In case you're curious, highlight the answers: 1) Operation Barbarossa, 2) 30 feet 3) Tsar Bomba, 10-30-1961, ~50 Megatons TNT. Explosion produced 1.4% output of the sun and shattered windows 560 miles away.
But in the end, it all comes back to my morbid fascination with death. Such a powerful force that seems truly inevitable and infinitely unquenchable. It is the one thing every person in this world knows, regardless of faith, color, and creed.
Perhaps more interesting is the intricacies that lace a military that deals such death in a glorified manner. Every country, every state, has some sort of armed force, if only for the sole purpose of defense. Some countries, like Japan, operate by such a doctrine, constrained by an inherited legacy. Others, like the United States, have no shortage of patriots being led to any battle, anywhere, anytime.
But it's the little things away from the battlefield that interest me. More specifically, what war forces people to because of the circumstances in front of them. Atomic weapons, flameless ration heaters, or military theory grabs my attention because it requires the greatest discipline and innovation humankind has ever produced.
And then there is the camaraderie, whimsical intrigue of inside jokes, national pride, and everything else in between. I'm sure Kilroy would agree:
Kilroy, in his natural habitat.And then there is the soldier. Hollywood knows the lowly grunt all too well, along with his more popular relative, the crew-cut cigar smoking general.
It's all representative of a much more savage truth, the one we lie to ourselves about, because it's such an contradiction that everyone is ashamed of.
We kill in battle for "peace". And that cycle can never be broken.
And that truth drives militaries to prosper, backed by the many politicians who have never been shot at, egged on by the masses who are too naturally xenophobic.
We train the young to continue the cycle. We break them down to nothing and build them back up into something that they should be repulsed at. But humans are malleable, and they know how to bypass ethics in the name of peer pressure.
The U.S. and its increasingly violent tendencies follow a spiral of sustained operant conditioning. In Colonel David Grossman's On Killing, he puts it bluntly, even on the back cover of the book:
In World War II, only 15 to 20 percent of combat infantry were willing to fire their rifles. In Korea, about 50 percent. In Vietnam, the figure rose to more than 90 percent.And what I find most amusing is the little things we do to try and cover up our ethical indecencies. As evidenced by General George S. Patton in World War 2, you can march them off a cliff, order them into suicide charges, but for some reason, you can't slap them.
With all the things a regular soldier represents, I again found it interesting how far we've gone.
So imagine my curiosity when I come across this article:
Photos show US soldiers in Afghanistan posing with dead civilians
'Trophy' pictures show US soldiers posing with corpses of Afghan civilians they are accused of killing for sport
The face of Jeremy Morlock, a young US soldier, grins at the camera, his hand holding up the head of the dead and bloodied youth he and his colleagues have just killed in an act military prosecutors say was premeditated murder.
Moments before the picture was taken in January last year, the unsuspecting victim had been waved over by a group of US soldiers who had driven to his village in Kandahar province in one of their armoured Stryker tanks...The pictures include a similar photograph of a different soldier posing with the same victim and a photograph of two other civilians killed by the unit.
I've always thought that there was a limit to human depravity before people simply went insane. Then again, we as humans are not considered insane when we go to war for almost anything, even over dead pigs.
I'm far beyond being convinced that the primal urge to kill is in the human genome. But sometimes I am skeptical. Are we raised to kill, or are we just simply born with it? What is it that draws us to death?
Is it the aesthetic beauty in playing chess with death? The adrenaline in grazing the inevitable constant of the universe?
Is it the desperate need to know about the one thing that unites us all in the beginning and the end?
To understand our deathly addictions, let me introduce Exhibit A, Francis Ford Coppola's classic film Apocalypse Now, where we are treated to a surreal journey into a Vietnam warscape that few see, and even fewer understand.
I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember … I … I … I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget.My judgment? I'll reserve it. I won't judge those poor soldiers and whatever forced them to pose with dead bodies.
And then I realized … like I was shot … like I was shot with a diamond … a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God … the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men … trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love … but they had the strength … the strength … to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly.
You have to have men who are moral … and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling … without passion … without judgment … without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us.
Let's not be afraid to be ashamed about death. What we need is an open discussion, an acceptance of what is final to help us appreciate our very temporary lives. It might not end war, but hell, it's a much better alternative than giving into the law of temptations. That's when the real killing starts.
Or maybe it's completely the other way around. We know too much about death. Our constant wars and desensitization to violence on television and in the movies has forced us to delve deeper into ourselves. It's a desperate attempt to find feeling and meaning using the extreme ends of pain and suffering.
As for me, I can say that understanding death reaffirms something I've been saying for years:
You're not ready to live if you're not ready to die.My own obsession with the end isn't a excuse for what I really think death is. I know many classmates who have that gleam in their eye, that cautious glare of transient curiosity when I openly talk about death and how it relates to almost anything.
You can't be blamed for wanting to know about what's natural. It is one of those subjects that is annoying and difficult to explain. It makes people uncomfortable in front of others, where I don't think it should be. It carries such a stigma of negative connotation.
When I'm older, maybe I'll have less of a skewed view about death and fear it for potentially taking away the things I care about.
But when teenagers start talking openly about dying, I'm not sure it's something we should be proud about. The American indoctrination schedule is right on time.
So, let's go back to where we started:
I'm a military mind. I'm a deathly mind.
Should I be proud of that?
What about the human war mind? Our death wishes?
Should you be proud of that?
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