So
Anzac Day is here, and naturally it's got me thinking about war - in particular how different countries view war.
When I was a kid, we did a project on Gallipoli in school every April. We watched interviews with people who survived the campaign, read books on it from both the perspective of the common soldier and a broader military standpoint, visited memorials and museums, and were often given projects where we had to try and imagine life from the view of a common soldier (one that stands out is pretending to be a soldier writing a letter home). There were a lot of recurring themes throughout the stories - day-to-day life in the trenches given story precedence over the actual fighting, the youth and naivete of the soldiers (who would then die horribly), and generally acts of helping mates out being portrayed more heroically than actual military prowess
(see this guy for basically the big example. tl;dr he deserted his post and spent three weeks bringing in wounded before getting shot).
All this built up a perception of the campaign (and, by extension, war as a whole) as a bloody, grim, pointless waste of life.
What I find both interesting and disturbing (and I admit, this is a bit of a cheap shot and as someone who has never been to the US I am very probably misreading the situation) is how this contrasts with USA culture. Whenever I hear an American talk about someone awesome from WWI or WWII, they're talking about guys who managed to kill a thousand Nazis with a bow and arrow or something. So much American pop culture glorifies war and violence that it's become trite to even point this out.
My questions are these: How were you taught war in school? How do you think it influenced your view on war as an adult? And how do you think it influenced your nation as a whole?