More and more of what is seen on the electronic screen is accepted as reality. What few sources of counterinformation are available are increasingly ignored or overwhelmed by the sheer number of hours most Americans spend in front of the television set or at the movies. The images seen on television comprise more and more of the informational ken of the American people. It is a naivete nurtured by a powerful communications establishment-television and movies-which increasingly serves as the single informational anchor in the lives of the most geographically mobile people on earth. This lack of a genuine bloody experience with war has produced in the American psyche a dangerously naive view of combat and its human costs. We have been a very fortunate people indeed. More men were lost in six hours in the first Battle of the Somme in 1916 by British forces than were lost to hostile fire in Vietnam. The Iran-Iraq war has claimed more dead in five years than all the dead lost by the United States in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam combined. The Israelis, in eighteen days of combat in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, had twice as many casualties in proportion to their population as the United States did in ten years of war in Vietnam. In the six-week battle for the city of Berlin in 1945, the Soviet Army lost more casualties than America lost in all its foreign warscombined. The disparity of experience with war between the United States and other nations is great indeed. A consequence of this fortunate historical experience is that we are largely unaware of the human costs of war, counted in blood, mangled bodies, and the minds of soldiers driven insane by terror. Except for the Civil War, in those few instances where we have gone to war we have fought on foreign soil. In all its major wars the United States has lost relatively small numbers of men killed and wounded in comparison with other nations, to say nothing of being able to avoid the death and suffering of civilians and the mass destruction of property that invariably accompanies a war fought in one's own country. Our collective psyche has been only lightly touched by war. Americans are a fortunate people, especially when it comes to war.
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