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31 July 2007
Wrath Without Malice
Perhaps this was the ultimate irony: the academics gave me a degree that equipped me to kill many people before I had killed my first man as a soldier. I am on some level grateful that I did the latter before being confronted with the former. With two security studies degrees, I could have easily been in a position where the ‘send’ button on my email would have been a live trigger. Black ink is much easier to stomach than red blood, so we spill it far more readily. I do not doubt that there are times to spill both, and by virtue of my calling I am willing to do so. But I am glad that I saw it first in red. In the International Security class on op-plans and strategy memos, they don’t show you the man lying in a pool of his own blood, fading on Infrared as it cools.
Nor should they. Starched suits should not be splattered with blood. The decision room is not the place for reflections on the horrors of the fall, lest those horrors be magnified through inaction. Reason must trump the fires of emotion, lest we fear war too much and become slaves. But reason cannot abandon emotion entirely, lest we fear war too little and become monsters. George Orwell tell us that we sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready to do harm to those who would hurt us. But there must be less rough men who stand ready to unleash those men, fully understanding the consequences of doing so.
‘Nasty, brutish and short,’ I think it goes. Hobbes’ famous apologetic for the structures of civilization. Under the shelter of governance, we are kept safe from the cruelties of the natural world. It is no doubt true to some degree. But ‘civilized’ people are generally just more subtle in their nastiness to each other. Brutish urges still dominate ‘civilized’ society, even when watered-down for their cinema, theatrical and literary presentations. I wonder if the cumulative costs of our prolonged longevity do not end up costing us more life once you subtract the time spent in traffic. This is the world after the fall… different flavors of nasty, brutish and short. But there are oases. So you make life where you find it.
This was the most surprising thing, initially: life at war was just life. You think that it would be some sort of a drastic departure from ‘normal life.’ On one hand, the medieval poets lauding the honor and glory of it all. On the other hand, the Platoon and Apocalypse Now decrying the horror, the horror of it all. It wasn’t either, just more of the same. This is not to say that it is boring. Just that it wasn’t all that different. This didn’t make it any less significant. A Centurion of the house of Caesar, I now know what it means to be an agent of wrath. I will not forget. (For a more ‘intellectually satisfying’ discussion of wrath, please see the last post on wrath, or the evolution of that line of thought in the note at the end of this post.)
I had one constant prayer, repeated each night and each mission. That all the crews would return home safely, that we would accomplish the things we set out to do, that my enemies would seek mercy before they found justice. I thank God for answering this prayer many, many times. Because of that grace, I didn’t have to deal with killing for quite some time. When things would start to spin up, I would pray, ‘God, this ends how you want. I’m in Your hands.’ Mercifully, it ended without bloodshed many times. But it is war, after all. And at some point it didn’t.
The act of killing itself was not that difficult. I’m no sociopath, just the choice was clear. In raising his weapon, he decided that someone would die that night. I made sure that it wouldn’t be my friends. There is a mercy in this ill-defined battlefield, I think. In the American Civil War, the Great Power Wars, even the First World War, I could imagine people of good will on both sides of the lines. You do your duty nonetheless, and the other man does his, I suppose. I imagine that would be more difficult. Knowing something of backgrounds and context (I am deliberately vague here,) that man wasn’t a freedom fighter, not a poor soul caught in the cruel grasp of fate and lack of opportunity. Blood cried out from the ground, from what they had already done, from what they were planning on doing. These were men I would never let anywhere near anyone I loved or cared about. My love for the people they had already hurt, and the people they would hurt made the choice an easy one. Yet there still and must be a tension: even in their choices they were still beloved children of God.
Killing a nameless, faceless monster is easy. All the Imperial Storm Troopers look alike. I imagine there isn’t much sorrow or nuance in the destruction of the Death Star. But this wasn’t a movie, and these were people, uniquely created to bear the image of God. So this is not as much the slaying of Goliath as the killing of Absalom. And Absalom was mourned. So I mourned these men.
I do not regret killing him. Far from it. But I mourn him nonetheless. I do regret that it had to be done, though. I mourned that precious creations of God chose a path that led to this end. That first night, I realized that something significant had happened, something that needed to be recognized. So I prayed. I asked God that somehow beyond my understanding that He would work outside of time. I prayed that something I could not imagine or understand had happened, and these men were somehow reconciled to Jesus. Like Emeth the Calormene. I closed in a prayer of mourning for each of them. This is a prayer I will repeat in the future, I have little doubt.
So this is life in the Physics of the Fall. Love comes with Pain here. And Wrath with Grief. I wonder what it would look like without it. The Lord is a Warrior, it says. I wonder what it will mean to be a warrior when there are no more wars to fight. Will wrath become a trophy on some heavenly wall, a no-longer-necessary remembrance of ancient battles? Like nail pierced hands and a wounded side? I cannot say. I will perhaps find those answers on the other side of these shadow lands. But I am here now. An agent of wrath. May my hands be His hands.
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