the men who are obsessed with war, who have never experienced it and seem to view themselves as having missed out on war and manhood because of how it is glorified by others or by the media. These men annoy me because they have a hunger for things they don’t understand. Then there are the men who went to war, experienced it, and become obsessed with it upon their return as a way to somehow “go back.” These men sadden me the most, because they are stuck in a time that most certainly harmed them and they can’t mentally leave the war zone. These are the men, my friends, who kill themselves. Then the third group of men have no affinity for war, be it because they simply never wanted to be near war or because they have experienced it and have fully integrated away from the glorification of war.

If I had a modicum of introspection, I would remove gender from my observations and turn this magnifying glass upon myself. I have, and I fall into the third group. So why am I still in this world where I have to think about war every day? Why have I not moved on to helping people as a therapist or an artist or literally anything beyond war? I have a long-winded response that is suited for another blog post. But this blog post is about my observations about men and war, not about my fear of not succeeding in another field.

So when I am at a party and get side-eyed for not wanting to see a war movie or to talk about war endlessly, I want to shake the men who go on and on about “how cool it is” or how that is “the only way they can feel something.” War is not “cool” and there is no point. It can be a necessary evil, but that is what it is, evil. There are men close to war who feel and act like gods, because of the power they have been given by their governments to decide whether others live or die. Is that not the definition of a god? Someone who decides the fate of others? But these men are not gods, they are men who strap wings to their bodies thinking they are invincible. And media does humanity a disservice when they portray the flight of Icarus and not the fall. And that is what the transition of men from group 1, to group 2, to group 3 entails. Dead men, destroyed families, and a continued evolution of glorified war for their sons.