Knife That Does

There can be an eeriness to silence in war. No screaming men, no wailing children, no malicious explosions, or crack crack crack of small arms punctuated with a sudden thump whack of something scoring a near miss. The torpedoes had killed all pursuit literally and figuratively. The remainder of the living aboard the floundering coast guard ships would most likely be dead by drowning, internal injuries, or just plain brutal shock.

There are times when you hold a mirror to yourself and wonder, am I damned? Plain old evil? I’d just killed hundreds of strangers. By my hand, mass murder had been done. Sure, war necessitates these kinds of things, but does that absolve us? It’s a question that ran through my head every day I baked bread in Amherst. My conclusion: yep, it made me evil. I am what I do. I killed without remorse or reflection. Just because it had been obligatory self-defense didn’t change the morality of the act.

But then your children appear and ask questions. What is it to be a soldier, to kill despite remorse and reflection? To defend the weak and the vulnerable from evil itself? Before me the hushed waves embraced my dying enemies. They died for no better reason than they’d been on the wrong side. Defined as being anyone but Us. Yeah, not much moral high ground here. Which reinforced Oslo’s point. Until we got humanity free of our own hideous game the whole world washed itself in the blood of innocents.