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When People Die, “We’re winning”
While being totally against the U.S. war on Iraq, I still feel some empathy for the troops being send there. Having been a soldier myself, it is painful to see them wasted for no cause. It is outrages to see some hurt because they are led by fundamentalist officers.
In today’s Washington Post, David Finkel writes about such a case:
Everything in the Army is supposed to have a task and a purpose, and this simple mission was no different. The task was to get 27 soldiers from Point A to Point B, from their neighborhood combat outpost to an Army base four miles away. The purpose was to attend a memorial service for one of their fellow soldiers, who had died eight days earlier while attempting to make the very same trip.
The platoon is supposed to do counter-insurgency work by caring for the security of Iraqi civilians. But it is ordered to take a dangerous trip to attend a memorial service.
Who is behind this?
On the early morning trip from A to B that platoon gets ambushed and hit by two IED’s, RPG and gun fire. With helicopter support, they fight it off and escape. After two hours of mixed walking, driving and fighting they somehow all make it to the base camp with only minor injuries. In the evening of that day, they hold the memorial service.
Their mission had been a success.
Which meant that soon they would be on their next one: getting from Point B back to Point A.
The platoon and its company commander waste a whole day and make two very dangerous trips to remember someone who will not come back anyway. Who might have ordered such a stupid mission?
Earlier in the piece the reporter explains the dangerous surrounding and gives us a hint:
One explanation for such a surge in attacks: "We’re winning. They wouldn’t be fighting if we weren’t winning. They wouldn’t have a reason to," said Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, the battalion commander. "It’s a measure of effectiveness."
That is of course a braindead statement in itself. But it is not surprising as Lt. Col. Kauzlarich has a record of being an kool-aid filled outer wingnut fundamentalist.
Three years ago he was involved in the coverup of the fractice that killed former football professional Pat Tillman in Afghanistan.
As ESPN reported:
Kauzlarich, now 40, was the Ranger regiment executive officer in Afghanistan, who played a role in writing the recommendation for Tillman’s posthumous Silver Star. And finally, with his fingerprints already all over many of the hot-button issues, including the question of who ordered the platoon to be split as it dragged a disabled Humvee through the mountains, Kauzlarich conducted the first official Army investigation into Tillman’s death.
[…]
In his interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich also said he was not driven to identify Tillman’s killer. "You know what? I don’t think it really matters," Kauzlarich said.
Tillman was just another soldier under his command. It doesn’t really matter to Kauzlarich how that guy died.
Asked about the grief of Pat Tillman’s parents:
Kauzlarich, now a battalion commanding officer at Fort Riley in Kansas, further suggested the Tillman family’s unhappiness with the findings of past investigations might be because of the absence of a Christian faith in their lives.
In an interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich said: "When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don’t believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more — that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don’t know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough."
But for a Christian nut like Kauzlarich, risking the soldiers life by ordering them to take part in a memorial service while neglecting their basic task is obviously fine.
Why should he care? He just knows that any of those who get blown up and die achieve a better life. Isn’t that reason enough to die for?
Kauzlarich makes sure his soldiers get a good chance to reach that state of better life by taking on a dangerous mission that doesn’t make sense at all.
Because if they die, it only shows that "We’re winning."
Juannie Dear Heart–post # 18–when you say that you don’t “agree” with my “interpretation/expression of my sense,” are you saying that you wish I didn’t express it at all?
I hope not! For this is the only bar on the net–the only such bar that I know of, anyway–where such expressions are truly welcome, and also open to challenge (by me, by you, by everyone). We know this, and are very, very grateful to Bernhard for keeping the bar open.
Let’s just say that I’m a very vain person, a WASP American male, who has to accept the responsibility that comes with being thoroughly identified (by myself, by everyone) with the people waging this war. I accept the identification–just as I did (and continue to do) with those of us who waged the war in Viet Nam. A part of me, whether I care to admit it or not, is on the ground with those troops. Common sense precludes my arguing against this wounding, this dreadful, fact.
So where to go with this rather dissonant fact (and a fact is what it is)?
My own answer, at the moment, is this: let it lead me, or let it lead my thoughts, to the place where reality makes itself known. Great writers have given us great exemplars in order to follow these things: Shakespeare, for example, gave us Othello, MacBeth, Claudius, and even Cornwall, not to mention Goneril and Regan, and who knows whom else besides… All these monsters are us (and also him–and he makes this very clear). They are not to be imitated, of course–merely recognized, and recognized affirmatively (that’s me! Or, to put it more sociably, that’s us!)
At this point in the game, if we let our thoughts proceed, our involvement becomes much more interesting than a mere crime (for which there is always the easy, and boring, solution of judgment and punishment, if only by our own stricken consciences).
A better perspective is always the one that asks: how do we get there in the first place?
