This is a link to a 1-hour programme but I'm only
interesting in sharing the last 20 minutes. This link will skip you ahead to
about 37:00, you'll pick up the story of a soldier. If you come in on the tail
end of the underwater cave story it's immediately after that.
It was worth hearing because it's a rare moment that
American journalism allows a soldier to speak like this.
Don't politicize this. There's an interesting lesson here
and it has nothing to do with Obama or Bush or even a vision of America.
This is simply about the essence of war and how the human
heart responds to power.
This guy is lost and his conscience is still that of an
unrepentant person, but at least there's something there... a need to speak
about what it's really like being a soldier.
Those without consciences are the ones who I find the most
disturbing or those who believe their actions are righteous.
Whether or not you subscribe to 'Just War Theory' or other
man-made traditions is not the point. This guy's candidness is a window into
what war is and how there's no glory in any of it. I appreciate his honesty,
but he's not a hero. Actually I don't think he's pretending to be one.
I hope he reads Smedley Butler's 'War is a Racket'. It would
do him good, or might make him angrier. I don't know.
The asymmetry of modern warfare is a formula for madness.
It's anticlimactic and endlessly frustrating. The mandate is nebulous and the
objectives are foggy.
Men and women walk away shattered and angry. They don't know
why they're angry or at what, but they've been reduced to beasts. It's as if
the Imago Dei is destroyed or perhaps more accurately rotted from within. It is
a seared and reprobated conscience that finds glory in the killing of one who
bears the image of God.
This really resonated with me. I had all my docs signed, was at MEPS and all, for being a grunt in the corps. While I did have a certain resolve to make the world a better place, a misguided hope in the US as a bearer of light, I know, looking back, that I had the same bloodlust inside. The same interest in wanting to shoulder the feeling/experience/burden/acceptance, knowing I was capable of killing a man. The interviewer had the perceptiveness to know that this isn't sociopathy, but something more nuanced, twisted, and base. She didn't try to play doctor on him.
ReplyDeleteThis guy has no idea what to do, no idea what life is. I suspect he'll get only worse from the prying psychiatrics. Yet, like you said, he knows better than the wanna-be crusaders. It's like a replay, from the chicken-hawk preachers, to the hardened Templars, and to the mass of confused, and lost foot-soldiers looking for some sort of deliverance and sanctuary.
Jesus told Peter to put his sword away, and yet many of today's blood drunk churches are eager to see the whole world burn. Tertullian said that when Christ gave that command, he unbelted every soldier. Yet onward christian soldier still blares, the drums of war still beating. There's a song from Ozzy called War Pigs. Even he, the so-called prince of darkness, saw the pure evil, even he could recognize that judgment would come one day. He gets it better than so many christians.
Cal