When doubts about the truth of a society’s ideology become acute for those who embrace this ideology, a war may be the vehicle for putting doubt to rest. The injuries or wounds that soldiers suffer in battle, as well as the deaths that occur, function to validate a culture’s belief system: "Look, men still are willing to be mutilated and to die for our beliefs! They must be true."

As Elaine Scarry puts it, the interior content of the soldier’s body, "lungs, arteries, blood and brains" that ooze "into the light of day" constitute the "motherlode" that substantiates the issue for which the war is being fought. The content of the wounded soldier’s body are displayed on the field of battle: the "precious ore" of confirmation.

In war, Scarry suggests, the "incontestable reality of the body—the body in pain, the body maimed—the body dead and hard to dispose of"—is "conferred on an ideology." The ideology thus achieves for a time the "force and status of material 'fact’ by the sheer weight of the multitudes of damaged and opened human bodies." War, in short, is that cultural activity which seeks to produce dead and wounded soldiers in order to establish the truth of a society’s ideology.

THAT FOR WHICH WE DIE MUST BE TRUE: In warfare, the body and blood of the sacrificed soldier gives rise to the reality of the nation. Killing and dying are undertaken in order to substantiate belief—to validate the ideology in the name of which killing and dying occurs. The sound and fury of battle suggests that something real is at stake. That for which we die must be true. That for which we kill must be true.