I was trained like so many others to be prepared to kill our "enemies". This is all taken as so natural. In the animal kingdom killing is very natural in limited ways. Human evolution, especially social evolution, is rather poorly understood. It took me a very long time to stop from feeling "odd" because my military training did not really "take" on me. What I have learned is that I really do not like the idea of killing human beings even if someone has designated them as "enemy". I was born in 1936 and we had Hitler and Pearl harbor. Things were "cleaner" then because the enemy was pretty real to a youngster. By the time I was into my NROTC training in college in preparation for becoming a USMC officer, it had changed. Now we have reached the point where we lose as many from suicide as from combat. Why does this make a sick kind of sense to me? Because we are fighting wars for nebulous reasons at best and our methods of warfare have become rather prone to taking innocent lives along with "combatants". Probably the first real clear exposure of what thius was all about was Scott Peck's People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil Peck documented the turmoil our troops were put through as civilians became indistinguishable from combatants. There is no need to get into ideology here for the issue is the human capacity to kill in these situations. And to make it clear the individual who becomes disturbed by what goes on does not have to be the killer. Peck documented mthe very widespread collusion between those who pulled the trigger and those who felt compelled to cover for them. That was a long time ago now and we never really have dealt with it. We just keep repeating it. Killing with drones is no answer. Read on below for more.
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