On Killing

It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.

-Robert E. Lee

A few days ago I gave up on Pynchon's masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow, because he just seemed to be trying too hard. War is absurd. I get it. But do we really need to take an imaginary trip down a sewage pipe, noting in detail the varieties of excrement stuck to the interior? Or read a description of orgiastic sex among soldiers that reads like Pynchon was auditioning for that scatalogical horror, "the Aristocrats"?

None of it resonated with me, so I put down Pynchon and purchased a book on that evergreen historical landscape, the War Between the States. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War provides a topical survey of how the war changed our attitudes about dying, killing, the handling of our mortal remains, and living with the legacy of a conflict that killed as many Americans as all of our wars combined until about the second year of the Vietnam War.

The war has held a fascination for me since I lived as a child a few miles from the base of Kennesaw Mountain, the situs of one of the few victories the Confederates achieved during the disastrous Atlanta campaign. This book is, therefore, familiar territory. That said, I was struck by an observation in the chapter on killing, which weaves through first-hand accounts what it was like to participate in a battle like Antietam, the deadliest single day on U.S. soil, in which 23,000 men were killed or wounded. My understanding was that humans have always had a natural resistance to killing another person, that thousands of unfired rifles were recovered from Civil War battlefields, that in one famous instance a dead soldier's weapon was found with its barrel stuffed with round after round, as he apparently pretended to fire and reloaded, over and over.

But that wasn't everyone. We have long known, or thought we knew, that around ten percent of all soldiers do most of the killing, and seem to enjoy the experience. Soldiers' letters home during the Civil War suggest the sentiment was more widespread than that. "Oh this is fun to lie here and shoot them down," one Confederate officer wrote home. Another wrote that firing at the enemy brought forth in him "the joy of battle." Were these the exceptions, the ten percent? Or is there something in us, some primeval urge, that rises from the inner recesses of the less evolved parts of our brain, and comes into its own in the act of killing in combat?

I can only speak with any authority about myself. As I've written before, we are in the midst of a series of thirtieth anniversaries of those days and nights spent fighting the Gulf War. This Sunday will mark three decades since my last "hot" combat mission, in the middle of the night on Valentine's Day, flying cover as a dozen B-52s flattened a chemical weapons plant with over 1200 bombs in two minutes. It was quite a sight on my thirty-first trip into harm's way, watching streams of ineffectual tracers spray blindly into the darkness like a snake writhing after it's been shot, secondary explosions rising from the staccato flashes as the bombs peppered their target.

I am sure people died that night, died on lots of the nights and days we prowled around the skies around Baghdad, waiting for a wave of Iraqi fighters that never arrived. But I never fired a shot, never even flipped on the Master Arm switch that cooled the seeker heads of my AIM-9s and prepared the jet's electronic brain for the business of killing.

Which is not to say I am some sort of pacifist, or that I do not own a share of all the death that was happening around me. So do you, as an American. My role was just a little closer to the event.

The closest I ever came to killing someone in that conflict was in early February. The Iraqi Air Force had taken to fleeing east across the border to Iran one jet at a time, seeking sanctuary in the arms of a hated enemy. We flew patrols along the Iranian border to prevent these escapes, which had left the eastern slopes of the mountains on the Iranian side of the border smudged with the residue of crashed Mirages and MiGs that had flown into the terrain in the weather or darkness.

On this particular afternoon Sammy and I were flying north when we were vectored toward Baghdad by AWACS, which detected a bogie flying low and fast toward the east off our left wing.

I swung our formation to the west, and in short order locked onto a MiG-21 coming right at us doing about 500 knots at rooftop level, apparently having just taken off from Rasheed Air Base, a few miles southeast of Baghdad, shortly before. He was well out of range for our AIM-7s when he started to turn tail for home, no doubt detecting he had been "spiked" by us and was in grave danger of taking a Sparrow through his canopy. We plugged in the afterburners and started trying to close the gap to allow a stern shot once we were within five or six miles.

What did I feel at that moment? Probably what a hound dog feels when he sees the rabbit turn and run. There was excitement, impatience, the strong urge for the needle on my head's up display to creep down below the line indicating he was in-range. Everything else fell away.

Which almost got us killed. Sammy was not so focused, keeping his radar in search mode to scan for other threats as he flew a mile or so off my right wing. After a few seconds our radar warning receivers gave a beeping tone that indicated surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft batteries in the vicinity were tracking us with their radars. "Firestone Four is spiked," Sammy announced. So was I.

It wasn't long before Sammy's RWR went from beeping to a solid tone, indicating a possible missile launch. "Four's spiked, turning cold." I watched him peel off to the right, rolling into a 180 degree turn toward the east and safety, leaving me there alone to chase the MiG. This was a serious breach on his part, but Sammy's first son had been born a couple weeks before, and he wasn't about to let my stupid bloodlust get him killed.

I felt dejected as I broke lock on the MiG and joined him in racing back out of the SAM rings. Who knows what the Iraqi MiG driver felt when my spike on his jet dropped?

I don't think of that day very often, but this morning wonder what it says about me, about combat. The excitement was real, but how would it have felt if I had seen my adversary? World War I pilots almost always saw the faces of the men they killed. The fact that he turned and ran probably was part of it--soldiers have known for a very long time that the most dangerous thing one can do in a battle is show the enemy one's back in retreat, that it somehow makes killing easier. I could observe that the abstraction of the video game I was playing made it less real, and that may be so. But the excitement and focus of chasing one's prey felt real enough, like something rising out of the less evolved parts of the neocortex, my dog brain with a rabbit in sight. I guess that's all part of who we are.

A little sun out there this morning, with the promise of snow over five of the next six days. P and I are debating whether a Valentine's Day weekend getaway is in order, but a lot of snow may land us here in front of our fake fireplace watching movies. And so it goes.