It is with great horror that i read of the Fallujah incident where a Marine shot and killed an unarmed man in a mosque. The news is full of it now, but i think Kevin Sites' account, the journalist who actually captured the act on video (view the unedited video here), is the most revealing. Why so?
I took a moment to look through Kevin's blog and found a lot of humanity there; the humanity of the people, the soldiers, the men and women who were actually fighting this war. Try to forget for a moment whether this war is right or wrong and you will see something startling: the people engaged in battle are just normal human beings, people like you and me, no more, no less.
They have our fears, our stregnths, our hopes, our dreams, our worries, oue weaknesses -- i made a hypothesis a while ago that people all over the world are basically the same. The only difference is that they are there and we are here. It frightens me that war can do this to people; strip us of all that is good of our humanity, and leave us with nothing.
The man in the mosque is very dead, the bullet from a high=powered carbine from close range made sure of that. The Marine who killed that man is in custody, and will surely be judged for what he did. Really, all of this isn't important, not really. What we should worry about is what war does to us. We are all the same, remember? It could easily have been me on that cold mosque floor, dead. It could easily have been me pulling the trigger. After all, anger and fear are human traits, aren't they?
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