I recently rediscovered this video from 2014. I loved it then, and I love it now. It was originally a Christmas commercial, but it's appropriate for Veterans Day: a reminder that our enemies are human beings, like us.

Evil must be opposed in the strongest terms, and sometimes by force of arms. But oh how often the foot soldiers in the working-out of the world's evils are simply ordinary people, with families and jobs and otherwise ordinary lives, at heart not that different from our own. They are not innocent, any more than we are innocent, but they are human, they are the "neighbors" whom we are commanded to love.

The surgeon who removes a man's leg to prevent the spread of gangrene does not hate the leg, nor the man; he hates only the evil that is destroying him. This is why it is right, and perfectly consistent, for a soldier to shoot a man in the course of war, and then, coming upon him dying on the battlefield, to offer him a drink of water and make him as comfortable as possible.

We who oppose war and protest killing, do we hate, revile, despise, and sneer at those with whom we disagree? Do we rejoice when they suffer?

I remember, from the years of the Vietnam War, a former draftee telling me how they were forced to march to a cadence of "F**k VC!" (Viet Cong) This, and much like it that happens during training, is a terrible thing. The job of a soldier (sailor, airman, and all) is a noble one. We must teach our people to kill, but we can at least refrain from teaching them to hate.

If we forget the importance of this, we are lost.

The Man He Killed

Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

I shot him dead because—
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like—just as I—
Was out of work—had sold his traps—
No other reason why.

Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.

— Thomas Hardy

Posted by sursumcorda on Monday, November 11, 2019 at 8:51 am | Edit
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