(Last night I finished this article, though I intended to post something else, a cheerful guest blog, on my website today. This morning I woke to the news of another savage terror attack in Brussels. Now both my reader and I are horrified by the descriptions of headless bodies, people who suddenly have no legs, a man with his chest wide open, and a mother screaming, “Where is my baby?” This necessitates posting my essay today and gives me two more things to say which I have added at the end.)
I am a coward. I confess. I probably have a lot of company, but I am not in a position to accuse anyone but myself.
Because I am a coward I have become complicit in the deaths of innocent people.
Here’s how it happened. One day I got an email from a human rights group that wanted me to add my name to a petition protesting the use of drones against our enemies. The reasons, of course, were obvious and good—extensive collateral damage associated with drones. “Damage” meaning the deaths of passing motorists, neighborhood children, women on the way to the vegetable market.
I stared at this petition for a long time, with my curser hanging over the “sign here” button. I thought sensibly that this was a complicated subject, and I did not know the whole truth. I asked myself if a drone was any better or worse than a bomb dropped from an airplane. Was a drone just a new kind of guided missile? What were the military alternatives?
And I did not sign. I wanted to. I felt it was right. It fit with my experience of war. It squared with my ethics, my Christian faith, and the ground under my feet. But I did not sign, for one reason. I happen to know a fine young man who is in the Army Special Forces, and I would so much rather they sent a drone and not him, not someone I love.
Actually, in modern warfare most of the casualties are civilians. An article in the June 2014 issue of the American Journal of Public Health claims that civilian deaths constitute 85% to 90% of casualties caused by war. What I know is that the war I experienced in Lebanon featured the spectacle of artillery shells slamming into city apartment buildings and little concrete houses like my neighbor Jacqueline’s. In Syria, armies do not attack enemy fortresses but towns full of ordinary people. All those refugees, millions of Syrians who have fled into Jordan and Lebanon and Turkey and across water to European countries, are a kind of collateral damage. When they left their homes and ran they were choosing homelessness instead of death, seeing that the bombs did not care that they were there, minding their own business, trying to make a living, raising a family, going to school. ISIS didn’t care. Russian bombs didn’t care. American bombs didn’t notice that a building was a hospital, with beds full of injured people, ministered to by foreign volunteers, selfless doctors and nurses. Drones do not care.
I could use the facts above either to support the protest of drones (they are inhumane) or to excuse their use on the basis that that’s the way war is these days. (Cities, homes, people are going to be lost, whatever I do.)
The crucial question seems to be: Can you make rules for an activity so violent and cruel and destructive and desperate as war? As though killing one another could be a game?
Writing In Borrowed Houses, relating my story about the death of the U.S. Marines in their barracks, I told about a letter from a grieving mother. She wrote that she and her husband had thought their son would make it back from Beirut but…”We just hadn’t thought about how there are people in this world who don’t value human life, not even their own.” Reading this again and again, I tried to make sense of it. The driver of the truck that carried the bomb had intentionally sacrificed his own life. Apparently this was not fighting fair.
When I told this, I was still stumbling toward some kind of spiritual accommodation with what I, an alien civilian on a battlefield, had seen, so this is what I wrote in my book: “I was baffled by the way Americans differentiated between acts of violence that were all the same to people who have lived through war in their own streets. Americans seemed to think it natural for soldiers to die in a tank assault or an artillery battle, while they felt that a suicide bomber in a truck had broken the rules of war. In Lebanon we heard that 20,000 people died in the Israeli invasion, a majority of them civilians who happened to be in the way. Could Americans know that and still believe that war had rules? Had they never noticed that it was people with causes but no planes and no tanks who resorted to ordinary vehicles, loaded with explosives and delivered by a human being? And what about the possibility that car bombs and artillery shells were morally equivalent?”
If you detect a little bitterness there, fair enough. When we get bitter enough, we admit finally that war is a blatant denial of the value of human life. For this reason I know and I often say the obvious: war is evil. Inevitably someone will protest by saying that war is sometimes necessary to accomplish something good. Usually they speak believing that they have contradicted my statement.
C.S. Lewis brilliantly advised us never to mistake necessary evils for good. Whatever it accomplishes, however it is justified, war is still evil. We must never lose sight of this truth. It is evil, precisely because it presumes, and requires us to act as though, the lives of others are worth less than our own lives and the lives of people we know and love.
Still, this is not quite the whole story. War is evil, and war is happening. A campaign against drones recognizes both these facts and attempts to ameliorate suffering by drawing a line somewhere.
In acknowledgement of the wickedness, the civilized world has attempted to establish standards, to make rules which might, if followed, protect at least civilian bystanders, prisoners of war and conquered people. As I understand such documents as the Geneva Convention, they forbid: the deliberate attacking of civilians (which happened today in Brussels), the killing of prisoners, torture, building anything permanent in an occupied territory, and maybe some other things.
I made fun of the rules once. It just seemed ludicrous to me for nations to commit mass murder and then try to insert some little politeness into the process. Or maybe what I noticed was that no one was keeping the rules and shocking things were happening.
I’ve never wanted to tell everything I know about what people did to one another in Lebanon, but maybe you need to know some of it. In the same town as our publishing office, victorious militiamen mounted the heads of enemies on their jeeps and drove through town honking in celebration. That was gross but not so savage as dragging a live and screaming enemy behind the jeep, with his body bouncing and spattering and shredding. It happened.
See what I mean? With no rules at all we are savages. There has to be something we won’t do. The salvation of our own humanity is at stake.
Throwing destruction into a space where we have an enemy without knowing who else will die is the kind of thing that has caused civilian deaths to multiply in modern wars. I understand why a soldier might feel it is necessary. I also understand the cruel consequences. I have already said that I would not want to send someone’s dear 22-year-old to find and assassinate the enemy when we could instead just release a drone. Likewise I know that if it were my child playing in the targeted neighborhood, I would understand clearly that launching a missile to kill a dozen people (hoping to include the enemy and likely including my child) was wicked disregard for human life.
Another day, after all this agonizing, I decided in favor of the innocent child and the helpless mother. I signed the petition.
But I am still a coward unless I post this blog.
So what about Brussels, the morning news and the gruesome pictures left in our heads?
First, the description of the aftermath could easily depict a scene just after the unexpected arrival of a drone: people with missing body parts, spattered blood, a mother screaming for her baby. It is the same, except that in Brussels, someone probably gave his own life to do it. Just before dying, he looked around at the people who happened to be there, knowing he was going to kill or maim them in an instant. We have spared ourselves that necessity, killing by remote control. And we who support it never have to see what we have done.
Finally, we may decide it is necessary to send drones, but we must do so knowing it is evil. The attack in Brussels makes this plain.