Melville’s (and not only Melville’s) answer to that question–namely that all creatures, humans included, are cannibals–has the virtue of simplicity, and also happens to ring true. So let’s just allow for a moment that we’re cannibals….
If so, then what, or who, have we eaten lately? And have we eaten our meals well?
As Christians, we have been taught (by Christ himself, no less) to feast on his very own body (however “symbolically” we do this). For me and at this time, such is the meaning of his “sacrifice”–of any sacrifice.
What, then, is the best possible way to “eat” our victims in Iraq, along with the people we’ve sent there to kill them? How best to take them into our own bodies, and make their losses our own? For this is the one, the only, way of knowing what we’ve been doing all along (which is to “eat” our fellow man). Only the recognition, the acceptance, of this fact–call it a “hard knowledge” if you prefer–can enable us to grieve for what we do, and proceed to do it a little less wantonly (for we can never stop being cannibals, creatures that we are).
Are these thoughts unwelcome? Of course they are! But the only alternative, alas, is to prevaricate, and to point to everyone else–Bush, Cheney, the neocons, the hawks, the oil merchants–as the only people who carry on in this fashion.
This is false, and a dead end. For if we refuse to recognize our own “gains” at this feast–and it is indeed a feast, and all of us sit at that table–then we have no chance to end it. We will continue to feast forever, stupidly, and without the grace of understanding what we do.
This was Luther’s idea of hell, and Luther was absolutely right.
Posted by: alabama | Jul 10 2007 8:13 utc | 24
I believe that it is impossible to end hatred with hatred.
–Mahatma Gandhi, 23 November 1924
In struggling for human dignity the oppressed people of the world must not allow themselves to become bitter or indulge in hate campaigns. To retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify the hate in the world. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethics of love to the center of our lives.
—-Martin Luther King, Jr.
World peace through nonviolent means is neither absurd nor unattainable. All other methods have failed. Thus we must begin anew. Nonviolence is a good starting point. Those of us who believe in this method can be voices of reason, sanity, and understanding amid the voices of violence, hatred, and emotion. We can very well set a mood of peace out of which a system of peace can be built.
—-Martin Luther King, Jr., December 1964
Yes, Alabama, you have freedom of speech, but your words are somewhat facile to me. Shakespeare not only made Regan and Goneril, he also made Cordelia. Tho evil is fascinating in its workings outside of society, isnt’ the release of this tension from viewing evil the triumph of the good? I find it hard to believe that Shakespeare’s audiences would have been satisfied if Cordelia were put to death by her sisters and then eaten for dinner.
Thousands of years before Jesus the Jews substituted goats for human sacrifice — but of course the old belief that one assumes the power of another by eating their heart or brain hasn’t been out of practice for that long …. tho recently it only occurred on the battlefield in the battles between certain, but not all, indigenous populations and the settlers…and the native americans did not win by this practice. In civil society, of course, such practice is considered an abomination — Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t last too long in prision before he was exterminated.
I do not understand this frisson you experience from death. To justify such a position by claiming all Americans delight in the deaths of others is a lie. Not all Americans feel the way you do. Rather, you align yourself with those who feel like you do by your statement. You take your thought experiment and then claim it is fact. That’s a clever maneuver, but one that denies higher brain functions. So, you would have us deny those functions– the ones that also created human civilization? Because nature for the most part takes the most efficient route — the higher brain is built upon the lower brain — no need to remake the apparatus for breathing and heartbeat… but the higher brain exists for a purpose as well.
Your claim that the only alternative is to lie sets up a false dichtomy that allows you to argue from a position of hatred…but not toward those who put the troops in Iraq (troops that were brainwashed by Fox and lied to by their commanders.) The troops generally come from the poor and/or immigrants to this place. Why do you excuse the powerful but delight in the murder of the subservient?
I do not agree that your statements are hard knowledge. Psychology is soft knowledge – soft science – and as far as Freud – he was wrong about the aborigines, and even those working within his framework, such as Nancy Chodorow, have established more rational understandings of females, for instance– we are not castrated males — Freud, operating out of a misogynistic, imperialist culture, could not begin to fathom others, it seems. I only want a penis when it is attached to a man, not to myself. I like my femaleness, my biology. What hubris could have invented such an idea? Male hubris, of course, built upon privilege.
And just as Freud made claims that are not universally true, perhaps your claim is also untrue. Those who have been become the icons of the way to humanity in modern times did not think that our lizard brains are all humans have to use to find ways to function (or to withdraw from Iraq, and to admit truths.)
I am convinced that love is the most durable power in the world. It is not an expression of impractical idealism, but of practical realism. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, love is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. To return hate for hate does nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Someone must have sense enough and religion enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil, and this can only be done through love.
—-Martin Luther King, Jr., 1957
Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 10 2007 15:40 utc | 34
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