From Real Duty to Call of Duty: What Video Games Don't Teach About War's Cost

I served before Doom made first-person war into a game.

When I enlisted in the army, my gaming experience consisted of whatever I could load from a 5.25" floppy disk onto my Commodore 64. By the time I left the service in the mid-nineties, id Software had unleashed the first-person shooter upon the world, and I watched as an entire generation began to believe that warfare was something you could understand through a monitor. War games had been around, but this was something new. It no longer meant making cold analytical decisions about troop movements, support, armored divisions, and terrain. It meant looking at your enemies and killing them face-to-face. Sure, Doom wasn’t the first FPS, but it was the one that gamers who are old enough will have played. It’s the one living on in further iterations. It’s the one that gave birth to memes and nerdish pastimes. And, although most intelligent, well-adjusted, and empathetic gamers (human beings all made in the image of God) will never be twisted in similar fashion, it’s the one associated with Columbine High, which represents a significant shift in American violence.

The next ten years flurried past in a bloom of computer & gaming technologies, along with ever more energetic and devastating first person shooters. What strikes me most about this transformation is how quickly we went from respecting the unknowable nature of combat to believing we could master it with a mouse and keyboard. I remember the first time I heard some teenager complaining about "camping" in an online match, how it "wasn't fair" when players took tactical positions and waited. This child was actually angry that someone played like a real sniper instead of running around in the open where quick reflexes mattered more than tactical intelligence.

I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and explain that in actual warfare, the "camper" lives and the run-and-gun hero comes home in a box. But how do you explain that to someone whose understanding of combat comes from respawn points and killstreaks?

The irony is that the military once tried to bridge this gap. In 2003, they released America's Army 2: Special Forces as a recruiting tool, and for all its propaganda purposes, it was the most honest war game I've ever played. I remember booting it up, cynically expecting another shooter, and instead finding myself in virtual basic training, actual lessons (including combat medicine) straight from Army field manuals. When you finally got to combat, one or two bullets could kill you. No respawning. No health packs. Just tactics, teamwork, and the constant awareness that one mistake meant watching your squad continue without you. And for those who remained in battle, there was the very real weight of fighting on under the gaze of the “ghosts” who went before.

I knew it was getting something right because it reminded me of crawling under barbed wire during my own training, explosions detonating overhead, tracers lighting up the darkness. That fear, even knowing it was "just training," was real. Your body doesn't know the difference when the sound hits you, when the ground shakes and shattered earth rains down. America's Army captured a fraction of that reality.

You know what happened? Most gamers hated it. Too slow. Too punishing. Too "boring."

They went back to their cartoon blood sports (e.g., Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, and God help us, games like Payday that literally glorify evil). They wanted to jump in the air to avoid headshots, spin 360 degrees while no-scoping, absorb ridiculous amounts of damage before even flinching. They wanted war as power fantasy, not war as it actually is: terrifying, confusing, and largely consisting of waiting punctuated by moments of chaos where survival often comes down to who was patient enough to take the right position and wait, or to move when command or situation demanded it. I’ve played and enjoyed many of these games, but they do have an impact on our culture, even if it’s just to hold a mirror up to ourselves, to show us who we might be.

Let me tell you what these games (even the "realistic" ones) don't teach about the true cost of war.

I know a man who became a 100% permanent and total service-connected disabled veteran after fighting the VA bureaucracy for twenty-five years. Twenty-five years of forms, appeals, denials, and degrading examinations just to receive what he'd earned with his body and mind. Years of being called a liar and a malingerer simply for asking for what had been promised. During those decades of bureaucratic warfare, the government quietly changed the rules. The veteran’s dependents benefits he'd been promised, four years of college for his children, got cut to three. No debate. No warning. Just politicians balancing budgets on the backs of those who'd already paid.

The shell game is everywhere if you know where to look. I remember watching some analyst testify before Congress about the cost projections for invading Iraq. They had charts and graphs showing equipment costs, deployment expenses, operational budgets. You know what they never mentioned? The lifetime cost of caring for every injured veteran. Not just the dramatic injuries (the IED survivors and amputees who make good photo ops) but the mundane ones that destroy lives just as thoroughly.

I know someone whose sacrum was cracked during routine service. Not in combat. Not doing anything heroic. Just doing their job when something went wrong through no fault of their own. They'll live with that pain forever, fight the VA forever, struggle to work and provide for their family forever, suffer the cruelty of wealthy men with chainsaws forever. But that cost doesn't show up in the Pentagon's PowerPoints because it's not their bill to pay; it's the VA's. And when officers parade their operational successes, they never mention the trail of broken bodies they've left for American taxpayers to support for the next fifty years.

We've been at war for over a third of a century now. People will argue that point, but according to the VA itself, we're still in the "Gulf War Era," a period that began August 2, 1990 and extends through "a future date to be set by law or Presidential proclamation." Soldiers don't talk about it because acknowledging it means risking the loss of certain benefits. The government doesn't talk about it because they need the flexibility to wage endless war, funneling billions into the military-industrial complex and the PACs, which funnel it back into the pockets of lawmakers. And every few years, some politician gets the brilliant idea that they can save money by restricting benefits to only those injured in actual combat, as if the supply clerk who throws out their back loading ammunition or the mechanic who loses fingers to faulty equipment somehow sacrificed less for their country.

