War is often understood and studied through its horrors: death, injury, violence, trauma, barbarity, and destruction. Yet personal accounts from soldiers, humanitarians, journalists and many other war workers reveal that war also generates a range of pleasurable experiences. As terrible as war is, it can also feel good.
These pleasures are wide-ranging and include friendship, purpose, adventure, money, freedom, and the intoxication of being fully alive. Yet pleasure is almost entirely absent from how we study and talk about war.
This project investigates that silence. Drawing on interviews with noncombatants who worked in the most recent Afghan war, as well as memoirs across the past century, poetry, and a small body of scholarship, it maps the pleasures of war. It also examine why we refuse to take pleasure seriously and how morality impacts how we discuss war.
Excluding pleasure from the study of war allows it to be framed as something only sadists could enjoy. But pleasure is as intrinsic to war as pain and death — and ignoring it purifies war in ways that make it easier to wage. By examining it, it offers insights into one of the ways war is sustained and brings meaning. We tend to define war by its destructiveness but war workers are telling us something else: that war is also a social world unlike any other. War does not just expose the extremes and awfulness of human behaviour; it also reveals truths about what we value and what we crave.