When you're in war, the moral universe you carry with you — the moral experience and baggage you brought into it — is suspended. You just don't bring it with you. It exists in an outside moral universe independent of our own.
Everything makes sense and has its own order, until you leave.
I remember the summer I left for the army. It was 2004. I was 18, about to turn 19, and I was working at a parking garage for a minor league baseball team. Someone came up and said, "This woman's having a heart attack." So I radioed my boss to get an ambulance to wait at the entrance to the garage, and I started moving these cars around, getting them away to clear this path. She came down in her car and was able to get out, and the ambulance was able to grab her and take her to the hospital. Luckily, nothing happened.
I was always a person to visit my grandparents and give them a call. I loved foreign films when I was in high school, and reading history, and not passing high school classes. I thought that's what it was all about.
And then I get to Iraq. And I’m going on raids. Throwing people down in their houses in the middle of the night because I don't know if they're good or bad and we don't know, at that point, if we even have the right house.
I remember clearly tracking mud and human waste through people's houses and getting it on their carpets and their rugs and their beds. And tearing their houses apart. And getting into firefights and probably shooting the wrong people. You can't go down and ask them, right?
I went from being proud that I helped this one woman to that.
Then you leave again. And what do you do with that? How are all those three people, before, during, and after war the same person? All three of them existed in different moral universes.
- More Here
Everything makes sense and has its own order, until you leave.
I remember the summer I left for the army. It was 2004. I was 18, about to turn 19, and I was working at a parking garage for a minor league baseball team. Someone came up and said, "This woman's having a heart attack." So I radioed my boss to get an ambulance to wait at the entrance to the garage, and I started moving these cars around, getting them away to clear this path. She came down in her car and was able to get out, and the ambulance was able to grab her and take her to the hospital. Luckily, nothing happened.
I was always a person to visit my grandparents and give them a call. I loved foreign films when I was in high school, and reading history, and not passing high school classes. I thought that's what it was all about.
And then I get to Iraq. And I’m going on raids. Throwing people down in their houses in the middle of the night because I don't know if they're good or bad and we don't know, at that point, if we even have the right house.
I remember clearly tracking mud and human waste through people's houses and getting it on their carpets and their rugs and their beds. And tearing their houses apart. And getting into firefights and probably shooting the wrong people. You can't go down and ask them, right?
I went from being proud that I helped this one woman to that.
Then you leave again. And what do you do with that? How are all those three people, before, during, and after war the same person? All three of them existed in different moral universes.
- More Here
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