War & Peace Quote by Seymour Hersh

Hersh’s line lands like an indictment disguised as plain reportage: the real scandal isn’t that people line up to join the security forces in a war zone, it’s that they have to. He takes a rosy political talking point - “100,000 people want to serve” - and flips the lens from patriotism to desperation. The sentence structure does the work. “Wanting to go work” sounds almost mundane, a job fair verb dropped into a battlefield. Then he punctures it with the brutal punchline: “stand in line to get bombed.” That jarring collision between employment language and mortal risk is the point. It exposes how official narratives launder coercion as choice.

The subtext is class warfare by other means. Hersh implies that the labor market is the hidden draft: when an economy is shattered, “volunteering” becomes a euphemism for survival. “There’s nothing else for them to do” isn’t a sociological aside; it’s the moral pivot. It suggests policy failure (or design) where instability and unemployment funnel people into institutions that also make them targets. His final clause - “take care of their family” - denies audiences the comfort of judging these recruits as collaborators or zealots. They’re parents calculating odds, not ideologues chasing glory.

Contextually, this reads as a rebuke to the Bush-era habit of treating enlistment numbers in Iraq as proof of legitimacy and progress. Hersh, as an investigative reporter, aims to discredit the metric itself: if your evidence of success is that people will risk death for a paycheck, you’re not measuring support. You’re measuring ruin.