posted March 17, 2008 02:51 AM         

I think it is easier to forgive the perp. when he/she does not try to defend themselves by blaming their behavior on others, such as following orders. I found the following pages (74-86) from the book, One by Richard Bach to be helpful in understanding how vulnerable the mind can be.

The main character (the author himself) meets his alternate selves who exist simultaneously in parallel worlds in order to learn from them and give them suggestions on avoiding some of the mistakes he made.

“Permission to join you?” I smiled at myself, sounding cadet-like after all these years.

“Who is it?”

“Why must he ask hard questions? “Sir,” I answered, “second Lieutenant Bach, Richard D., A-O-Three-Zero-Eight-Zero-Seven-Four, sir!”

“Mize is that you?” he chuckled.

Phil Mizenhalter, I thought. What a friend he was! In ten years he’ll be dead, shot down with his F-105 in Viet Nam.

“It’s not Mize,” I said. “It’s Richard Bach, it’s you from your future, thirty years from tonight.

“I’m you, Lieutenant. I’m yourself with a little more experience. I’m the one [who] made all the mistakes that you’re going to make, and somehow survive.”

He walked closer, inspecting me in the dark, still thinking this was a joke. “I’m going to make mistakes?” he said with a smile. “That’s hard to believe.”

“Call them unexpected learning experiences.”

“I think I can handle em,” he said.

“You’ve already made the big one,” I pressed on. “You joined the military. Smart thing would be to quit now. Not the smart thing. The wise thing would be to quit.”

“Ho!” he said. “I just graduated from flight school! I still can’t believe I’m an Air Force pilot and you’re telling me quit? That’s pretty good. What else do you know?” If he thought I was a game, he was willing to play.

“OK,” I said, “in the past I remember, I thought I was using the Air Force to learn how to fly. Fact is, the Air Force was using me, and I didn’t know it.”

“But I do know it!” he said. “I happen to love my country and if there’s fighting to be done to keep it free I want to be there!”

“Remember Lieutenant Wyeth? Tell me about Lieutenant Wyeth.”

He looked at me sideways, uneasy.

“The name was Wyatt,” he corrected. “Instructor in preflight training. Something happened to him in Korea and he went a little crazy. Stood in front of our class and wrote in big letters on the board: KILLERS! Then he turned around, his face like grinning death, and he said, ‘That’s you!’ His name was Wyatt.”

“You know what you’re going to learn in your future, Richard? I said. “You’re going to find out that Lieutenant Wyatt was the sanest person you’ll ever meet in the Air Force.”

He shook his head. “You know, he said, “every once in a while I imagine what it would be like to meet you, to talk to the man I’m going to be in thirty years. You’re not like him. Not at all! He’s proud of me!”

“I’m proud of you too,” I said. “But for different reasons than you think. I’m not proud because I know you’re doing the best you know how to do. I’m proud that the best you know is to volunteer to kill people, to strafe and rocket and napalm villages full of terrified woman and children.”

“Like hell I will! I’m going to fly air-to air day fighter defense!”

I didn’t say a word.

“Well, air defense is what I’d like to do….”

Just looked at him in the dark.

“Hey, I’m serving my country and I’ll do whatever….”

“You could serve your country ten thousand different ways,” I said. “Come on, why are you here? Are you honest enough with yourself even to know?”

He hesitated. “I want to fly.”

“You knew how to fly before you joined the Air Force. You could have flown Piper Cubs and Cessnas.”

“They’re not… fast enough.”

“Not like the pictures on the recruiting posters, are they? Cessnas aren’t like the airplanes in the movies.”

No,” he said at last.

“So why are you here?”

“There’s something about high-performance,,,,” He checked himself, as honest as he knew how to be. “There’s something about fighter planes. There’s glory there nothing else has.”

“Tell me about the glory.”

“The glory comes from a… a mastery of the thing. Flying the airplane….” He patted the wing of the Sabre lovingly. “… well, I’m not plodding around in the mud, I’m not tied to desks or buildings or anything on earth. I can go faster than sound, forty thousand feet up-no other living thing has ever been there, practically. Something in me knows we’re not ground-creatures, says we don’t have limits, and the closest I can come to living what I know is true is flying one of these.”

Of course. That’s why I had wanted the speed and dazzle and flash. I’d never put it in words, never put it in thoughts. Just felt it.

Without you, I thought, war would die. I swept my hand toward the Sabre. “Beautiful,” I said. “Bait.”

“Bait?”

“The fighter planes are bait. You’re the fish.”

“So what’s the hook?”

“The hook is going to kill you when you find out,” I said. “The hook is you, Richard Bach, human being, are personally responsible for every man and woman and child that you will kill with this thing.”

“Wait a minute! I’m not responsible, I have nothing to do with decisions like that! I follow orders….”

“Orders are no excuse, the Air Force is no excuse, war is no excuse. Every murder will haunt you till you die, every night you’ll wake up screaming, killing every one again, over and over.”

He stiffened. “Listen, without the Air Force, if we’re attacked …. I’m here to protect our freedom!”

“You said you were here because you want to fly, and for the glory.”

“My flying protects my country….”

“That’s what the others say, too, word for word. The Russian soldiers, the Chinese soldiers, the Arab soldiers, the fill-in-the-blank soldiers of the fill-in-the-blank nation. They learn In Us We Trust. Defend the Motherland, the Fatherland from Them. But their Them, Richard, is you!”

His arrogance suddenly disappeared, “Remember the model airplanes?” he said, almost pleading. “A thousand model airplanes, and a tiny me flew in every one. Remember climbing trees, looking down? I was the bird, waiting to fly. Remember throwing yourself from diving boards, pretending it was flight? Remember in Paul Marcus’ Globe Swift? I wasn’t the same for days. I wasn’t the same ever!”

