I’m flip-flopping here. I said my previous sword post would wrap it up, but (as is so often the case) I thought of something else I wanted to say.

One of the great things about blogging is that you’re generally immune from “staircase syndrome,” the phenomenon where you get into an argument with somebody at a party, and then finally come up with the perfect retort as you’re going down the staircase as you leave.

When a blogger comes up with something he should have said, he can just make it a new post.

One of the guys I do live steel combat with is a Vietnam combat veteran. At one point early in my training, after I’d been in my first fight, and he saw how much I’d enjoyed it, he told me, “Now you know what it’s like.” There was a gleam in his eye as he said it.

I made it clear immediately that I didn’t think for a moment that I really knew what war had been like for him. He’s been there—seen the elephant—actually put his life on the line and taken lives. What we do with our blunt weapons is worlds away from that.

But I also knew what he meant. He was talking about the exhilaration, the sheer fun, of fighting.

It’s fashionable today to make movies and write books that portray war as an unrelieved hell composed of long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of fear and pain and horror. And certainly there’s much truth in that. For those who go to war, I suspect, that probably describes 99% of the experience.

But there’s another thing too, for those (or many, at least) who actually engage in combat. There’s the moment when the whole world narrows down to a kind of tunnel, where you turn off your critical brain and everything becomes marvelously simple.

At that moment you don’t care. At that moment a fearful man is no longer afraid (he may be very afraid a few minutes later, if he survives), and a civilized man becomes a barbarian, and a moral philosopher suddenly sees the world in a strong, clear light, utterly devoid of dilemmas or nuances.

And that feels good. That kind of feeling is the reason men jump out of airplanes, and drive stock cars, and climb mountains. It’s a rush. It’s addictive.

And that’s why men rushed, or rush, into hails of arrows or gunfire on battlefields. At that moment they’re not afraid.

One thing I’ve learned a warrior must do, after a battle, is to inventory his body, to see if he’s gotten hurt. Because he probably didn’t notice it if he was wounded while his blood was up.

This is a thing neither good nor bad in itself. Like eating or sex, it all depends on the circumstances and the purposes.

You may regret the loss of the warriors who fall, and the tragedy to their families. We all must mourn their lost potential.

But don’t pity them. When the old warriors praised a fighter, even an enemy, by saying “He died like a man,” all the other warriors knew what he was talking about.