Betty Kovacs remembers being five or six when her mother first explained war to her. She'd grown up resolving conflicts through talk, not fighting, so the idea that adults solved problems with violence made no sense. That confusion launched a lifetime of questions about why humans wage war.
Chapters
My life had just been wonderful as a child. I was 5, not quite 6 at the time, and life was wonderful. You know, as long as everything worked, it was beautiful and didn't have so many questions. But that was, first off, what was war? And my mother tried so hard to explain to me in a way that I would accept. But what I couldn't get over is that it was the adults who were fighting. Now my brother and I would get in arguments and, uh, we were brought in and would have discussions with our parents about that and how to resolve things, but not in fighting. And if we weren't supposed to fight as kids, what was going on in the world? It just absolutely threw me as a kid. Mm-hmm. And I, I think for the rest of my life I was trying to figure out why do human beings do that kind of thing? What happened to us?