{"id":3922,"date":"2012-07-19T15:29:17","date_gmt":"2012-07-19T19:29:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=3922"},"modified":"2012-12-04T11:44:36","modified_gmt":"2012-12-04T16:44:36","slug":"brave-enough-to-kill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2012\/07\/brave-enough-to-kill.html","title":{"rendered":"Brave Enough to Kill"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Pentagon is considering awarding Distinguished Warfare Medals to drone pilots and Glen Greenwald is furious<\/a>. \u00a0He sees it as an attempt \u201cto depict drone warfare as some sort of courageous and noble act.\u201d Greenwald and I are in accord in condemning the use of drones for assassination, but I don\u2019t know that I agree with his critique here. \u00a0Greenwald says flying a drone cannot meet any of our traditional criteria for valor because:<\/p>\n

Whatever one thinks of the justifiability of drone attacks, it\u2019s one of the least \u201cbrave\u201d or courageous modes of warfare ever invented. It\u2019s one thing to call it just, but to pretend it\u2019s \u201cbrave\u201d is Orwellian in the extreme. Indeed, the whole point of it is to allow large numbers of human beings to be killed without the slightest physical risk to those doing the killing. Killing while sheltering yourself from all risk is the definitional opposite of bravery.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I just don\u2019t think he\u2019s right that the pilots are really \u2018safe.\u2019 \u00a0Wired<\/a> and NPR<\/a> both report that drone pilots are experiencing high levels of stress and PTSD that takes a toll on their families. \u00a0The soldiers are safe from physical damage and death, but psychological wounds can\u2019t be written off; they\u2019re harder to diagnose and treat and more difficult for a family to compensate for. \u00a0This kind of danger seems to be what one of the pilots quoted in Greenwald\u2019s piece is referring to when he says:<\/p>\n

Luther (Trey) Turner III, a retired colonel who flew combat missions during the gulf war before he switched to flying Predators in 2003, said that he doesn\u2019t view his combat experience flying drones as \u201cvalorous.\u201d \u201cMy understanding of the term is that you are faced with danger. And, when I am sitting in a ground-control station thousands of miles away from the battlefield, that\u2019s just not the case.\u201d But, he said, \u201cI firmly believe it takes bravery to fly a U.A.V.\u201d \u2014 unmanned aerial vehicle \u2014 \u201cparticularly when you\u2019re called upon to take someone\u2019s life. In some cases, you are watching it play out live and in color.\u201d As more than one pilot at Holloman told me, a bit defensively, \u201cWe\u2019re not just playing video games here.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which seems like an echo of one of the themes in Drew Gilpin Faust\u2019s This Republic of Suffering<\/em><\/a>. She introduces the second chapter with:<\/p>\n

And in the Civil War, it was killing, not dying, as Orestes Brownson observed in 1862, that demanded \u201cthe harder courage,\u201d for it required the more significant departure from soldiers\u2019 understanding of themselves as human beings, and, in mid-nineteenth century America, as Christians.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And that leads me to ask what, exactly, the military is trying to valorize when it awards medals. \u00a0If they are singling out soldiers as role models, then perhaps drone pilots should be excluded. \u00a0 But, a lot of the time, these decorations are framed in terms of recognition of sacrifice. \u00a0You can end up in sin-eater territory<\/a> pretty fast once you start admitting that the sacrifice you\u2019re commemorating is the sacrifice of \u00a0peace and\u00a0innocence. \u00a0What are you supposed to say at the speech, \u201cThank you for putting aside your natural revulsion to killing, even at the cost of your own stability!\u201d<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s the appropriate way to handle this? \u00a0For starters, we should probably think long and hard about what\u2019s worth a war, if we know it requires the kind of sacrifice that we feel ashamed of asking for. \u00a0If we\u00a0don\u2019t<\/em> think these sacrifices are something noble to aspire to, if we think that they diminish or wound something good in humans, then maybe the appropriate tone is more mournful, more like the way we would behave at the funeral for a person who stepped into the path of a bullet to save someone else. \u00a0We can commend their desire to protect others but it would be bizarre to say there was anything particularly good about sustaining a gunshot wound. \u00a0We need to praise the\u00a0why<\/em> but not the\u00a0what<\/em> and think seriously about whether this is a particularly\u00a0desirable\u00a0way to express love of countrymen.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Pentagon is considering awarding Distinguished Warfare Medals to drone pilots and Glen Greenwald is furious. \u00a0He sees it as an attempt \u201cto depict drone warfare as some sort of courageous and noble act.\u201d Greenwald and I are in accord in condemning the use of drones for assassination, but I don\u2019t know that I agree […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[86,184,181,43],"class_list":["post-3922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-morality-in-practice","tag-inculcating-morality","tag-just-war","tag-offering-resistance","tag-sin-eatersdirty-hands"],"yoast_head":"\nBrave Enough to Kill<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Pentagon is considering awarding Distinguished Warfare Medals to drone pilots and Glen Greenwald is furious. \u00a0He sees it as 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