Attribution: Ray Platnick, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports the question posed by a young grandson a long time ago as a family discussion veered into military matters, with the keeper perhaps recounting a combat story or two.
“Did you ever kill someone?” the young listener asked.
It was, of course, the only truly appropriate question to ask of a combat-storyteller and it stopped the keeper, perhaps in the middle of recounting the enemy artillery shell that buried him in dirt and debris in the observation post on top of a Korean hilltop.
The keeper does not remember exactly how he responded to the grandson’s “kill” question. He hopes it was with somehow making the point that war killing tends to be less face-to-face and increasingly remote control.
But in the end it is still killing and so the short answer is, “Yes, I killed someone,” maybe some of those in the spotting scope images scrambling into tunnels just before one of those horrible napalm raids directed from the keeper’s Korean bunker.
The keeper wonders if those now pushing the drone bomber launch buttons from remote locations ever get the question from a grandson: “Did you ever kill someone?” And he wonders further that if the kill question is ever asked of any of the thousands of civilians working in the monstrous US military-industrial complex, what they tell their grandsons about killing?
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