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of cc&d magazine.
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Killing another person should be a very personal thing. It shouldn’t be throwing a sixteen-inch shell twenty miles through the air into some unseen island or ship. It shouldn’t be sending a guided missile and watching it arch on a computer screen into human targets five hundred miles away. It shouldn’t be dropping megaton bombs from an aircraft at thirty thousand feet.
Killing should be up close and personal. Like a marine on Guadalcanal who sunk his knife into the belly of an enemy marine, pulling it upwards to disembowel, while at the same time the Jap was biting him on the face, leaving a scar that he still carries today.
Killing shouldn’t be women throwing their babies off cliffs into the ocean and then following them. Killing shouldn’t be shadows of children left in the cement after a nuclear explosion.....shouldn’t be urban civilians dying in the firestorm of an incendiary attack.
Killing should be up close and personal. It should be as personal as knowing there’s a fifty-fifty chance that the person killed will be you. And burying the body of the one you’ve killed should be your duty. You should know that this is how you may look. You should know this is how you could smell. You should know that the personal photos on the body could have been of your family. It can’t be sanitized.
Killing in war must be brought that close. You say, “How dare you talk about such things?” I say, “How dare you consider war without talking about these things”.
How dare you not know how it looks, how it smells and how personal killing another person can be. If you know nothing of the scars of killing, you’ve learned nothing. If you learn nothing, then history will repeat itself.
War is killing and killing should leave scars that last a lifetime. Who’s killing and who’s being killed is academic. Numbers are for statisticians. Killing is for conscience. Feeling the scars is something we should know not only on Memorial Day, but every day of the year....and the scars should be visible for others to see, like I do whenever I shave.
