The reality of war

Recently I have seen two war films - The Water Diviner and Unbroken. Both brought me to tears, and both prodded at my brain like I didn't believe.

Firstly, two completely unbelievable stories. The Water Diviner is based on true events, but a bit of creative licence has been taken (I'm led to believe) with the love story. Unbroken is also a true story. It blows my mind that these stories are not stories, they are lives lived.

Although I knew that we sent men off to war, the reality of war did not hit home to me until I saw a battle scene in The Water Diviner. Young men running across the battlefield, jumping into trenches, and physically punching people until they died. I imagined people on opposite sides firing guns, not this brutal hand-to-hand combat. I cried. Young men dying of fatal wounds, lying there, moaning. I cried. I wanted it to stop.

Then again, during Unbroken, where a couple of guys drifted on a liferaft for a month and a half, and then got starved and bashed up repeatedly in a POW camp, I cried. When they didn't break, through everything that happened, I cried.

War is huge. War these days is different, but still young men and women go off and get killed every day. Some of them don't even know why they're fighting, they just do it because they love their country, they love their freedom, and they want their families to be safe. In the two World Wars, so many families lost people, so many people lost themselves. Both sides had massive casualties. Both sides lost. It hasn't changed now, it's just a little more hands-off. People still die. People still lose.

I don't want my children to have to fight like that, to have to fight at all. I don't want my husband to go off and die so that we can still have a life. I might be changing my little part of the world by improving who I am, discovering who I am, and being who I was destined to be. But I am not enough. We all need to change, to accept others, to accommodate differing belief systems. We all need to believe in kindness over violence, to live together in a world that is great BECAUSE of it's diversity.

Deep. But powerful. More movies like these need to be made, and more people need to see them. More people need to tell their war stories, and more people need to listen. To be affected. To change. To really think about what has happened in the past and decide if they're going to be a part of the solution, or a part of the problem.

I want to be part of the solution, even though I have no idea how that is meant to happen.