As I watched, I found it increasingly difficult to place those people inside the familiar frame of good and evil.

Some characters did things that were impossible to accept. Yet once the film showed what they had lost, what they had lived through, it became difficult to fit them neatly inside the word “evil.”

Some had lost family. Some had lived too long with fear. Some had made revenge into the reason to keep living. Even children began to inherit the hatred of adults.

None of that excuses harm. It simply makes visible how fragile a human being can become under enough fear, enough loss, and enough repetition of the sentence: “They all deserve it.”

There is often no clean dividing line in this process.

A gentle person does not wake one morning and decide to become monstrous. More often, one loss creates the wish to take something back; another wound makes it harder to believe in the humanity of the other side. Eventually the person opposite is no longer a person with a name, only “the enemy,” “them,” “the one who must pay.”

CHAPTER 01Understanding someone is not the same as absolving them

This was the first difficult line we ran into.

If someone seeks revenge after their family is killed, can we understand the impulse? Of course. It may be almost impossible not to.

But understanding cannot become: therefore anything that follows is acceptable.

War gives almost everyone a “because”: because you hurt us first; because I have already lost too much; because there was no other way; because if I do not retaliate, you will come again.

The pain behind each “because” may be real. But when the next act of violence falls on someone innocent, that person acquires a “because” of their own.

We gradually arrived at a distinction that mattered to both of us: understanding causation helps us see how violence grows; preserving responsibility prevents causation from becoming a permit for violence.

The two do not cancel each other out; they calibrate each other. Understanding keeps judgment from becoming crude, while responsibility keeps understanding from sliding into permission.

Aggression, massacres, the use of children, and deliberate harm to civilians still require moral and legal judgment. Beyond that judgment, however, we can keep asking how a person, a group, or a society came to this point.

If the answer is always only “they were evil,” we may never learn very much about how to stop the next descent.

CHAPTER 02Wars have outcomes; human lives are harder to settle

In July 2026 alone, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine verified at least 437 civilians killed and 2,610 injured—the highest combined monthly civilian toll it had documented since March 2022.2

437 and 2,610. War often reaches us first in numbers like these.

Those numbers matter. Without them, we cannot even begin to understand the scale of harm.

But cinema does something else. It turns numbers back into people.

A soldier returns alive and may spend years living with what he saw and did. A family reaches a ceasefire with one chair permanently empty. A child survives, but part of childhood remains in shelters, flight, and fear.

At that scale, the word “victory” becomes harder to place.

States and armies do win and lose in military terms. Wars can produce strategic outcomes that have to be acknowledged. But those outcomes cannot smooth away the pain carried by each person who has to live through them.

So “war has no winners,” if treated as an absolute statement, is too simple. Some wars are fought in self-defense. Some aggressions have to be stopped. There can be clear military victors.

Yet at the level of a household, a dinner table, or the remainder of one life, victory becomes much less complete.

What we came closer to saying was this: victory can be declared on a particular day; loss does not share the same ending.

CHAPTER 03After the film, even the walk home felt more specific

The questions did not remain on the screen when the film ended.

They became more immediate when I returned to my own life.

I live in China now, where public order feels secure and daily life is stable. I can walk outside at night. Trains run. Shopping malls stay lit. Convenience stores remain open.

Most days, none of this feels remarkable.

I may complain that the train is crowded, that work is tiring, that the weather is humid, or that the thing I wanted from the convenience store has sold out.

That night it occurred to me that the ability to complain about those things depends on a much deeper layer of order still holding.

Hospitals have electricity. Water runs. Phones can be charged. Children know what time school begins tomorrow. A person coming home late can still wonder whether to stop for food.

War often breaks these unremarkable continuities first.

That thought makes visible how little control we actually have over the order we take for granted.

Watching one film, of course, does not give us the power to stop every war.

But perhaps not every feeling has to be converted immediately into a list of actions. Sometimes noticing what we already have changes the way we see the world.

CHAPTER 04That is why casual words about war begin to reveal what they leave out

So when phrases like “just fight,” “deal with them,” or “make them pay” appear, what stands out is the people missing from the sentence.

Not because every war can be avoided, and not because the answer to aggression is always a call for peace.

The discomfort comes from how easily such language makes the cost disappear.

The phrase “go to war” contains no cancelled classes, no restaurant closed in a hurry, no home that cannot be returned to, no unanswered phone call late at night.

The sentence takes seconds. The consequences may occupy years, decades, or another generation.

So we found ourselves valuing hesitation—not as weakness, and not as the absence of judgment.

The harder the judgment, perhaps the more important it is to remember the people who do not appear on strategic maps.

CHAPTER 05If the cost is so high, why does the United States still go to war?

This became the part of our conversation that lasted the longest.

It is easy to fall into one of two stories: that the United States fights only to defend security and order, or that war is simply a business arranged for arms companies.

But “the United States” is not a single person sitting at a table with one mind.

The president, Congress, the military, intelligence agencies, allies, defense contractors, voters, and military families face different risks and expect different gains.

So the question “What does America gain?” immediately opens into another: gain for whom, over what period, and are we talking about benefits expected before the war or outcomes actually realized years later?

When states consider force, the reasoning can include security threats, deterrence, alliance commitments, regional influence, and judgments about future danger.

Those considerations are not automatically false. The problem is that they point toward a future that can only be estimated.

