I am a sixty-three-year-old war reporter. I have covered wars and madness in Rwanda, Burundi, apartheid South Africa, the Romanian revolution, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Albania, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. I have seen babies with hacked limbs and an old man with his eyes blown in by an artillery shell and people with their lungs sucked inside out and a man with his brain sliced with a machete – and there is nothing worse than watching kids smile in war, watching the aristocracy of the human soul. It makes me cry – and cry I do.

If those who support aggressive war had seen a fraction of what I've seen, if they'd watched children fry to death from Napalm and bleed to death from a cluster bomb, they might not utter the claptrap they do.

War is men killing each other, often at close quarters, and doing their damnedest to stay alive. And until you have done that, against a capable enemy, you don't have any idea of what it's like, honestly. Mr Spielberg may splash the screen with gore, and publicists may declare: "You are there!", but you're not. You're snug in a cinema watching a load of crap performed by actors. Hand-to-hand fighting is different, and it's no place for a woman. (It's no place for anyone, including me, but for a woman least of all.)

Moreover, you know … mass murder, slaughter, is often an abstract thing. But when you happen to see it directly, to be a witness of it, it’s something quite different, you cannot just play games. It changes you deeply. And you are compelled to do something. The last weeks of 71, November to mid December, were among the most moving, disturbing and terrible I have experienced in my whole life. I saw things I should not have seen. I saw things a man should not see. But I saw them.

I went to the Russo-Japanese War and killed people until I had enough of it. If you think about it soberly, this is a serious matter. Today the newspaper writes about the extermination of the enemy or how we clean them away with machine gun fire. That almost sounds like everyday household cleaning. They fire with machine guns and call it "cleaning away the remains of the enemy". Imagine that would happen in the midst of the ginza: people getting "cleaned away" as if you were shooting animals! It would be a serious affair. Compared with today the former war was old fashioned. We shot only one bullet at a time. That was not so gross like shooting your machine gun as if you were spreading water with a watering can, or throwing big bombs, or poison gas. I also once killed enemies at the battlefield of Baolisi, chasing them into a hole, and I was never punished for it. I even received monthly payments as a veteran after I came back from the war. That means that you do not always get punished for killing a person. It depends on the regulations of the time if you get punished or not. But these regulations are made by men.

I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping exhausted men come out of line-the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

The true agony of war isn't being wounded yourself, it's having to watch those you care about being hurt.

I feel that nonviolence coupled with some kind of sustaining influence can work in comics. I don't feel that you have to show blood and gore and guts. I think it's repellent. I've seen enough of it in its reality, and it's just as repellent when it's drawn as in reality. I see nothing of any value in anything that has what you call shock value. I see nothing in that except using that sort of thing to prove a point. In other words if you're making an anti-war document or if you're trying to tell the truth about a certain subject, and the blood and gore was a part of that subject, I wouldn't omit it. If I were going to make an exposé on anything I would show anything connected with it. For instance, in a gangster movie I would show the results of being a gangster-the life activities as well as the end and death. I would show exactly how it is they ended. I would show the bullet holes because it's part of the picture, but I wouldn't exploit it for its value alone. I see no entertainment in that sort of thing.

We've all grown up with the idea that gunning a man down is just fun and games. All of us, as kids, played cops and robbers, with toy pistols or pointing a finger at somebody and saying, "Bang, Bang. You're dead!" Both the movies and television have perpetuated the idea that shooting a man is clean and quick and simple, and when he falls down there is only a small hole, or a blood-stain, to show how he died. Well, killing a man isn't clean and quick and simple. It's bloody and awful. And maybe if enough people come to realize that shooting somebody isn't just fun and games maybe we'll get somewhere about violence on the screen in the first place. [...] No, I don't like violence. In fact, when I look at the film myself, I find it unbearable. I don't think I'll be able to see it again for five years.

The worst thing about this modern world is that people think you get killed on television with zero pain and zero blood. It must enter into kids' heads that it's not very messy to kill somebody, and it doesn't hurt that much. That's a real sickness to me. That's a real sick thing.

Watching violence in movies or TV programs stimulates the spectators to imitate what they see much more than if seen live or on TV news. In movies, violence is filmed with perfect illumination, spectacular scenery, and in slow motion, making it even romantic. However, in the news, the public has a much better perception of how horrible violence can be, and it is used with objectives that do not exist in the movies.