““A favorite pastime of soldiers on long mounted patrols was testing each other with impossible hypotheticals. They were an endearing yet vulgar form of moral drama, but only because the alternative was to contemplate being blown up by an illiterate goat herder’s morning project. “What would you rather do, have sex with your sister or shoot your mother?” “Would you rather pick up a baby with a pitchfork, or throw a paraplegic in a fire?” In one form or another, these young men were weighing the relative value of human life in real terms, perhaps as a surrogate for murkier thoughts that might otherwise be in the forefront, such as, “Why am I risking my life in this wasteland?” or “Whose life is worth more, that of my best friend in the gun turret or of some Iraqi kid I’ve never met?” It passed the time.””
