Peer Pressure

     "It was as if there were an audience to my life, that swirl of faces along the river, and in my head I could hear people screaming at me. Traitor! they yelled. Turncoat! Pussy! I felt myself blush. I couldn't tolerate it. I couldn't endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule. Even in my imagination, the shore just twenty yards away, I couldn't make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that's all it was.
     And right then I submitted.
     I would go to the war - I would kill and maybe die - because I was embarrassed not to."

     O'Brien T. "The things they carried." Mariner Books, Boston, 1990.