Not that instances of heroism cannot happen in war, for surely they can, but that the conditions of war, at least as we came to know them in the twentieth century, when mechanization depersonalized combat, and made of the soldier a kind of fodder, would seem to have so reduced the value or the integrity of the individual that to portray war with any degree of authenticity is to describe acts of valor only insofar as they exist within a larger abjection.