This question applies to folks from any country, any conflict, as long as it’s distant from your country. The global war on terror has expanded, well, globally. If you are off fighting in some place thousands of km away from your home country, do you ever feel you’re not really contributing to your nation’s security? Instead you’re fighting some bureaucrats turf war with some other empire, which doesn’t really pose a direct, material threat to your homeland? Often bureaucrats justify their government programs with tenuous explanations of how the world will end if their program isn’t continued, in order to protect their jobs/influence.

As examples, terrorists from a certain group feel they’re working towards a higher purpose, that’s their motivation even if fighting way far off from their home country. Militiamen in a country that recently was under terrorist control, were directly driving those terrorists out of their literal home country so their motivation was understandable.

Soldiers from another certain religious country have been fighting for another country’s leader but they have religious motivation and think they’re helping the oppressed so their motivation could make sense, right or wrong. Another secular country fighting in the same place which poses no direct danger to their own country, what motivates the folks fighting in those situations?

Do bureaucratic explanations of the greater good in some indirect way, really stand the extreme stress of war?