The Buffed Historian

Wars are fought by kids. We'll let that sink in for a moment. In every recorded conflict, at least from the Napoleonic Wars, when detailed records of armies began being kept en masse, to today, soldiers serving in combat have averaged around twenty-two years of age. Our brains are not fully mature until we reach twenty-five, yet nations send their young off to war, with many still in their late teens. This is an uncomfortable truth society still struggles with, and in many ways has remained oblivious to for decades, due in no small part to the film industry.  Thanks to war films, mostly from the 1950s and 60s, there has been an ongoing misconception about the age of soldiers in war. Watch any war flick prior to 2001's Black Hawk Down , and every soldier, even the low-ranking privates, are depicted as mature men in their thirties and even forties. Occasionally, you would see a young "newbie" in his late teens to early twenties, but these were always the exception. In r