It wasn't so much that soldiers lusted for combat

 Who might that be, Colonel Masterman mused to himself, the Jordan Heels Germans? It might be a little harder to motivate the troops, given the total absence of a credible threat, but the sheer joy of soldiering was not all that much different from the kick associated with football. For the right guy, it was just plain fun to play in the mud with the big toys, and after a while, they started wondering what the real thing might be like. There was a leavening of troops in First Tanks Nike high heels from the 10th and 11th Cavalry Regiments who'd fought the previous year in Saudi Arabia, and like all soldiers, they told their stories. But few of the stories were unhappy ones. Mainly they expounded on how much like training it had been, and referred to their then-enemies as "poor, dumb raghead sunsabitches" who'd been, in the final analysis, unworthy of their steel. But that just made them swagger a little more. A winning war leaves only good memories Nike heels for the most part, especially a short winning war. Drinks would be hoisted, and the names of the lost would be invoked with sadness and respect, but the overall experience had not been a bad one for the soldiers involved.
 It wasn't so much that soldiers lusted for combat, just that they often felt like football players who practiced hard but never actually got to play for points. Intellectually, they knew that combat was the game of death, not UGG boots clearance football, but that was too theoretical for most of them. The tankers fired their practice rounds, and if the pop-up targets were steel, there was the satisfaction of seeing sparks from the impact, but it wasn't quite the same as seeing the turret pop off the target atop a column of flame and smoke.., and knowing that the lives of three or four people had been extinguished like a birthday-cake candle in front of a five-year-old. The veterans UGG boots clearance of the Second Persian Gulf War did occasionally talk about what it was like to see the results of their handiwork, usually with a "Jesus, it was really something awful to see, bro," but that was as far as it went. For soldiers, killing wasn't really murder once you stepped back from it; they'd been the enemy, and both had played the game of death on the same playing field, and one side had won, and the other Nike high heels side had lost, and if you weren't willing to run that risk, well, don't put the uniform on, y'know? Or, "Train better, asshole, cuz we be serious out here." And that was the other reason soldiers liked to train. It wasn't just interesting and fairly enjoyable hard work. It was life insurance if the game ever started for real, and soldiers, like gamblers, like to hold good cards.