I'm reading Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller, halfway through it and loving it. Part of what I read last night was about war, and he mentioned Robert MacNamara and the documentary Fog of War. Later that night, after a failed attempt at a movie rental, I looked at the TV guide (something I havnt done in months) and saw that Fog of War was actually going to be on. Coincidence?
Well I have to admit that I did not make it through the whole documentary, but kept switching back to it. In one part MacNamara talks about his first memory- being two years old and seeing people in the streets celebrating the end of World War One. They thought it was the war to end all wars.
A few days ago I was reading the June 12th Time magazine's article on Haditha, Iraq, where 24 Iraqis were killed by Marines in their homes after one Marine was killed by a roadside bomb. This was back in November, and the Marines reported that the roadside bomb killed not only their buddy but 15 Iraqis. The truth is just now coming out, thanks to an Iraqi human-rights actvist named Taher Thabet who filmed the scene of the crime and all the bodies in the morgue. There was plenty of evidence on tape to show what really happened.
So did the Marines just snap? go crazy with rage? did they really feel like the women & children minding their own business in their houses had something to do with the insurgent(s?) responsible for the bomb? The killing took place over 5 hours. To me that seems like enough time, maybe not to calm down after seeing a friend killed, but enough time to think through your actions instead of just shooting at whatever moves. We can't really know what went on in their heads and what scares me most is that they are just people...sure they are trained to kill but also trained to know when not to kill. This particular group of Marines, the Kilo Company, "had already seen some of the uglist fighting in the postinvasion period", according to Time. I can't even imagine...
Donald Miller, in talking about WWII and war in general, says,
"I bring this up only because the fall of man, when Adam and Eve ate from that tree, occurred because there was a war going on. This is the only way I can explain life as we know it. The people of Japan were not monsters, they were just people, but they were caught up in war. They were victims of war, victims of a handful of mean, a handful of leaders who wanted something they couldn't have. .... We are wired so that other people help create us, help make us who we are, and when deception is fed to us, we make bad decisions. War is complicated; it isnt black and white".
Don writes a lot about Genesis and the fall. He says that humans were wired to be connected to God, to find our identidy in God, but the Fall changed all of that. The potential for that connection is still there, but we seldom hook up and instead look for other things to define our beings.
So these three things were running around in my head all weekend: the fog of war, Haditha, and the fall of man. and they all just helped the other to make sense. MacNamara, a former secretary of defense, admited that mistakes were made in WWII Vietnam. Mistakes are being made in Iraq (and throughout the world for that matter) as we speak. We don't look to God for our identity anymore, we look to others and our expiriences with others. The Marines were deceived by war, maybe deceived into thinking that more violence would justify their friend's death. Maybe you could say that they were totally desentized to violence and death that killing was just the natural response to emotional pain. They made bad decisions. You can find lots of people or events to blame for it, and in the end it just goes back to the garden of eden, to the first spiritual battle that satan won.
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