In the first months of fighting, he was dismayed by the sight of sterile trench war, where "Tommies chew barbed wire in Flanders".
-- Killing becomes mechanical, clean, nearly sterile (remember the war porn images of missiles blasting through windows in Gulf War 1.0?) Our atrocities -- My Lai in Vietnam is the best known, but there were many more -- are the work of a few bad apples ("This is not who we are as Americans").
But otherwise the ravages of war are sterile, safe, and romanticized, something that doesn't sit well for someone who witnessed 9/11 in New York.
There are numerous reports of the use during times of war of sterile blow fly larvae in open wounds to remove decaying tissue and to prevent bacterial growth.
The measures that Mr Obama and Mr Castro announced on December 17th including a deal to restore diplomatic relations and the liberalisation of travel and remittances will do much to normalise a relationship that has been trapped in the sterile logic of the cold war.
After his Academy Award for directing American Beauty at the age of 34 came his gangster tale, Road to Perdition, then the war story Jarhead and the sterile suburbia of Revolutionary Road, before his smart-talking travelogue, Away We Go.
And war itself increasingly became a sterile and distant affair: U.S. soldiers directed drone attacks from buildings on U.S. soil, using high-tech weaponry much like blockbuster video games.
Just ask those who endured the sterile "five o'clock follies" briefings during the Vietnam War.
In an essay he wrote in 1980, he contrasted the sterile technology, hygiene and paranoia of the late cold-war era with the lusty vitality of civilization before the Great War.
Orwell said of Gandhi that he did "did not take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins".
