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A note showed up in my inbox this afternoon with a link to a video from the UK Telegraph, prompting me to "take a sober look before the link gets removed", and because the note came from a reliable source, I did, and I was horrified.
I was not horrified because the video was of the "heads-up display" of an American A-10 that accidentally fired on a British convoy in Iraq in 2003, killing a soldier. That was simply tragic, because the accidental "blue on blue" killing of friendly forces is, to some extent, unavoidable and acceptable in wartime. I was horrified for another reason: because the tape was so clear. I found myself listening to it, getting caught up in the drama of the kill, knowing the language and remembering it from my own little war, and knowing--knowing--that the kill was going to result in the death of a British soldier, and wanting to hear it anyway, and also wanting to hear what came next, how the pilot would react (predictably, with tears, anger, and denial). I was, in short, a voyeur.
“We’re in jail, dude,†the wingman says over the frequency after they learn from the command station on the ground that they’ve just killed a British soldier. There's a heavy silence. This is not how they began the day.
(True to form, the British come in long after the action is over and tell the A-10 fighters to “abortâ€â€”military slang to call off the mission.)
There is a lot of heavy breathing on the last part of this tape. A lot of silence. A lot of pondering, in which you can almost hear the pilots’ minds turning over and over, wishing to call back the moment, the missile, anything to bring them back to that time before they had committed a crime, before they had become killers.
And that, of course, was my second horrifying thought. That in a part of my mind, they had only just then become killers.
