Not about heroes

Last night I headed over to A-squared again, this time to see/hear a dramatic reading of a two-person play entitled "Not About Heroes", which portrays the friendship between Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, two of the best of the generation of British poets who were cavalierly tossed into the meatgrinder of WWI trench warfare by pigheaded generals who considered the deaths of a hundred thousand men here or a hundred thousand there to be an everyday, blase occurence. It's a powerful play, closely based on the poems and letters of the two men, and it leaves questions lingering in one's mind.

Sassoon's war poems were read and acknowledged largely because he had demonstrated downright suicidal courage under fire, thus pre-emptively absolving himself of the charge of cowardice. Owen died in one of the very last actions of the war, trying to accomplish the same thing.

Does a person need to be a military veteran, or even a military hero, in order to be considered competent to judge the desirability of war and peace?

And how can a society where decisionmakers are completely insulated from the immediate results of their decisions expect to have any rational decisions made on its behalf?