And this is exactly the point; the soldiers in the helicopter were acting on everything we had been heavily drilled with from the early days of basic training. If you want to keep things like this from happening, stop screaming at soldiers who are fighting in a war that most Americans advocated to begin with and instead spend your energy exposing the training that soldiers are put through and demand political and military leaders to reexamine the system that creates the callousness displayed in this video or the huge amount of our national budget that we pay for this thriving military system. Because, again, from examples like the cadence I mention above, this callousness is both rampant and intentional.
I personally refused a number of orders and eventually chose to go through the process of conscientious objection and was fortunate enough to have a lot of support from family and friends during that challenging process of leaving the military early. I was also fortunate enough to read books by Gandhi and Tolstoy while in Iraq. But for the many soldiers who don't have that support from those around them or haven't read books articulating peace, calling them baby-killers for acting how they were trained to is not going to make them any more likely to seek help from those claiming that war is not the answer. If you want to do something truly revolutionary, try reaching out to a soldier in compassion and show him/her that there is a better way to solve problems, real or perceived.
And that's where this video can be helpful. It shows the huge contradiction of what our government says we are doing--spreading freedom and democracy--and how we are seeking to accomplish this. For those who want to defend the soldier's decisions in terms of self-defense, we still have to ask the serious question that even if these actions legitimately so, (I'm definitely not saying they were) are we not still creating far more enemies in the process?
This video is, as the saying goes, "the nature of the beast." Staring only at the fangs of the beast prevent us from the much needed conversation of whether or not we should be using this beast at all. Then we need to be prepared to answer what will stand in its place.
Shock from seeing this video is natural, but please don't miss this opportunity to use this video to talk about the much deeper implications of the nature of warfare and what it means to work for peace.
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