Can you be a pacifist and still enjoy military gaming?

Those who decry violent video games don't understand that simulating an activity can act as a replacement, not just an encouragement

Studying the horror of the world wars turned me into an avowed pacifist by age fifteen. Two years later, I walked into an army PR van for a chat with the recruitment sergeant. I felt confused when I went in but when I left, a bundle of helpful propaganda under my arm, I was also scared.

How could I have become a pacifist thinking about signing up to the armed forces?

It took years before I understood myself, but smarter people had already worked it out. Michael Herr, Tim O'Brien and other biographers of America's failure in Vietnam had the answer. To say that war is hell is an obvious truth, but the harder, darker and more subversive idea is that it can be persuasively glamorous too. A clarion call to the base instincts beneath our precious veneer of civilisation. It satisfied desires that lurk hungrily in us all, however much we might wish otherwise.
Some soldiers and civilians recall wartime as the best years of their lives, the carnage and loss forging bonds of solidarity as strong as those of family. It is a thing of extremes that brings out the best and the worst in people.