“That’s the way it’s planned,” I said.

“Planned?”

“Soon as you learned to see, pictures. Soon as you learned to listen, stories and song. Soon as you learned to read, books and signs and posters, flags and movies and statues and tradition, classes in history, pledge allegiance, salute the flag. There is Us and there is Them. Them will hurt us if we’re not vigilant, suspicious, angry, armed. Follow orders, do as you’re told, defend your country.

“Encourage the boy-children’s curiosity in machines that move: automobiles, ships, airplanes. Now set before them the most excellent of these magical machines in one place: in the military, in the armed forces of every country in the world. Hulk the auto-drivers in million-dollar tanks, launch the sea-lovers to command nuclear cruisers, offer the would-be flyers, offer you, Richard, the fastest airplanes in history, all your very own, and you get to wear this flashy helmet and visor and paint your name on the side of the cockpit!

“They lead you on: Are you good enough? Are you tough enough? They praise you: Elite! Top gun! They drape you in flags, pin you with wings on your pocket, bars on your shoulders, bright-ribbon medals for doing just as you are told by the ones who pull your strings.

“There are no-truth-in-advertising rules for recruiting posters. The pictures show jets. They don’t say ‘By the way, if you’re not killed flying this airplane, you’ll die on the cross of you personal responsibility for the people you kill with it.’

“This is not dumb other, Richard, this is you, eating the bait and proud of it. Proud as a grand free marlin in your handsome blue uniform, hooked on this airplane, hauled by the line toward your own death, your own grateful proud honorable patriotic pointless stupid death.

“And the United States won’t care, and the Air Force won’t care, and the general who gives the orders won’t care, either. The only one who is ever going to care that you killed the people you’re going to kill is you. You and them and their families. Some glory, Richard….”

I turned and walked away, left him at the wing of the fighter. Are lives so destined by indoctrination, I thought, that there is no changing? Would I change, would I listen to me if I were him?

He didn’t raise his voice, or call after me. He spoke as though he hadn’t noticed I had left. “What do you mean, I’m responsible?”

What an odd feeling. I was talking with myself, but his mind was no longer mine to change. We can only transform our lives in the split-second eternity that is our now. If we move one moment from that now, it’s somebody else’s choice.

I strained to catch his voice. “How many people will I kill?”

I walked back to join him. “In 1962, you’ll be sent to Europe with the 478th Tactical Fighter Squadron. It will be called the ‘Berlin Crisis.’ You will memorize routes to one primary and two secondary targets. There’s a pretty good chance, five years from now, that you will drop a hydrogen bomb on the city of Kiev.”

“How many people….?”

“There will be nine hundred thousand people in Kiev that winter, and if you follow orders, the few thousand that survive your attack will wish they were dead, too.”

“Nine hundred thousand people?”

“Tempers short, national pride at stake, safety of the free world,” I said, “one ultimatum after another….”

“Will I… did you drop the bomb?” He was tense as steel, listening to his future.

I opened my mouth to say no, the Soviets backed down, but my mind went silver with rage. Some alternate me from a different-past holocaust grabbed my neck and spoke fury, a razor voice desperate to get through.

“Of course I did! I didn’t question, any more than you question! I thought if there’s a war, the President’s the one with al the facts, he makes the decisions, he’s responsible. I never thought till takeoff that the President can’t be responsible for dropping the bomb because the President doesn’t know how to fly an airplane!”

I struggled to gain control, lost.

“The President doesn’t know a missile-launch key from a rudder-pedal, the Commander in Chief can’t start the engine, he can’t taxi to the runway-without me he’d be one harmless fool in Washington and the world would muddle along without his nuclear war. But Richard, that fool had me! He didn’t know how to kill a million people, so I did it for him! The bomb wasn’t his weapon, I was his weapon! I never put it together then: a handful of us in the world know how, and without us there could be no war! I destroyed Kiev, can you believe this, I incinerated nine hundred thousand people because some crazy … told me to do it!

The lieutenant stood mouth open, watching me.

“Did the Air Force teach you ethics?” I hissed. “Ever have a class called Accountability of Fighter Pilots? You never had, and you never will! The Air Force says follow orders, do as you’re told: your country, right or wrong. It doesn’t tell you that what you’ve got to live with is your conscience, right or wrong. You follow your orders to burn Kiev and six hours later a fellow you’d really like, a pilot named Pavel Chernov, follows his orders and cremates Los Angeles. Everybody dies. If you murder yourself when you kill the Russians, why kill em at all?”

“But I … I promised to follow orders!”

At last the madman let go my throat in despair and disappeared. I tried reason once more.

“What will they do to you if you spared a million lives, if you don’t follow orders?” I asked. “Call you a non-professional pilot? Court-martial you? Kill you? Would that be worse than what you would have done to the city of Kiev?”

He looked at me for a long moment in silence. “If you could tell me anything,” he said finally, “and I’d promise to remember, what would you say? That you’re ashamed of me?”

I sighed, suddenly weary. “Oh, kid, it’d be a lot easier on me if you’d just shut your mind and insist you’re right, following orders. Why do you have to be such a nice guy?”

“Because I’m you, sir,” he said.

Dear God, I thought. Women and children and men, lovers and bakers, actresses and musicians and comedians and doctors and librarians, the lieutenant would kill them all, no mercy, when some President orders. Puppies and birds and trees and flowers and fountains, books and museums and paintings, he’ll burn his own soulmate to death and nothing [I] can say will stop him. He’s me, and I can’t stop him!

posted April 16, 2008 01:39 PM         

Valuable information and a delightful read!