What is war?
Well, simply put, it's two enormous organisms, which we call "civilizations" or "nations", having at one another over something which they both want. For now, I'll call them nations Joe and Bob.
Bob wants something Joe has - a box. Now, Bob is a fighting man (an aggressive civilization), so he asks Joe politely for Joe's box one time. Joe refuses, because it just so happens the box is what Joe's economy runs on. (Think of a country which makes its commerce solely on gold.)
This is where the armies come in. In this extended metaphor, armies are fists, feet, and teeth. Bob really wants that box, so he throws a punch at Joe. Joe can either block it with his arm or let it hit his face (the face being the civilians), so he blocks the punch.
Well, what are armies?
Armies are the instruments of war. This time, think of a chess board. Joe is white and Bob is black. The white pieces all start in one inert, enormous mass which plunderously starts moving from Joe's innermost protection (his side of the board is closer to his 'cities') to attack the other side. The same is true of all the black pieces. Then, the two sides approach and finally clash into each other, destroying each other in a massacre of marble pieces which are placed to the side of the board for future use. Okay, so extended metaphors aren't always perfect - or ever perfect, for that matter.
In this case, the king represents the box in the sense of being the goal: when it's captured or taken in chess parlance and destroyed in mine, the war is won.
What are soldiers, then?
From the army's perspective, they're the same as skin cells to a human: they do their job, they do it well, and sometimes one becomes cancerous. They do their job for about two weeks, then they die and are sent away.
From the country's perspective, they're cold, hard, detached people who want to shoot guns at other people.
From their family's perspective, they're living people with three-dimensional personalities who either joined the army or got recruited (and in the latter case, they probably come back drastically changed in an incredibly short period of time, shocking the family who could still remember how they were before they left.)
Soldiers who serve any number of tours in war will undoubtedly experience death, destruction, chaos, and general universal entropy, from greatest to least importance. It's amazing soldiers can even cling on to even the thinnest strand of humanity after having been shot at, bombed on, blasted, maimed, and generally forced to endure death as a daily thing and destruction as a constant of life. (Chaos and general universal entropy happen everywhere on Earth regardless of conditions, so I doubt that's really so horrible. Six point nine billion people seem to have managed to survive them so far.)
What is death?
From a purely definitional standpoint, death is the moment where an organism ceases to be, or, more precisely the instant at which the cells cease to operate in unison. (In laymans terms: death is when all your organs stop agreeing on what to do next.)
However, from a more philosophical standpoint, no one really knows what death is or feels like, because everyone who went through it is dead now. We haven't figure out a way to talk to dead people yet, but I'm sure this will be one of the first questions we ask them when we finally figure out how to do so.
From the eyes of the living, death is usually pretty traumatic. Now, in this context I mean death we know about... thousands of deaths are occuring all over your body as you read this and you don't even care! How cruel a person you must be!
As a general rule of thumb, trauma is a factor of the scale of the death times the inverse of the distance. For example, if your car hits a bird, it's a fairly sad event for most people: You'll say "Oh no!!!", stop, and wish you hadn't hit the bird. However, you won't be a completely different person because of it, and you won't hold a funeral for the corpse of the bird.
Another example is a war on the other side of the planet. There's an incredible amount of death going on, but you're so disconnected from it you may not even know there is a war. If someone tells you about it, you may go "Really? Oh, wow, that's terrible! Why don't they just end the war?" but unless you know personally know someone who's in the war you probably won't lay awake every night tossing and turning about it.
What is destruction?
Destruction is the ending of a structure: fission is destruction of atoms, disassembly is the destruction of assembled parts, and war is the destruction of hopes, dreams, lives, places, and nations. Everything can be thought of as causing the destruction of something else: every time you eat you're destroying solid chunks of food so you can restructure them into something useful to you.
What is chaos?
Chaos is comparable to total randomness. For example, when two atoms collide into each other at near-light speeds, there are an infinite number of almost-identical paths they can take, which can end up leading to very different points over a long period of time, such as one millenium.
An example of chaos could be a twenty-sided die. When you roll it, there's theoretically an equal chance there will be a one or an eighteen. The same is true of chaos. However, another function of chaos is that things will always either converge or diverge as a result of it. Chaos is not stationary.
What is general universal entropy?
General universal entropy (better known as: "entropy") is any action which is easy to do and extremely hard to undo. For example, energy released as heat is a form of entropy because it's incredibly difficult to ever get that work energy back. You can get it back by using a cold object, like ice - but creating the ice will in fact create more entropy than what you harness by using the ice.
An example could be as follows: you have a pot of water and a shaker of salt. You shake salt into the pot of water and let it dissolve, and for your one unit of work you get a pot of slightly salty water.
If you want the salt back, you'll have to boil off all the water in the pot, scrape the solidified salt off the bottom of the pan, and grind it back into table salt. However, in the act of doing so you expend 500 units of work and empty your pot of water.
To get the water back, you could set up an enormous collection net going into the pot, and then chill the room to below zero degrees Celsius. However, the amount of work to do this is in the ten thousands, as you have to keep an enormous area chilled, which requires more work elsewhere. As an end result, you finally get the kitchen back to the way it was, as long as you're willing to ignore the chilliness.
...and on that note, I draw my post about somewhat-connected topics to a close.
