A childhood belief about wars

When I was little, no one wanted to tell me about the concept of war and what is actually is, which is, let's face it, a bunch of people killing each other over things that were way too complicated for a kid to know anyway. So I thought that war was more like a fight and no one actually had to die. I visualized it like a martial arts tournament and the two sides would fight and then when someone cried "uncle!" it was over in a match, so no one really got hurt and after they counted up the score of winds and loses, it was over. As an advocate for standing up for yourself, I didn't understand why people weren't having these perfectly civilized competitions more often to solve their problems. Even when someone told me that war is about killing everyone on the other side and showed me a picture of a US soldier with a gun in his arm, at first I was confused. "But if everybody kills each other, there won't be any winners or losers, just dead people." Oh man I wish I had been right all along.