Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [45]
Bravery is as rare in war as it is in peace. It isn’t just a matter of facing danger from which you would prefer to run. If a man faces danger because the alternative to doing that is worse or because he doesn’t understand the danger, this may make him a good soldier but it is something other than bravery. Stupidity faces danger easier than intelligence. The average bright young man who is drafted hates the whole business because an army always tries to eliminate the individual differences in men. The theory is that a uniformity of action is necessary to achieve a common goal. That’s good for an army but terrible for an individual who likes himself the way he is.
Some men, of course, like the order imposed on them. They like the freedom from making hard decisions that mindless submission to authority gives them.
There is always more precision on the drill field back home than there is on the battlefield. Uniformity of action becomes less precise as an army approaches the front. At the front it usually disappears altogether. It is not always, or even usually, the best marchers who make the best fighters.
Everyone talks as though there was nothing good about war, but there are some good things and it’s easy to see why so many people are attracted by it. If there were no good things about war, the chances are we would find a way not to have another.
A nation at war feels a unity it senses at no other time. Even the people not fighting are bound together. There is a sense of common cause missing in peacetime. Accomplishments are greater, change is quicker . . . and if progress is motion, there is more of it in war-time. A nation at peace is busy gratifying itself, overeating, over-dressing, lying in the sun until it’s time to eat and drink again.
If war brings out the worst in people as it has been assumed it does, it also brings out the very best. It’s the ultimate competition. Most of us live our lives at half-speed, using only as much of our ability as is absolutely necessary to make out. But at war if a man is actually fighting it, he uses all his brain and all his muscle. He explores depths of his emotions he didn’t know were down there and might never have occasion to use again in his lifetime. He lives at full speed, finding strength he didn’t know he had accomplishing things he didn’t know he could do.
The best thing about war is hard to describe, is never talked about. Most of us get a warm sense of fellow feeling when we act in close and successful relationship with others, and maybe that happens more in war than any other time. There is a lonesomeness about life that no one who has experienced it likes to talk about, and acting together for a common cause, men often come closest to what they ought to be at their very best.
It is paradoxical but true that in war when man is closest to death, he is also closest to complete fulfillment and farthest from loneliness. He is dependent, dependable, loved and loving.
And there is another thing about war. If there is love in us, there is hate, too, and it’s apparent that hate springs from the same well as love and just as quickly. No one is proud of it but hate is not an unpleasant emotion and there is no time other than wartime when we are encouraged to indulge ourselves in an orgy of hate.
The worst of war is hell but there isn’t much of the worst of it and not many soldiers experience even that much.
A soldier at war doesn’t feel the need to answer any questions about it. He is exhausted by the battle.
He is busy destroying and it does not occur to him that he will have to help rebuild the world he is pulling down.
He often mistakes the exultation of victory for a taste of what things will be like for the rest of his life.
And they are only like that for a very short time.
Part III
A Few Decades with Andy Rooney
The home of “A Few Minutes”
In 1978 “Three Minutes With Andy Rooney,” a short segment that featured Rooney