The Art of War

Is war an art? Is war a part of our daily lives? Some people would say it is. One of those people would be the famous Chinese general Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu was a brilliant military strategist who's ideas were well before his time. His ideas have been immortalized in his book, The Art of War. This book changed the way people looked at warfare. Many modern leaders implement the knowledge of Sun Tzu.


I wish I could tell you that is where it stopped. I want tell you that war is a horrifying and undesirable thing. I wish I could convince you what the media is feeding people is wrong, and that war has been romanticized to a point that people think all soldiers look like Jeremy Renner and Josh Hartnett. But I can't. War has been engrained in our culture. In fact, it has been engrained in almost every culture since the beginning of time. That is why a sixth century Chinese general has a best selling book. And why his book has been reinterpreted to fit people's daily lives. Books like The Art of War for Executives: Ancient Knowledge for Today's Business Professional are in every bookstore around America, and we eat it up. We love war. We have made it into an art. People search it out. As James A. Nadeau says in his article The Hurt Locker and the Contemporary War Film, On a basic level the anxieties of war are an integral part of the human experience and the war film serves to enable us (those of us fortunate enough to not have to experience it) to experience it vicariously. It allows those who haven’t (and probably never will) see for a brief time just what it might be like."

Many people think war is an art, but do you?

The Fallen

Every war has casualties. Every battle has casualties. Some have more than others. Some have very few. But all casualties, no matter which side they are on, are terrible. For those of you that do not know, September 21st is International Peace Day. As this blog focuses on telling true war stories, it would be a shame to not speak of peace in at least one post.

This year for International Peace Day, a group of people from Sandinyoureye and Peace One Day came together to create a work of art commemorating The Fallen of the D-Day Invasion on June 6, 1944. For every casualty of this single day, they drew a soldier in the sand along the beach of Normandy.



Using the stencils shown above, some 9,000 bodies were drawn in the sand. According to the site, even that is a conservative estimate. Of the casualties that day, 3,000 were French civilians, 2,000 were German soldiers, and 4,414 were Allied forces. If two of those words above did not cause you to pause and ask yourself why, let me say them again. The casualties that day were 9,000.

Why do we insist on losing so many lives in such a short period of time? Is war a last resort or a first response? Which should it be? Can we ever achieve peace one day?



"On Peace Day we quietly and harmoniously drew 9,000 people in the sand so that people can understand the loss with their own eyes. This was a quiet day with a very loud statement. The message of the Fallen is now travelling the globe, those people that lost their lives are no longer with us but on Peace Day 21st September 2013 they spoke." Jimmy Wardley

Throughout history, mankind has fought each other. Every side of every war has experienced casualties. Whether it is the 9,000 lost on D-Day, the 46,286 lost at the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War, or the approximately 1,600 casualties of the Battle of Mogadishu, every loss is bitter.

All images from The Fallen 9000 Gallery