Question: Do you believe there has ever existed a country in which every single person—man, woman, and child—deserved to die?
Unless you’re a racist asshole, the answer should be: “No.”
And yet some people really do think that way. Just last Thanksgiving I had to sit and listen to my own father (who has never served in the military, by the way) shoot off at the mouth about how we “need to just kill all the Muslims.”
What’s worse is, a lot of people seem to feel that way. To my deep shame, I had to sit there with my girlfriend and listen while members of my own family agreed with this horseshit.
As the only person in the room who’d actually been to the Middle East, met a great many Muslims and befriended a few, and served in our botched War On Terror, I felt I had a responsibility to speak up. So I said a few things that should have been obvious. How genocide is wrong. How religious intolerance is wrong. That almost all the people I met Over There were good, decent people who just want to live their lives in peace without getting bombs dropped on them, and that really doesn’t seem like too much to ask for.
The men grumbled, mentioned again that I’m the token Hippie of the family, and I think my Dad muttered something about how I must have picked up these crazy ideas in college or during my time living in San Francisco. As if I’d said something utterly senseless and he had to find an excuse for my obvious wrongheadedness. At this point my aunts rushed in to change the subject.
They’re very good at changing the subject. To this day I haven’t been able to have an honest conversation about Iraq with my family. Haven’t been able, or perhaps haven’t been allowed to.
Getting back to the point: I may have picked an extreme example, but the problem is that most Americans—and probably most people throughout the world—are raised to think this way. When we send children to their history classes and teach them about past wars, we always describe those wars in terms of The Good Guys vs. The Bad Guys. Us vs. Them. But the world is far more complicated than that. Unless, of course, you believe that every single German soldier killed in World War Two was a mass-murdering Nazi with no respect for human life.
Which isn’t true. Your average German soldier was just another poor farm-boy, drafted into a madman’s war.
Those Soviet troops we were taught to fear during the Cold War? Again, I’d bet most of them were just poor draftees.
How about the Indian Wars? Remember cheering at the movies whenever John Wayne shot another red man? Those Native Americans were just some young men defending their homeland. Read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee sometime. If anyone was the “bad guy” in that situation, it was John Wayne for fuck’s sake.
I believe I can speak with some experience of your average “terrorist.” He’s a guy living in the middle of nowhere. He’s poorer than you can imagine. He’s got kids to feed. And one day some asshole with a bomb offers to pay him twenty dollars to dig a hole in the road. Our “terrorist” knows the man who hired him will probably plant a bomb in that hole to kill Americans, but he needs the money, and he’s afraid what will happen to him if he says no, and he doesn’t like what these American soldiers have done to his country anyhow, so he takes the job. Next thing he knows, he’s being tortured in Guantanamo Bay.
Does that poor man really sound like a homicidal maniac to you? Do you think this “terrorist” deserves to die? Yes, I understand that there are some genuinely awful men in the world who do terrible, inhuman things. I’ve met a few of those guys, too. But most of the “terrorists” I met were just poor bastards stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And if you can empathize with that “terrorist,” then what about your average law-abiding Iraqi citizen who just saw his home blown to pieces? Does it really make any difference to him if the bomber was American or Al Quaeda? Either way, his home is gone, and he’s got a right to be angry about that. You can see how he might not be very happy with us.
I spoke of “terrorists,” but I can speak even more confidently of your average American soldier. He’s a poor kid who’s been misled. He’s been taught since earliest childhood that war is noble, that war is romantic, that war is Right, especially when America goes to war. Your average American soldier is a child that has been brainwashed and handed a gun and turned loose in a hostile land. He’s a good kid tricked into doing terrible things.
God forbid he should learn the error of his ways. Soldiers who refuse orders have a way of disappearing. Just look at Private Bradley Manning. You can be sent to prison—military prison, where you’ll break big rocks into little rocks for the next few decades. Politicians and the media will vilify you. You’ll be ostracized by your fellow soldiers, your friends, even your own family. You’ll be dishonorably discharged, and not even McDonald’s will hire you. You’ll be branded a Traitor, the lowest form of human scum, and it would be better for you if you were born dead. And it goes without saying that the war you protested will go on, bloody as ever, with or without your cooperation.
So, yeah. I had my doubts about our War On Terror. But I continued to follow orders until I finally (finally!) got an opportunity to leave active duty and go back home. Perhaps some of you think that’s not enough, that I should have thrown down my rifle and my aid bag and martyred myself. That my failure to do so makes me the Bad Guy.
And if that’s the way you feel, you need to grow the hell up.
If you’re so immature that you think of war in terms of The Good Guys vs. The Bad Guys, you’re likely to think that all Iraqis are bloodthirsty terrorists, or that all American soldiers are inhuman baby-killers. And either way, you’re wrong.
We’re all adults here. We should know better.
But apparently we don’t. Just watch five minutes of Fox News and you’ll see highly paid pundits talking about war in terms of Us vs. Them. Good and Evil.
Our political leaders talk this way, too. Either they’re condescending to us, talking to us like we’re children, or they’re damn fool enough to think that way. And we’re damn fool enough to elect them.
People who talk like that are far guiltier than your average enemy soldier. It’s that sort of political language that dehumanizes people and allows us to kill thousands of people overseas and still sleep at night.
If you’re dumb enough to think that way, you need to shut the fuck up when grown folks are talking.
