Divine Plagiarism

"People love you the most for the things that you hate/
And hate you for loving the things you can't keep straight/
People judge you on a curve, and tell you you're getting what you deserve/
And this, too, will be made right."
- "This Too Will Be Made Right," Derek Webb.

This is was most uncomfortable realization: both of us went off to war, at least at first, out of our own hatred. And not only in our wars with each other. Both of us had a war we needed to fight with the world. The two of us sought out that war on two very different battlefields.

In the course of my professional studies, I happened across a book authored by a Middle Eastern studies professor she held in high regard. I was struck by how much hatred was written between the lines of this man's work. Multisyllabic words and scattered citations did little to hide the author's intent. To call him a propagandist for a certain people group would be generous, as it would ascribe constructive intent to his work. Certainly criticism can be constructive, but the constructive critic leaves his joy in malice at the door. This man did not. And for this, like Chomsky and Zinn before him, this man was loved by those who shared his hatred.

Yet, for my one finger pointing out, I find three pointing back in. I kill men for a living. There are a lot prettier words for what I do, and I am glad to use them in polite company, but one can hardly gloss over the intent behind a warbird's design. Yet even if written in starker colors, there are similarities between my world and that of academic critique. There is a world of difference between wanting to protect and wanting to destroy; between wanting to save the day and wanting to kill, even if both sometimes happen at the same time. A man might kill to protect things worth protecting, and a man might kill simply to kill. There are gradations, no doubt. My blood boils when I see pictures of an Al-Qaeda torture facility. I hate what they do, I believe rightly so. And I am glad to draw a line of fire between my enemies and those they show no compunction in hurting. I have killed men with mournful resolve, I have killed with regretless sorrow, I have killed with many things in my heart. Nonetheless, I can say honestly that I have never killed a man with hatred in my heart. This is by the grace of God alone. There was a time when this would not have been the case.

I think of conversations some of the conversations here. "I'm bored… I want to go kill something." "As long as the good guys are safe and we get the mission done… if we're not shooting, nobody's shooting at them, right?" I answer. (I sound like a tool.) I understand the whole 'first rotation' thing. You want to go and do the job you've worked so hard training for. Of course. And that was me once. But in my case, I wonder if my desire to make a difference wasn't paired with some unnamed rage. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure it was.

A memory from years ago: driving to my flight training squadron, 'Nightmare' by Eve 6 blaring across the radio, I remember thinking "I want to do whatever she would hate the most." In the aftermath of the battle of Second Christine, these words made sense to a very angry young man. I had been willing to give up my life's dream of flying fighter jets in order to be with her. Since the latter was not an option, then I determined to lose myself in the former, and I infected that dream with my bitterness toward her. I am not proud of these words, nor of who I was then. In fact, I am very thankful that God has redeemed some decisions made with mixed motives. (Were we to count pride, though, I think very few of us have any decisions of pure motives.) It was more than that, though. She became the quick and easy synopsis of all the abuse I endured in Cambridge, the summary of all the people who hated me without knowing me, all the people who made me into the accessible and attackable representative of Sa'ad's "other." These people, in turn, became the most recent manifestation of anyone who had every hated me without reason, cast me out, shunned me, or otherwise treated me with contempt for being different. And since I could not meaningfully answer her contempt or their contempt on the battlefield I was on, I sought out another battlefield where I could answer my adversaries in kind. Somewhere I could shoot back. How dark the heart of man. Once again, I am not proud of who I was then: a boy consumed by hatred and fear. But we are rarely so honest with ourselves; I was a Christian in good standing, and determined to be seen as such. So I hid vicious intents from myself by wrapping them in Christian-ese words. I am thankful that God saved me from me. I am sorry that I waited so long to let Him show me my own heart.