But here's what haunts me most: I know a Lt. Colonel who flew B-52s over Vietnam. This man, one of the finest human beings I've ever had the privilege to know, once tried to explain to me what it was like to release death from 30,000 feet. I had asked him about the supposed psychological benefit of fighting at distance, how technology was supposed to make war cleaner, more precise, less traumatic.

He wept.

Four decades after his service, tears rolled down this warrior's face as he spoke of people he'd never seen but knew he'd killed. "You tell yourself it's just coordinates," he said. "But coordinates have children in them."

This is what Call of Duty truly can't simulate: the weight of the dead, the way they accumulate over years and decades until strong men break under their burden.

And now, God help us, we have evangelicals who've made a devil's bargain, supporting a morally bankrupt man because he promised them Supreme Court justices. They got their judges, their victory over Roe, and what's the trade? We now have a commander-in-chief who dodged the draft with "bone spurs," who called avoiding STDs his "personal Vietnam," who mocked Gold Star families, called the fallen "losers" and "suckers," and sneered at the P.O.W.s.

This same man, still nursing his ego over a failed fascist birthday parade, just sent missiles into Iran. Not because of any immediate threat. Not as part of any coherent strategy. But because Israel wanted it, demanded it, and he needed to feel powerful. The evangelicals who claim to follow the Prince of Peace are cheering while real soldiers, not video game avatars, prepare to bleed for this vanity.

And all this for an Israel without God as its moral compass. I’m not antisemitic, and I believe every nation has a right to defend itself. I don’t say these things lightly, but I know what I say is true: If Israel were following God, they’d come to Jesus. They’d weep over Him, just as Scripture says. They give their citizens free healthcare and education, while we deny the same benefits to every American who cannot afford them, all the while funneling billions into Israel in the form of cash and weapons so they can commit genocide, so they can snipe Christians and children in Gaza. And why? Because Christ demands it? No. It’s because the politicians are owned by the donor class, Democrat and Republican alike. A day of reckoning is coming on account of the powerful wicked and the blind, the ignorant, and the self-righteous who support them.

I think about those kids who complained about "camping" in their games, who wanted warfare to be "fair." They have no idea that fairness is a luxury combat doesn't offer. They've never had to write a letter to a dead friend's mother. They've never watched the VA deny another claim while defense contractors buy another yacht. They've never seen a strong man break under the weight of his necessary sins in service to “God and Country.” They’ve never known the rage of watching men and women who’ve also taken an oath to defend the Constitution before God, an oath we’re never released from, and then trod all over it without a second thought for God or law because they could and it got them what they wanted.

What we've created with our gaming culture is a generation that thinks war is winnable, that violence is consequence-free, that military service is just another career option with good benefits. They don't understand that every soldier who serves, whether they see combat or not, pays a price that compounds over decades. They don't see the divorces, the suicides, the homelessness, the untreated pain that defines so many veterans' lives while politicians thank them for their service and cut their benefits in the same breath.

The truth our games can't tell and our politicians won't admit is this: War is a meat grinder that turns idealistic young people into broken adults, and then abandons them to fight a second war against their own government for basic care, care that was promised and then never delivered. Every "successful" military operation leaves a trail of human wreckage that we'll be paying for, in money and misery, for generations.

If you want to understand the real cost of war, don't boot up Call of Duty. Instead, visit a VA waiting room at dawn and watch men and women, who were promised honor and care in exchange for their health, humanity, and autonomy during their best years, forced to fight for basic dignity ever after. Listen to them compare medications and appeal strategies. Count the wheelchairs and the prosthetics and the thousand-yard stares. Or go to the breakroom at the local VA offices where you can hear employees laugh at veterans who’re seeking benefits from the government because “they already got one payout.” Not that the law dictated what their benefits should be, but that they got one payout so they’re not getting another. I witnessed this appalling behavior firsthand in Atlanta. Not only were they talking about a veteran in a public space loud enough for me to understand every word, but they were laughing at him.

Then remember that for every veteran in a waiting room, there's a politician who sent them to war and a defense contractor who profited from it, neither of whom will ever face the consequences of their decisions.

That's what video games don't teach about war's cost. That's what they can't teach. Because if they showed the truth (the boredom, the bureaucracy, the broken promises, and the lifetime of pain), no one would play. And more importantly, no one would enlist.

But they do enlist, these beautiful, breakable children who believe the lies we tell them about honor and duty and country. And we send them to kill and die for causes we can't even articulate, in wars we refuse to end, creating costs we refuse to calculate.

And the worst part? We've convinced ourselves it's a game where somebody wins.

Nobody wins. Everybody pays. And the bill always comes due—just never to those who wrote the check.

Lord, have mercy on us all.