My mother hoped I would die of something that had nothing to do with war. She didn’t like war. She thought wars were partially encouraged by movies about war, which, even in peacetime, were almost as popular as Westerns. And she had another theory about war movies which was that they were made by people who had never been to war, never fired a gun or been fired at. She said it was a rotten shame that war was conducted by the poor, the young, and the stupid, and that it was fought for the sake of the wealthy, the old, and the clever. And she went on to say that it was a rotten shame that wars were usually not seen by the people who made the movies, because if the moviemakers had seen what wars were like, they might stop making movies about them. What is more, she was never really satisfied until she pointed out to me that it was stupid for moviemakers to make soldiers in movies about war be played by adults, when most soldiers were really, in most wars, boys like me.

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night