"War is a depredation of the human spirit that is sold as the loftiest of livelihoods. To hide the rape and pillage, the degradation and disaster, the training of human beings to become animals in ways we would allow no animals to be, we have concocted a language of mystification. We count casualties now in terms of 'collateral damage,' the number of millions of civilians we are prepared to lose in nuclear war and still call ourselves winners. We call the deadliest weapons in the history of humankind, the most benign of names: Little Boy, Bambi, Peacekeepers. The nuclear submarine used to launch Cruise missiles that can target and destroy 250 first-class cities at one time, for instance, we name 'Corpus Christi,' Body of Christ, a blasphemy used to describe the weapon that will break the Body of Christ beyond repair. We take smooth-faced young men out of their mother's kitchens to teach them how to march blindly into death, how to destroy what they do not know, how to hate what they have not seen. We make victims of the victors themselves. We call the psychological maiming, the physical squandering, the spiritual distortion of the nation's most vulnerable defenders 'defense.' We turn their parents and sweethearts and children into the aged, the widowed, and the orphaned before their time. 'We make a wasteland and call it peace,' the Roman poet Seneca wrote with miserable insight."