War Today in Europe

War today is the little curly-haired girl in the hospital in Agros, Greece, whimpering in the dark all night because her right arm hangs in blackened tatters and she wants her mother, who is dead.

War today is that man lying on the sidewalk with his guts sticking out of his belly, and a hole through his skull, and both hands blown off, screaming because he can't reach into his pocket to get a drachma to buy aspirin tablets to stop the funny feeling inside his head.

War today is the line of dead bodies in the doorways of little shops in Belgrade's terrazia, killed when they rushed out to see what that crazy noise in the sky meant.

War today is that Serbian girl you promised to get out of Yugoslavia before the Germans or Italians caught her, and then didn't. War is what you think when you say "God-damned coward" to yourself and wonder what the Germans or Italians did to her when they found your name in her passport.

War today is thousands of Australian soldiers lying on the deck of a boat taking them out of the hell of Greece and Crete, reading books like 'Propaganda for War' and trying to figure out what it's all about.

Foreward; From The Land of Silent People
-Robert St. John

The Worst Type of War

I remember the first Russian soldier I treated: a tall skinny boy with blonde hair, wearing filthy clothes, smelling horrible, and infested with bugs. It was hard to tell if he was moaning because he was afraid of us or because he was in pain from the shrapnel wounds near his spine. After I shot him full of painkiller, extracted the shrapnel, bandaged him, and sent him to the ward, he calmed down.

Later when I passed through the ward, I heard him and the Chechen fighter in the next cot discussing their wounds. They were laughing. There is nothing worse than this kind of war- where people who have lived with each other for so long in the same society, who have grown to know each other, often to like each other as individuals, who speak the same language, end up on different sides trying to kill each other

The Chechen fighter's mother, there to look after her own son, also fed the young Russian soldier and gave him clean clothes. She then passed his name to the council of elders, who tried to contact his family in Russia to come and collect him. A few days later there was a report on Russian television about the cruel way Chechens supposedly treat Russian prisoners.

Heaven and Hell,
The First War
The Oath: A surgeon under fire
-Khassan Baiev

Weight of the Geneva Convention

For the next seven hours, I amputated several limbs, removed shrapnel, and sewed up gashes. It turned out I was the only person with medical training left in the hospital. Everyone else had fled. The hospital was out of commission - the work of the townspeople destroyed in seconds. The building had operated for only 3 weeks, and Zulai's white flag with the red cross lay in tatters under the rubble. So much for the protection of the Geneva convention. All that flag had done was to signal to the Russians where to bomb.

Chapter 6; The hospital opens
The First War
The Oath: A surgeon under fire
-Khassan Baiev

Criticism & Contempt

"You would think that criticism would be the worst, because criticism is a global condemnation of a person's character. yet contempt is qualitatively different from criticism. With criticism i might say to my wife, 'You never listen, you are really selfish and insensitive.' Well, she's going to respond defensively to that . That's not very good for our problem solving and interaction. But if i speak from a superior plane, that's far more damaging, and contempt is any statement made from a higher level. A lot of the time it's an insult 'You're a bitch. You're scum.' It's trying to put that person on a lower plane than you. It's hierarchical." John Gottman

Contempt is closely related to disgust, and what disgust and contempt are about is completely rejecting and excluding someone from the community.

The Theory of Thin Slices
Blink- Malcom Gladwell
p.33