I will not recap the last three years again. Suffice it to say that God broke my fears by letting them break upon me; He broke my pride and broke my heart; He broke my hatred for others when I finally faced another's hatred toward me with love. The angry boy cast off, I have put on the man He has made me to be, and I am proud of what He has made. And this man believes to his very bones the heart of the Christian faith: love is thicker than death. So I have put down hatred, and love has become my new weapon. (All things are incomplete forms on this side of the fall. I embrace this nonetheless, even if imperfectly.) I am still a warrior. Born into a world at war, I left behind as much of my hatred as I could as I went off to war. Because of this, I will never have to live with the guilt that I would have brought upon myself otherwise. For this, I am thankful.

In this, though, is an irony: in a world of hatred, you are loved more for what you hate than for what you love. For all the angry, rebellious kids parading around in their Che Guevara shirts, "The Motorcycle Diaries" gives them a veneer of moralism to cover their hatred for mom and dad. Guevara is exciting far more so for what he hated than for what he loved. He demonstrated well the latter half of the Jose Marti quote about those who build and those who destroy. He is the rebel, and the rebel is sexy. In the same way, I remember conversations with well-meaning near-strangers about my profession. "Kill some hadjis for me" and all of that. Mostly no more than sports team smack-talking, an emotional investment in some far off world where good and bad are defined in terms that are as black and white as they are arbitrary. I'm not judging, nor claiming some sense of moral superiority, but things look a little different when you have to perforate the body of some kid too young and stupid to know what he's doing with thousands of fragments of hot metal because his older brother told him to point his Kalashnikov at the good guys. I've flown x number of successful missions, and brought x number of good guys home safe. But, to the world, I am cool because of how many men I've killed. Don't get me wrong, I'm no pacifist. I just question our assessments of value.

Returning to the story that helped get me here, I've chosen to know nothing about her for more than two years now. But here, on the far side of this change, I think I see one more parallel between who we were. I believe the difference between old Dave and new Dave is the difference between rage and love. Old Dave nursed hidden wounds, shoving his rage far enough down to poison the aquifer of his dreams, and hence he could not be free of the ghosts of his past that denied him identity. Old Christine, from what very little I knew of her, was very similar. Old Dave found a battlefield where his dreams and his rage could co-exist in his choice of aircraft. Old Christine seemed to have found her own battlefield where her dreams and her hatreds dovetailed. Both of us found places where we would be loved and accepted both for the things we loved and for the things we hated. This world loves to hate, and in that hatred we found some degree of acceptance and affirmation. But there can never be peace in hatred.

I heard echoes of her of late. They were not sought for. Apparently, one of her friends described to a mutual friend a person without a name, a monstrous and pathetic and ugly person. Her friend not realizing that the mutual friend knew that nameless person, and my friend realizing that person was intended to describe me, a bit of verbal sparring ensued. I thank that friend for coming to my defense. There was a time when my reaction would have been anger, maybe even hatred. But that time has passed. May she be greatly blessed. If, after two years of knowing nothing of me whatsoever, she still needs to wrap all of her fears and hatred around a caricature of me, then she needs those blessings even more so, and so I give them all the more gladly. If the difference between old Dave and new Dave was found in forgetting how to hate, then may Christine be blessed in the same way. I have no desire to interact with the old Christine… she reminds me of a self I am glad to have left behind. But I would be honored to know a new and free Christine. Regardless, I am forgetting how to hate her, as I have forgotten how to hate my enemies out here.

It started with my war against the world. Men warring against the world is not exactly unprecedented, though perhaps mine has come full circle. Athanasius contra mundum, they said. And rightly so. But there are different ways to pursue a war against the world. Fight against those who have hurt you, and you will inevitably become those same people to someone else. Fight for those you love, for those who are innocent, and for those who have hurt you, and you will conquer even past the grave. The weapon of hatred will do you no good in the higher stakes of this latter war. Love is the only armor dense enough and the only steel sharp enough to conquer hatred and death. But there are many flavors of love. And so, denied any softer expression in this place, I will love the innocents with wrath against their oppressors. But I will not hate those oppressors. A man who fights from love is more dangerous than one who fights from hate, anyways.