The 2003 Iraq War is a useful example. The Bush administration publicly framed its objectives around disarming Iraq of weapons of mass destruction it was believed to possess, ending Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and removing his regime.3

The later Iraq Survey Group did not find the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that had been asserted before the invasion.4

This does not mean every U.S. war follows the same logic. Afghanistan in 2001 followed the September 11 attacks and had a direct counterterrorism context; Iraq involved a different set of judgments.

But Iraq illustrates something important: the benefit that motivates a war is often an expected benefit, not one already proven to exist.

Judgments can fail. Intelligence can fail. Expectations about what happens after a regime falls can fail.

CHAPTER 06Once war begins, reasons to continue can grow wild along the path of sacrifice

At first, the reasons may still be relatively contained. War quickly draws casualties, credibility, sunk costs, and political pressure into itself, until they cling like vines around the possibility of leaving.

Before war, the question is whether entering is worth it.

After war, the question quietly becomes whether it is still possible to leave after so much has already been paid.

Those are not the same question.

When many soldiers have died, withdrawal can be framed as allowing them to have “died for nothing.” The greater the sacrifice, the more painful it can become to admit that the original judgment may have been wrong.

This resembles the logic of sunk costs. Past losses cannot be recovered merely by investing more, yet emotionally and politically the phrase “their sacrifice must not be wasted” has enormous force.

An experimental study using the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as contexts found that, under certain conditions, activating this logic of not wasting prior sacrifice could make information about casualties increase support for continuing a war.5

Then there is credibility.

A superpower that publicly promises to defend allies or punish certain actions worries that retreat will be read by allies and adversaries as proof that its commitments are unreliable.

That concern is not imaginary. Credibility matters in international politics.

The danger is that if more and more local conflicts are interpreted as tests of global credibility, leaving begins to look like an intolerable defeat.

A war can therefore be sustained not only by its original reasons, but by costs already incurred, domestic political pressure, and anxiety about future reputation.

Sometimes people remain not because a better reason to continue has appeared, but because they no longer know how to say: perhaps it is time to stop.

CHAPTER 07“War is profitable” explains something, but not enough

Defense companies, contractors, and industries tied to military spending can indeed receive orders and profits from war.

But profit for an industry is not the same thing as profit for a whole country.

Those figures need careful reading. The 4.5–4.7 million figure does not mean that all of those deaths were directly caused by U.S. forces. It is an estimate across multiple post-9/11 war zones that includes both direct violence and longer-term indirect deaths associated with war damage, and the project itself emphasizes uncertainty.6

Even as an order of magnitude, however, it makes the phrase “war makes money” difficult to leave unqualified.

The United States may gain strategic position in one war, destroy an adversarial organization, defend an ally, or demonstrate military capability. At the same time it can incur fiscal costs, military deaths, veterans’ care, domestic division, regional instability, and damage to its international standing.

Hatred is one of the costs that does not fit neatly into a budget.

In surveys after the Iraq War, Pew Research Center documented marked declines in views of the United States in many countries, particularly in parts of the Muslim world; its analysis linked anti-American sentiment in part to the Iraq War, the war on terror, and perceptions of unilateral U.S. action.7

At this point in our conversation, it was hard not to think back to the people in the film who had lost family.

From Washington, the vocabulary may be security, deterrence, alliances, and regional order.

From the position of a child whose father is gone, the first fact may simply be that one day his father did not come home.

Both descriptions can exist at once. They leave completely different memories of the same war.

CHAPTER 08The harder question is how “reasonable” fragments can add up to disaster

By this point, we had somehow returned to the film’s first question: how does a person become capable of things they once might not have done?

If war came only from one completely mad person deciding to do evil, the world would be easier to understand.

The harder reality is that many decisions are built from reasons that, taken one by one, do not sound absurd.

If we do not act now, more people may die later.

If we retreat now, our allies may never trust us again.

Too many people have already died for us to leave.

If this regime falls, perhaps the people there will live better lives.

We have to show an adversary that attacking us has consequences.

Some of those statements contain real danger. Some contain responsibility. Some are driven by fear. Some rest on mistaken assumptions.

They do not all have to be lies for them to combine into a terrible outcome.

This is not an argument for abandoning judgment.

It is an argument for making judgments more carefully: distinguishing aggression from self-defense, responsibility from circumstance, necessary resistance from avoidable escalation.

And after judgment, still remembering people.

Strategic language naturally turns the world into objectives, threats, allies, losses, and gains. The film brought us back to the people beneath those words—people who also want to eat, go home, and wait for someone to return.

We did not arrive at an answer that explains every war.

But perhaps we became more comfortable with the idea that some questions matter even when they do not produce quick answers.

Their value may be that the next time we hear something very certain, very angry, and very eager to divide the world into two sides, we keep a little more judgment—and a little more imagination for the person on the other side of the sentence.

EPILOGUEIn the end, we came back to “eat well”

In Wuhan, people often greet one another with a simple question: “吃了冇?”—have you eaten?

It is light enough to function as a greeting; often it is not even a literal inquiry about food. Yet after talking our way through war, this was where we found ourselves again.

In ordinary life, “have you eaten?” and “eat well” are almost weightless. We say them to family, friends, or someone leaving the room without thinking much about it.

In war, it depends on many things still being intact.

A table remains. A stove can be lit. There is something to cook. Someone can wait. There is still a place that can be called home.

After that night, I did not feel a stronger need to say “cherish peace” loudly.

I simply noticed a streetlight on the way home, a train still arriving on time, a convenience store still open late, and the work waiting for the next morning with a little more attention.

We cannot guarantee that these things will always remain.

Perhaps that is exactly why they deserve to be seen.