what makes a teenage william mcdowell willing to go out and make one of these frontal assault? what does it take to be in the first wave of fredericksburg? what does it take to be in the 10th wave at fredericksburg? what does it take to be one of chargediers in pickett's on the third day of gettysburg or one of the union soldiers who pinned an improvised dog tag to his jacket? diary entrys a saying i was killed today, yet he gets up and goes? this is fascinating. this is one of those fascinating puzzles of human behavior generally. one of the things that makes it so interesting is that you have rational people behaving in a way that is somewhat irrational. the willingness to expose yourself to fire over and over again, to risk your life, to give your life. it violates deeply ingrained biological impulses we have. the other thing that makes combat motivation interesting is it is much harder to study. for an initial motivation, we can look at recruiting posters and look at letters that people wrote as they were going off to war. for sustaining motivation, we can study some of the