Free Republic

August 23, 2006, 6:41 a.m. The Soul of BattleÂ…Â…the soul of America. By Joseph Morrison Skelly Who are these men and women? Who, exactly, are the 130,000 Americans fighting today in Iraq, the more than 20,000 standing tall on the front lines in Afghanistan, and the hundreds of thousands of other soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen who have served courageously in both theaters of war since the autumn of 2001? What motivates these warriors to travel thousands of miles to foreign theaters of war? What sustains them in the heat of the desert and in the heat of battle?...

Review of Hanson's "Soul of Battle" by a reader (brothersjudddotcom). This is an older article, but I think that it is appropo for today. When a free and consensual society feels its existence threatened, when it has been attacked, when its citizenry at last understands an enemy at odds with the very morality of its culture, . . . then free men can muster, they can fight back well, and they can make war brutally and lethally beyond the wildest nightmares of the brutal military culture they seek to destroy. Such is the case that the outstanding military historian Victor...