I get in touch with my inner warrior sometimes, and he is a very strong, very capable self that is angry, calculating, and covered head to toe with battle scars. He should be dead, but he wasn’t ready.
But all warriors know their destiny is to die, and so is the destiny of everyone around them. Nothing lasts. You cannot depend, ultimately, on anyone but yourself. Everything else will be cut away, and so one day will you be, too.
We idealize warriors, I think, because our culture has become much too effeminate, having cast aside masculine virtues like risk-taking, valuing physical privation and difficulty, and seeking out difficult challenges. These are all to the good. These are needed and good virtues. But they are not war. War is learning to kill our fellow men (and women: do not forget that the bombs we drop do not discriminate) effectively. It is learning to suppress normal human impulses of empathy, connection, and revulsion at the thought of violence.
As a friend of mine once put it, who had seen enough of it, “war is as romantic as a meat grinder.”
I have PTSD and spent last night being reminded of it nearly hourly.
I do have a battle plan, though, to deal with it, and I am executing it.