(no subject)

[pecunium]

A hard day. An hour and a half shooting photos in San Luis Obispo Creek, finding out the test prints I sent out have a four day turn around (which really means a week, unless I get them in on Monday morning) so that anything I want to hang in the show in early Oct. will be B&W, or needs Maia to finish up, because I am supposed to be at a planning conference for a mission in Ukraine this coming spring.

I then spent five hours in the darkroom (mostly successful, save that the last print was eaten by the print dryer, after I'd put the enlarger to bed).

Then I saw this, Neil Gaiman discussing what war is. He quotes Stephen Fry, elaborating Bertrand Russell. Because it is so worth reading, I will quote it too.

Bertrand Russell, the great philosopher and mathematician, got into terrible trouble by writing quite fearsome articles against the first World War when it began. He got all these letters from people who said, “My child is prepared to lay down their life for their country. Don’t you think that sacrifice demands some respect?” He wrote this extraordinary essay in which he said, “Don’t you understand? The sacrifice we’re asking of our young is not that they die for their country, but that they kill for their country.” That’s the sacrifice. To ask a child to kill someone else, whom you’ve never met. That’s a moral choice, pulling a trigger. Having a bullet hit you is not a moral choice. You don’t decide to be killed. It’s a terrible thing that happens to you. But killing something is something you do and that’s a desperate sacrifice. And we’re seeing that in the Iraq war. That’s what this poor Lynndie England did, this tragic soldier who was shot smugly smiling next to naked Arab prisoners. That’s the chickens coming home to roost. It’s not Americans being asked to die by President Bush. It’s Americans being asked to kill and to torture. Not necessarily by name. He doesn’t say, “I want you to kill this or that one.” Of course, politics isn’t that simple. Essentially that is what society does. It asks its young to kill, and that’s what we all have to live with.

I have to confess I have a certain fondess for Gaiman on the topic, because back in March of 2003, when I was crunching sand in Kuwait, he had the kindness to tell the world he'd read my comments to Electrolite and that they made the whole thing plainer, and gave him a deeper understanding of his father's war.

Read all of it, follow the links, and be certain he may have appreciated my telling him what it was like, but he didn't need it.







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Comments

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Yes, the important thing is not that we ask young people to die, but that we ask them to kill. For most people in our culture that's much worse. And yet, I understand, the Armed Forces -- even after Viet Nam -- practically ignore this psychological trauma and offer virtually no counseling for it. They try to give psychological help to the GIs who were seriously injured, lost limbs, &cet., but this even-worse psychological/moral problem is ignored or swept under the rug, so that the victims have to deal with it without official help. But then, we rarely hear, either, that we've killed more than ten civilians in Iraq for every one of our troops killed there. Somehow this reminds me of the Mantra about "accepting responsibility", though perhaps not in the way the people who prate it intend.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Actually the Army (I can't say for the Marines... the Navy and Air Force, usually, inhabit a different world) has made great strides in this.

I was bombarded with opportunities to get counselling (and in response to my answers on my redeployment questionaire, ordered to see a shrink... prior service Air Force, but a civilian now. I led him down a garden path, and he declared me, "Funtamentally stable" with a decent understanding of my (then) present conditions and coping well with the transition to life in a non-combat zone. He was mostly right, perhaps as right as anyone can be. I've not had any dark-urges, nor moments more depressive than I [think I] used to have.

More interesting is the existence of "shell shock" centers (I so much more prefer that to the more sterile, "battle fatigue" which makes it sound as though one is worn out from one too many parties in the Hamptons... fatigue my ass... but I digress, and into rants which might call the good doctor I spoke of above's diagnosis into question) in which a soldier spends three-five days, away from the war (in much the same way units were rotated out of the lines in WW1). A commander can send one there, a soldier can sort of check himself in (He goes in to talk, and the shrink basically commits him).

It seems to be working pretty well. The soldiers don't see a whole lot of shame in it (there but for the grace of God, and all that) and the troops feel they can afford to share how they feel, without getting one of Patton's gloves in their face.

And the training, the intial training, on how to kill, is different. More operant, less trying to make it somehing one wants to do, and more of something one has to. This is, perhaps, a mixed blessing. When one is trained to see this as shooting a rabid dog, it may be easier to see the enemy as less than human.

On the other hand, I take solace in the story I heard about a Staff Segeant (sqd leader, IIRC) who stopped on the road to Baghdad, after a firefight, and was snapping pictures. His plt ldr, or maybe his sqauddies, asked what he was doing (the context makes me think it was the LT, afraid he was violating Geneva, on the treatment of the dead), "I'm taking pictures for my son, so that if he wants to join the Army, I can show him what we do."

TK

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I'd love to open this, but I don't know who you are... which is the one condition I place on anonymous posts. It isn't even that I care really, but I have had some people being abusive to others, and that's the best compromise I seem to be able to make... if you want to be anonymous to the rest of the world, that's fine, but I need some idea who you are...

TK