History is often portrayed as either an admixed muddle of capricious coincidences, or as a unified construct of intentional conspiracies. Revisions lacking in imagination and insight, in analysis and speculation, do as much injustice to their argument as to their opposing apologia. Historical events occur in a time-line but that neither makes them linear or causal, connected or related. They are unique, and therefore have limited utility as predictors, since the elements of events are atypically volatile. Just because we call psychology a social science, with dictates imitative of physical laws, does not mean that individuals, much less peoples, are permeable, or even permutable. Being free and independent persons, we went to war for many varied and confused reasons. Being products of our environs and cultures, we went for many understandable reasons as well. We went for adventure, altruism, avarice. We went to escape debts, relationships, stagnation. We went to prove or refute, to impose or justify, to protect or extend. We were ordered, volunteered, and some avoided assignment. Others refused to participate for equally diverse and confused reasons. We all saw opportunity and obligation in the war. Like stalking-horses and cat's paws, we were all provoked, pandered, or patronized by others for their own motives. In many ways we were actually quite similar to our historic forebears, who'd been noble and ignoble since this nation's establishment. Prophets have claimed that there has never been a good war, nor a bad peace, but no one seems able to explain why we, alone in epochal condemnation, created a bad war and a worse peace!