“War is too weird a thing to make sense of when it’s actually happening…”

War is too weird a thing to make sense of when it’s actually happening. It’s not just the combat, which by its nature is unintelligible. Armed conflict so fundamentally alters the environment it takes hold of that no aspect of life escapes undistorted: not love, not friendship, not sleep, not trust, not conversation. In war, even boredom is strange.

Dexter Filkins, “The Long Road Home”, The New York Times Book Review (9 March 2014), 1.