Watching a movie like Lone Survivor, I can't help thinking about issues like these, and with something as weighty and dire as war, painting every American conflict as "heroes defending our freedom" does a disservice to the victims of war as well as those fighting them.
"That helps you to avoid getting into that situation in real life". So what happens at the end of the Dire Straits war game?
The academic crisis is even more dire in war-torn Syria, where universities have been occupied or destroyed and thousands of students and professors have been displaced, threatened, or killed.
They fear consequences as dire as regional war and an Iranian regime unified and strengthened by a sense of common purpose.
To them, it's very clear that Syria is in a very dire situation, the war has been going on almost two years, and tens of thousands of civilians have been killed and many houses have been destroyed.
The meeting in Turkey of the so-called Friends of Syria group is taking place against a backdrop of worsening violence in the two-year-old civil war, dire new worries about how to care for millions of displaced Syrians, and further signs of Islamist radicalization in the insurgency as well as intransigence by President Bashar al-Assad.
For Kennedy, the threat to America's existence came from abroad, but the consequences were perhaps even more dire: our Cold War foes presented an existential threat to America, and our conflict presented a threat to humanity itself.
Respecting religious differences while celebrating our common humanity, Religions for Peace is active on every continent and in some of the most troubled areas of the world, creating multi-religious partnerships to confront our most dire issues: stopping war, ending poverty, and protecting the earth.
Michael E Mann is distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center and author of three books, including The Hockey Stick and The Climate Wars, Dire Predictions, and The Madhouse Effect.
Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Pennsylvania State University and author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change, and just out in September, The Madhouse Effect, with Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles.
