Stoopid Stuff

Kill 'em all--Let Allah Sort 'em Out

Combat is tough. Ugly. You break things, and you hurt people. You try to survive. You fight for your friends and to survive, you don't cut the enemy any slack, you don't give them a break. It's about killing. You don't risk your life, or your buddy's life, to make sure you protect the rights of the enemy. That makes sense. That's just the rules. But. There have GOT to be limits. After days and nights of combat, nerves are stretched, anger runs hot, you haven't slept, eaten, showered. Firefights and explosions punctuate your days. And yet, you still have an obligation. Your obligation to your squad mates is well known. But what about your obligation to humanity? There, in the worst that humans can do, in the horror and brutality of close up urban combat, this is where you MUST do what you can to preserve your own humanity. Maybe killing is easy, easier than not killing sometimes. But maybe, just maybe heros can be guys who hold back, who find a small piece of humanity in all the hell. I don't know what happened in that mosque in Falluja. I look at the video, and it looks wrong. It smells. I think we have a kid, here, who lost his humanity. Who took the easy route. Who chose to kill rather than to have some restraint. Even if it turns out his decision wasn't wrong, it still wasn't right. A better man would have left those people as they found them. Better men would have gotten them some aid the day before. Better men come home with fewer scars. Not the visible kind, the kind that never heal. They come home in better shape because they know they did the right thing. They fought hard, and never let their fellow soldiers down. But they went through all that inflicting the minimum damage, taking the minimum lives, that they could. They survived, but they didn't become animals in order to survive. And when they get old, and they try to talk to their grandchildren about war, they can feel pride in what they did.

posted by mikey @ 6:02 PM