Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for August 17, 2013
August 16, 2013
August 18, 2013
Transcript:
Melissa: So what do you think I should talk about, Mr. Wilkes? Principal Wilkes: Well, you're part of career week... So, just talk about the rewards of being a military professional. I'd steer clear of discussing deployments, combat, casualties or war. Melissa: Seriously? Principal Wilkes: Yup. Stick to cool stuff. Drones or whatnot.
An old friend of mine, a WWII combat veteran, said that wars are fought by 18-year-olds because at that age you just can’t believe that you are the one who will be killed or maimed. He was a medic and he saw how often soldiers were surprised (!) when they were hit. Another vet told me that, no matter how often and emphatically he was told in training that people would be shooting at him, he just didn’t “get” it until he was lying in a foxhole at Anzio. This is not just inexperience. Physiologists now know that the brain, especially those parts that deal with risk assessment, is not fully developed until about the age 25. A teenager’s brain literally does not operate the same way an adult’s does, no matter how “smart” he is.