An American seaman looks at the charred corpse of a Japanese flier

An American seaman looks at the charred corpse of a Japanese flier brought up from the bottom of Pearl Harbour, where he crashed with his burning plane during the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941 in Hawai. AP Photo

I've gone and tagged it NSFW as the remnants of the pilots face are.gruesome to say the least. No matter how little sympathy you have for the pilot, think this photo is one that drives home how ugly war is, since.so often photos, especially pre-Vietnam, simply avoid the

uglier side of war.

It wasn't until late 1943 that pictures of dead Americans even for published in the US, and it was a very clean, somber picture, not one that showed the terrible injuries and mutilations many others suffered in their dying (of course this can contrast with the picture Life Magazine later ran of a womancontemplating the.Japanese skull her boyfriend sent her from the Pacific...).

War is brutal and ugly to the extreme, and this photo is only.a small slice of that. Blindly glorifying war is really quite dangerous, and I think that Shelby Foote captured that very.well in an interview I heard him give, where he spoke about portrayal of war in fiction. "There is a general belief that war books promote a love

of war, and that is true about bad war books, but every serious book about a battle or about a war, if it's serious,

is bound to be anti-war.  Because the truth is, it's more bloody than it is glorious, and the suffering is a far bigger part of it than the patriotism and the glory, and that will come across with an honest writer. Cheap literature.hurts everybody, but decent, honest literature will always carry this anti-war message, it's bound to be there.

No matter how patriotic a man may sound, underlying it, if he has a good eye, everybody is going to see through the phoney patriotism and the ephemeral glory, and to the real

suffering of it and especially the absurdity of it."

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