Seen from the historical perspective, cases in which swords have been beaten into plowshares are far less common than vice versa. Modern division of labor, with its focus on instrumental reason, can serve almost any purpose imaginable. In their analysis of letters German soldiers sent home from the Eastern Front, historians Ute Daniel and Jürgen Reulecke cited Jens Ebert’s thesis that war is accepted as long as it can be articulated in terms of peacetime, workplace values such as diligence, endurance, persistence, duty, obedience, and voluntary subordination: “The only thing that changes on the frontline or as part of a special commando is the content of one’s work, not one’s attitudes toward work itself or the way it is organized. In this sense, the soldier is a ‘worker of war.’”⁸⁷⁵

This sort of work-oriented understanding of war is also clearly expressed in a letter sent home by a U.S. Marine captain to his mother during the Vietnam War. In it, he tries to justify his decision to extend his tour of duty and explain why killing enemies is an appealing job, carrying a lot of responsibility. “Here there is a job to be done. There are moral decisions made every day. My experience is invaluable. This job requires a man of conscience. The group of men that do this must have a leader with a conscience. In the last three weeks we killed more than 1,500 men on a single operation. That reflects a lot of responsibility. I am needed here, Mom.”⁸⁷⁶

When war arises, the participants don’t have to reconfigure their psyches, overcome themselves, or be specially socialized in order to be able to kill. The context in which they do the things they do only needs to be altered. For soldiers who only do the sorts of things they were trained for anyway, nothing at all changes except the fact that the context becomes deadly serious. Thus, as a number of examples have shown, the transitional phase from training and practice to actual war not only surprised and frightened soldiers. It also excited and fascinated them. In no case, however, did the definition of what they were supposed to do, what they were there for, change.

Pride in the fruits of one’s labor and descriptions of what one has achieved are not the only way in which people express that war is work, and that they see it as such. The idea is also articulated in acknowledgment that the enemy, too, has done a “good job.” In the surveillance protocols, one vivid example of this was the appreciation German POWs had, all Nazi propaganda about Bolshevik inferiors notwithstanding, for the skill of Red Army soldiers. The same was true for German soldiers viewed from the perspective of the enemy.⁸⁷⁷ Nonetheless, soldiers’ perceptions of one another were also formatted by cultural stereotypes. For Germans, Red Army soldiers were courageous warriors and masters of improvisation. But those positive images were clouded by stereotypical beliefs in inherent Russian brutality and lack of self-preservation instincts.⁸⁷⁸ Since Japanese soldiers treated POWs with extreme brutality, American GIs also came to view “Japs” as inhuman enemies. Other aspects of Japanese behavior were equally incomprehensible to U.S. soldiers: the practice of killing their own wounded or POWs who had been released, or of refusing to be saved by GIs when their ships were sunk. This radicalized the way American soldiers perceived their enemies, expanding upon already existing cultural stereotypes. For that reason, the word “Jap” had extremely nasty, and occasionally racist, connotations that were absent from the relatively harmless term “kraut.”⁸⁷⁹

THE GROUP

Cultural differences prevent soldiers of all nationalities from perceiving war universally. In soldiers’ own eyes, not all soldiers are created equal. Differentiations people make in peacetime persist during war. What distinguishes war from peace, and remains constant from war to war, is camaraderie. The group plays an extraordinarily important role. Without it, individual soldiers’ behavior in wartime would be incomprehensible. Soldiers never act on their own. Even sharpshooters or fighter plane aces, who have only themselves to rely upon, are still parts of a group that remains together before and after battle. Samuel Stouffer’s previously discussed study from 1948 thus concludes that the group has far more influence over individual soldiers’ behavior than ideological convictions, political views, and personal motivations.⁸⁸⁰