On War

I just watched the 9th and almost final (whats the word for second to last? anyone have Mr. Gurrall should know this.....) and it changed the war I've thought about the human aspect of war. Sure it's grueling, a dark, difficult aspect of life, but it's been complicated in this past century. World War I saw the rise of the "Hun," a notorious, baby-bayoneting savage. World War II saw the "Jap" rise as a slant-eyed monkey of untold brutality. Vietnam saw the faceless "Charlie" rise out of the paddies to hit the Americans wherever they were. In the past two decades, "towel-heads" "A-rags" and a whole host of other defamities have risen to beat down those who oppose us on the battlefield.

War is about dehumanizing your opponent to make them kill-able.

But last Sunday's episode changed the way I viewed humanity in the context of war. True, one must dehumanize the enemy, but in the process, one must not lose their own humanity. For every man, there is a human. For ever human, there is a body. In life, to seek death on another man is unnatural, and to kill is to strike at the very soul of yourself, to threaten your own humanity. To survive a war, yes, you must dehumanize your opponent, but at the same time, you must not lose touch with your own humanity.

End the eloquence. Begin speculation.

The types of wars conducted today are unlike any the world has seen in it's history. Man no longer finds his opponent lined up in rows to be mowed down, but hiding, burying bombs in the roads and waiting, watching for the moment to strike. Man no longer has an enemy to shoot at, to dehumanize, as every person you see could be a potential insurgent. In those God-forsaken areas I can only read about, those areas I see muzzle-mounted videos of and pray for the protection of those soldiers, those areas so awash with weapons that their mere presence is routine and non-incriminating.... It is these areas that we fight in. Every farmer, every herder, every civil servant can be a potential spy, a potential fighter. You can't sort through them. You don't even know who they are.

This new type of warfare is even more savage in that the escape of the insurgent occurs more often than your own ability to shoot at them. The frustrations that occur, the inability to shoot back, compounds the difficulty of war. The more difficult war becomes, the greater the ability to sacrifice one's humanity in its exploits.

This is the world we live in, and this is the world we will have to deal with. One in which countless young men come back as a shell of their former selves, dealing with what we dub "post-traumatic stress disorder," the latest in the line of soldier diseases that have dulled their humanity. If, by chance, any soldier, former soldier, or future soldier reads this, just know that from the very depths of my heart, I appreciate the sacrifices you've made for this country. Godspeed, and God bless.