No wonder that some individuals thrust into this morass sometimes act differently from how soldiers behave in romantic war movies. The hell of war is internal as well as external.

We might remember this as the story of Sgt. Bowe Robert Bergdahl unfolds.

Bergdahl volunteered for the U.S. military and was apparently a gung-ho soldier. Americans have not been conscripted since 1973, but young Americans are propagandized from childhood with the message that time in the military is service to their country. Few question this narrative; fewer seek rebuttals to it. You have to want to face the facts that governments lie and that the service is to an empire having nothing to do with Americans’ security.

This, however, doesn’t relieve military personnel of responsibility for their own conduct. In 1951 — while Americans were fighting in Korea — Leonard E. Read, one of the founders of the modern libertarian movement, published “Conscience on the Battlefield,” in which a dying American soldier hears his conscience say that he — not the army or government — bears responsibility for his deadly conduct: “Does not the fault inhere in your not recognizing that the consequences of your actions are irrevocably yours…?”

Bergdahl seems to have been plagued by this question. (See Michael Hastings’s revealing 2012 article.)

In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a regime that used war to keep its population too frightened to ask questions and in which the enemy could change without notice. Orwell may have exaggerated, but not by much. The United States sided with one Afghan faction against the Soviets and their Afghan allies in the 1980s, then switched when it replaced the Soviets as invaders in 2001.

On the surface, the war in Afghanistan seems easy to understand. The Taliban government gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, which attacked American targets in the 1990s and on September 11, 2001.

But things are not so simple. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the U.S. government sided with the future Taliban and al-Qaeda. President Reagan called the Afghan mujahideen“freedom fighters,” subsidized their war, and hosted them at the White House.

After the Soviet exit and years of  civil war, the Taliban became the brutal theocratic government of Afghanistan, but not an anti-American terrorist organization. Indeed, as late as May 2001, President George W. Bush was helping the Taliban suppress opium production. After 9/11, the Taliban made various offers to surrender or expel bin Laden, but the Bush administration was uninterested. (This lack of interest predated 9/11.) Taliban attacks on American military targets since the U.S. invasion should not be construed as terrorism, but rather as combat between former government officials and the foreign force that overthrew them.

Anand Gopal, author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, points out that soon after American forces invaded Afghanistan, “there was no enemy to fight”:

By mid-2002 there was no insurgency in Afghanistan: al-Qaeda had fled the country and the Taliban had ceased to exist as a military movement. Jalaluddin Haqqani [whose “network” held Bergdahl captive] and other top Taliban figures were reaching out to the other side in an attempt to cut a deal and lay down their arms.

But, Gopal writes, “driven by the idée fixe that the world was rigidly divided into terrorist and non-terrorist camps, Washington allied with Afghan warlords and strongmen. Their enemies became ours, and through faulty intelligence, their feuds became repackaged as ‘counterterrorism.’”

When Haqqani, a celebrated freedom fighter during the Soviet war, turned down a deal from the Americans because it included detention, the U.S. military attacked his home province and other areas, killing his brother-in-law and innocent children.

If he wasn’t with the Americans, he was against them, and therefore it was open season.

In this whirlwind of cynicism and relativism, can anyone be blamed for wondering what the point of the war was?

Such talk places a darker, callous spin on the concept of sacrifice, commonly spoken of with regard to military service, than most are used to hearing in public: “Shed your capacity for critical thought, or we shall shed YOU.”

When contemplating what people see themselves as fighting for, though the theme of nationalism is included, there tend to be more ground-level concerns within average people. They think of their neighbors, their families, their friends, their way of life, as what they are defending. With additional thought, however, there’s more to consider. In this case, the war has stretched well beyond its claimed trigger, with the occupation of Afghanistan now in its 13th year. The spread of US troops and weapons throughout northern Africa and central Asia, the drone program now operating in several countries other than Afghanistan, even the revelation that that entire country is effectively being wire-tapped come to mind. With the stated target of the mission long dead, civilian deaths mounting and war crimes by the US now common knowledge, to expect anyone, even a soldier, to not think twice about why they are where they are is to demand a robot in place of a human soul.

A recent piece on The Daily Beast points out that Bowe Bergdahl’s father Robert, during a 2010 speech at an Idaho GOP fundraiser, actually brought up the other side of the matter, saying that a drone strike killed the child of one of the people holding his son at the time. One quality we are taught to shut off in the run up to war is empathy. I can’t help but imagine what desperate thoughts may come to the mind of an American in rural Alabama if a weapon from the heavens, sent by the Pakistani government, robbed them of their sons & daughters. Yet the average citizen at either end is not the one giving these orders, nor is it for loved ones that the orders are so given.

Our understandable allegiances have been swallowed by allegiances to flags. Our identities have been forced into a shotgun wedding to the state. Within this poisonous relation, we are required to be no more than confused when violence in our names is responded to with more violence. On a neighborhood scale we would recognize this as gang activity, lament the destruction of lives all around and seek to end the cycle of violence. Why do we praise the mediators seeking peace in the streets, but condemn anyone deciding to leave the gang life of the nation-state and seek peace in the world?