if I was serving in the Norwegian Armed Forces, or the United States Armed Forces, at any point after World War II, I would then too feel like I was betraying my own moral standards

Well, I say this, but I don’t spit on the graves of deceased relatives who served in the military, nor berate my living relatives who served. I’m sure this is what most people morally opposed to imperial-core military service do, but I still worry that it makes me a hypocrite.

Edit: In fact, I still cry sometimes about a memory I have of my granddad from when I was a little kid. This was a very long time ago, and I was too little to understand everything, but as I recall it I was visiting his house, and I gave my granddad a big hug, and playfully “rubbed my scent” on him pretending to be a cat, for I liked to “play cat” and I was very glad to see him… Then after that visit, the following day, I was told by my mom not to hug my granddad in that way ever again. She explained that the specific playful way I’d hugged him, had apparently reminded him of a child that he played with shortly before a traumatic incident back when he was a UN peacekeeper — and so I had accidentally triggered my granddad’s PTSD.

In that moment, I think, I came to better understand the toll of war… That war is not just lost lives that can be mourned, not just physical injuries that can heal or be accommodated for, not just destroyed buildings that can be rebuilt — that war is also a child being told it can’t give its grandpa a hug. And that to me really seemed like a fate worse than death, to be emotionally crippled by a hug from one’s own grandchild… I never knew that child from granddad’s memory, I never knew its name or gender or hobbies or when exactly it was born, and I either wasn’t told or I cannot remember the country that granddad was deployed in — yet I still wonder if in that moment, when I was told what I had done to my granddad… that between two very different countries in two very different times, that two children were still haunted by the same monster.