I'm an army vet.  Since the US army is structured somewhat like the Roman army I think I'd be right at home as a Centurian.  Plus with the Roman army if you're fortunate enough to survive there's usually a nice payoff at the end... citizenship, choice land, etc.

Morphy, I will answer with it a little diferently.
I went to Belfast during the conflict in North-Ireland. For me, it's a fascinating city for its violence, humanity, humour, resilence, pride, fragility and thirst for justice.
As long as you haven't been in a war, you can't realize how violent and trivial it is. Just my idea.
So, to answer your question, I would like to go back as a journalist to better understand people.

If not, as long as I can live again, I would be curious about the battle of Tollense in the bronze age.

I may be able to add a twist to this conversation.

Due to survivorship bias, the word "War" is an example of a word for which it is literally impossible to have a correct opinion.

Whatever description you might have heard, whatever experiences, whatever image the word itself generates in your head, whether the word is read, heard or seen, it is incorrect and biased towards a positive interpretation. This is inevitable by the very nature of the thing. Your idea of war is wrong, inevitably.

The total set of experiences of people participating in a war includes all of the experiences of death, including the very worst deaths imaginable (or unimaginable). These experiences of death, even though they are an inevitable and essential part of the total set of experiences of war, are by the nature of war absent from the perceived image of it. The dead are simply silent.

You could graphically imagine this as a line distribution, one extreme represented by the most positive experiences of war and the other extreme by the very worst. Death erases a huge chunk of the very worst side of this distribution. The only thing left for any(every)one to see is what the living know, biased towards the positive extreme.

There are other concepts where survivorship bias plays a similar role, of course, and I'm sure you could think of other examples, but in my opinion none are as destructive or as sinister as war.

Please keep this in mind when contemplating questions like the one listed above.

P.S. The exact same is true for deadly diseases, distorting our perception and making us disregard their danger, causing more suffering and death through our inaction.

Ooh that's a cool idea to be one of the long Bowman at Crécy
Beat the french
Those warbow archers were freakishly strong
Often there skeletons could be identified by excess bone density and size on the right arm and shoulders

I like the idea of people who go to war against all odds for a just cause and end up winning. Normandy is a good one. Those guys...man...talk about bravery.

If I had to choose I would end up in a Native American tribe in the high desert in the American Southwest defending my territory from an enemy tribe in the days before white settlers came.

Rat Man wrote on Feb 6^th, 2025 at 9:10am:


That was a wild ride RM. Thanks.