In war, those with their lives yet to be lived are also those most urgently needed to fight. It is one of the tragic ironies of conflict. In the U.S. Civil War, the average soldier was 26 and approximately 620,000 soldiers died. In World War I, over 2 million German soldiers died, and 40 percent of German combatants were between 21 and 25 years old. In the Vietnam War, 58,193 American servicemen died — approximately 24 percent of those killed were 20, and roughly 17 percent of those kille...
