WAR.... what is it good for? -- Edwin Starr

Most of you know by now... but I am a combat veteran of Desert Storm.

I consider myself EXTREMELY fortunate in the fact that I was never injured, never had to watch a fellow soldier get killed. In fact, I don't recall ever firing a shot...

I do, however, remember vividly LOTS of shots being fired AT me....

In fact, I once had three different countries shoot at me all at once from all different directions.

As lucky as I indeed was, that luck did NOT keep me from seeing, first hand, the horrors of war. Nor did it keep me from learning definitively whether I could take another life or not....

So much death and destruction.... bodies horribly burned, mangled or simply in pieces. Dogs eating the bodies strewn around like a buffet. The oil fires looking like an artists perception of Hell.... the sky forever blocked from sunlight by the smoke. The children scrounging for food or even a simple kindness.

If you know anything about me yet, then you know there is a reason I bring all this up.....

I started The Ultimate Basement as a means to give back.... to try to make a horrible world just a little bit better in some way.

Ask my kids, I was very much ANTI-video games and all who knew me was amazed I had started a game center.

So it was that I decorated a part of a wall with my war mementos.... since Call Of Duty was so popular.

One of my most regular/best customers was a young man roughly 12 yrs old.

He came all the time to battle it out with the enemy on Call Of Duty. This guy was serious about the game.

He had been coming there pretty steadily for a few years when one day he comes up to my counter and FINALLY notices my plaque on the wall.

He looks up at me with big eyes and says "Were you really in a real war?"

I looked back at him and said "Well yes sir, I was indeed."

He gets this excited look on his face and almost yells "Was it COOL???"

This young man had rocked me to my heels and I could barely speak out a response.... but I did.

"Hell no son! It isn't "cool" at all..... real war is nothing like Call Of Duty..... you dont get to "start over" if you get killed or hurt..... In the game, you hate when its boring and love when its exciting. But in real war, you yearn for the boring and fear the exciting. (regardless of the bravado we must keep pumping ourselves up with).

I will never forget that day, that look..... that huge, gaping flaw in society that I suddenly realized I had become a part of by having video games here......

I was helping propagate a lie... a monstrous horrendous fib.