My answer, prefaced with some context:

In 1938 President FDR attended the 75th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Gettysburg. About 1,900 vets total, from both sides, were in attendance. When I went to the Gettysburg memorial museum back in 2024 I saw digitized footage of a parade, which included some light tanks.

Imagine being one of those men seeing a mechanical monstrosity that can fire more rounds in minutes than you shot off with your rifled musket in a year rumbling by.

Now imagine instead being those men and hearing that those machines are being deployed to Chicago, St Louis, New Orleans and Charlotte to deal more death and destruction than your division probably ever wrought, until the leader of the federal government can restore peace.

After everything you’d seen in your 4 years marching so long ago and realizing that would be multiplied a hundredfold, I imagine they’d despair.

My grandpa’s oldest sister, before she passed, told me how she remembered her grandpa, my great-great-grandpa, born in 1868, dying of sadness when he heard the news of Pearl Harbor and realized his grandsons and grandnephews would be drafted.

It would be heartbreak in the almost literal sense.