For the soldier who asked a religious man if it's okay to kill:
It's not.
I can see how it might be easy to forget that. We train people to defend, to fight, to rescue, to kill. You know better than I what you're trained for. I imagine it's to turn off your conscience and react in certain ways to certain situations without wavering. In some cases, the purpose is quite simply survival. In others, it's a matter of following orders and trusting the judgment of superiors. I guess, in a way, to reduce yourself, under certain circumstances, to animal instincts. Sometimes, that means killing, and other times, not.
We non-soldiers are afforded what not all of us realize is a luxury in having the freedom to deliberate over these things. We can have barroom debates about who should or should not be allowed to bear arms and the circumstances under which those arms may or may not be used. We have the freedom to sit with our newspapers and scream 'fair' or 'not fair'. We consider international conflict from our sofas while a headline ticker flashes across our screens and smiling anchormen yell in our faces. We act as though we understand our legal systems, as though we understand justice on an ontological level. We talk about right and wrong without having experienced the kinds of extremes that put these ideas to the test. At the end of the night, we go to bed, reasonably sure we'll wake up tomorrow in the same peacetime in which we fall asleep tonight.
We non-soldiers have it easy.
Elsewhere in the world, going to sleep in one place tonight doesn't guarantee waking up at all, no less under the same circumstances.
Elsewhere in the world, the Powers fight over who owns the land a man calls 'home'.
Elsewhere in the world, groups haunted by hatred are plotting against others. It may be the believers and the infidels. It may be the haves and the have-nots. It may be blacks and whites. Or it may be grudges dating back so far that nobody quite knows what it is for which they fight.
Elsewhere in the world, human beings are being killed by other human beings, and this horrifies us, inspires us to get involved, moves us to action. Who am I kidding? Sometimes, elsewhere in the world, someone has or controls something we want or want to control - that moves us, too. To fight horror, oppression, terror, hatred, violence, or to just plain take whatever it is we want, we send in our men, specially trained to act on a level of animal instinct, to follow orders and ask few questions. They will take, quite simply, what someone else perceives as necessary action in order to achieve the aim of the day. Sometimes that action is killing other human beings. So who are these people?
Who are soldiers?
Soldiers are the ones who have declared themselves to have decisively taken a side. They declared themselves by selling their soul, so to speak. They will do the hard thing when it needs to be done. They will do the hard thing when they are told it needs to be done. They will do the hard thing when ordered to do so, right or wrong.
That hard thing is a thing that us non-soldiers know is not okay, but sometimes somebody needs to do it. What determines that may be questionable. It is a heavy moral burden we pull off our shoulders and lay on those of our soldiers.
Here is my question:
How grateful are we for their sacrifice?
To what extent do we, barstool philosophizing non-soldiers, ease that burden? Do we feel the responsibility we carry for sending them out? Do we try to understand what we, as a people, ask them to do? Do we meditate on the gravity of their sacrifices (including the sacrifices of those who come back alive)? As a community, do we carry a sense of cultural responsibility for the actions and hardships of our men and women?
I'm not implying a universal answer to any of the above. These are merely the questions I feel we should ask ourselves, and not just on Veterans' Day. Obviously, there are those that feel the gravity of those answers more than others - the families and friends of soldiers, first and foremost. Perhaps the questions are weaker than a more important one: HOW CAN WE DO OR BE BETTER?
I will not undertake to answer that here and now. Let your conscience answer for you.
But to return to the original question of the soldier, Is it okay to kill?
It isn't. That is why you have become what you are - to become the man who can do the thing that I, a non-soldier, could not, on my behalf. And it's hard for me to thank you while my heart bleeds for existing in a world that deems your soul a necessary sacrifice. It isn't fair, and it isn't right, but history shows this to be the never-ending human tragedy. It's hard to thank you, knowing that I don't want this for you, or for me, or for our community and culture. It's hard to thank you, but I certainly and without question respect you. It's hard to thank you, who represents the darkest side of my own self, but I do, and will, because without you I may not have the freedom to make that choice.
