It's easy to take things for granted. Yes, this applies to situations in life or the people around us,

but more than that, it literally applies to things.

Take, for example, that thing that allows you to find a brand new coffee shop or comic

bookstore, the humble GPS. As wild as it is to believe, people used to get around with maps on paper,

sometimes in massive spiral-bound books. GPS, though, changed the game,

giving us a better understanding of where we are in the world and the guidance we need to go

somewhere else. But GPS is older than a lot of us think. It started in the 1960s, born as a tool

to help the Navy track submarines that were armed with dangerous, valuable

nuclear missiles, which means that without the military and our obsession with war, it would

be a lot harder to drive to that new doctor's appointment today.

And it's more than just GPS.

The effort to be ready and win wars has left us civilians with some pretty amazing byproducts.

Silly putty started out as a research project for better synthetic rubber.

Duct tape, freeze-dried foods, and super glue all had similar origins.

Heck, even the internet itself, the very thing that lets me tell you these stories, was funded by the

Department of Defense. But war has produced other things for us to brush up against an

experience, and they aren't new or modern or rooted solely in the 21st century. War creates

destruction on a scale that few other forces can. It's an event that comes with death tolls that

sometimes boggles the mind, and it leaves behind generations who are traumatized and forever changed

by its mere existence. And above all, war leaves behind story. From tales of sacrifice and heroic victory

to painful defeats and horrifying injuries,

war has always had the right ingredients for generating powerful tales that haunt us long after

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