collateral damage

i was sitting atop the toilet bowl the other day when a little flying insect caught my eye. it buzzed in circles about a metre in front of me, then settled on the bathroom wall. "is it a mosquito", i asked myself. maybe he looked like one, but maybe he didn't - the body a tad too long and fat, the legs too spread out and i wasn't sure if he had a proboscis.

for a moment i didn't want to kill him - he could have been one of those harmless unidentified insects that buzz around my bathroom sometimes. my policy is that i only whack mozzies, flies, kahzhuas, ants and things that piss people off. this one hadn't pissed me off yet.

then: "what if he's really a mozzie and he turns around when i'm not looking and bites me in the ass when i get up from the bowl?" that changed things. i grabbed some toilet paper, snuck up to him very close and them squished him into the paper and flushed him right down with my shit.



i thought about what i'd just done later in the shower, and suddenly drew an enlightening parallel to the situations faced by U.S. soldiers and pilots in Iraq.

i saw this piece of war footage some months ago: you are an attack helicopter pilot, and on your screen you see two fuzzy men manipulating a metre-long tube they just took out of their car boot. they could just be smalltime plumbers trying to fix a pipe. or the tube could actually be an anti-aircraft missile launcher meant especially for you.

"what if he's really a terrorist and he turns around when i'm not looking and shoots me in the ass if i ignore him and turn around?" your ass takes priority over their lives, rules of engagement notwithstanding, and you give them a good spray with your machine gun.

or you are a foot soldier, on patrol with your squad. a somewhat beat-up car turns the corner and runs at your team. it's night, all you see are headlights, and you've been told by your superiors to be careful for suicide bombers in cars. what do you do? you shoot at it before it gets too close, and it bursts into flames. but when you check it out, you find a man, his wife and two kids... all dead.


when i go and end a life just because i fear a mosquito bite, what more soldiers who may end up facing death the next moment? it is most unreasonable to dump the blame on young jittery soldiers in mortal danger on the frontlines. you kill or be killed, and i may just be in such a situation one day in the army. it is also most easy for us to dump that blame from the armchair at home in front of the TV.

if anyone is to blame for the awful slaughter of innocents in war, it is the leaders who drag and manipulate their citizens into bloody conflict in the first place. the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Tojo - and Johnson, Milosevic... and Bush. evil or not, they all have blood on their hands. lots of blood.