War: the real thing

There's a book review in this morning's New York Times by Chris Hedges entitled "What War Looks Like". It reports on a book called The Photographer by the late Didier Lefèvre and cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert . Here's the one paragraph I really wanted you to see:

The disparity between what we are told or what we believe about war and war itself is so vast that those who come back, like Lefèvre, are often rendered speechless. What do you say to those who advocate war as an instrument to liberate the women of Afghanistan or bring democracy to Iraq? How do you tell them what war is like? How do you explain that the very proposition of war as an instrument of virtue is absurd? How do you cope with memories of children bleeding to death with bits of iron fragments peppered throughout their small bodies? How do you speak of war without tears?

I, of course, do not want to see the book. I'm afraid I'm not emotionally armored enough to look at pictures like that. But I know. I know what war is really like and I don't know how any person of faith, how any decent person, can not recognize how morally wrong it is.