Insightful

I have noticed the effect that this guy talks about for years, but I've never heard it expressed so well:

"There is talk that many Vietnam films are antiwar, that the
message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train
young American men to fight and kill, they turn their fighting
and killing everywhere.... But actually, Vietnam war films are
all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or
Coppola or Stone intended. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Omaha or San
Francisco or Manhattan will watch the films and weep and decide
once and for all that war is inhumane and terrible, and they will
tell their friends at church and their family this, but Corporal
Johnson at Camp Pendleton and Sergeant Johnson at Travis Air
Force Base and Seaman Johnson at Coronado Naval Station and Spec
4 Johnson at Fort Bragg and Lance Corporal Swofford at Twentynine
Palms Marine Corps Base watch the same films and are excited by
them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the
terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight,
rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are
pornography for the military man.... It doesn't matter how many
Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar -- the actual killers who know
how to use the weapons are not."

- Anthony Swofford, a former U.S. Marine corporal, from his
memoir of the First Gulf War, "Jarhead: a Marine's Chronicle of
the Gulf War and Other Battles."