You never know who you might run into at the local mall–perhaps even an Army recruiter. At the Franklin Mills shopping mall in Philadelphia the U.S. Army Experience Center has 60 computers with military videogames to ensnare young people. Prospective soldiers can also pretend to fire from a real Humvee or participate in a helicopter raid.
This is certainly contributing to the modern Army’s culture of death that this former Army Ranger just wrote me about:
Dear Dr. Vance,
Today I followed a large pickup bearing an Arizona “Purple Heart”  plate and driven by a youngish type, perhaps in his 30s, a sad  commentary in itself. But worse, it sported a bumper sticker reading,  “Special Forces. If God didn’t want us to kill people, he wouldn’t  have made us so good at it.”
From a culture I’m well familiar with (having completed Ranger  training 37 years ago), such a sentiment would once have been shared  only among practitioners—Rangers, Special Forces, Delta Force—and not Â
thought fit for even non-elite infantrymen. Now we’re seeing it openly and casually expressed, as if commenting on the economy. Even a  generation ago soldiers expressed regret about their experiences; now  they want to tell you how proud they are to have killed and, presumably, that they would not hesitate to do it again.
Join the Army, meet interesting people, kill them.
