from "A Conversation with Paul Fussell:
Hackney: Why would you say that war is ironic rather than heroic?
Fussell: It's ironic because everybody believes that life is pleasurable, and they should. They have a right to believe that, especially if they're brought up under a Constitution that talks about the pursuit of happiness. To have public life shot through with that kind of optimism and complacency is the grounds for horrible, instructive irony when those generalities prove not true. War tends to prove them not true. War is about survival and it's about mass killing and it's about killing or being killed -- that is, in the infantry -- and it is extremely unpleasant. One realizes that a terrible mistake has been made somewhere, either by the optimistic eighteenth century or by mechanistic twentieth century. The two don't fit together somehow, and that creates, obviously, irony.
for those interested in the entire Conversation:
http://raven.cc.ukans.edu/~kansite/ww_one/comment/fussell.htm
