Life Under the Gun

I can walk down the street here in Chicago and never see an armed soldier standing patrol. Every night on the news I see them though. Standing guard on the other side of the planet. Far enough away that I can choose not to think about it. But sometimes, like when a tornado destroys a town in Kansas, I hear that here at home the states suffer from a lack of vehicles in the event of crisis. Why? Because when the guardsmen go serve in Iraq they take the trucks and hummers with them. But usually I can go through a day and not think about it.

I remember driving up to the checkpoint at Bethlehem in the West Bank four years ago and seeing a young man playing with his fully automatic rifle as though it were a toy. I know that soldiers are people and not machines. They are taught to kill but also be entirely humane. They're taught to do a job, to be task oriented and follow orders, but then to also be responsible and make ethical decisions. A young soldier is handed a gun and asked to enforce a military occupation for an indefinite period of time. He (or she) is put in the position of policing, guarding, communicating, and patroling where innocent civilians just want to live their lives. These civilians would rather be like me and pretend that soldiers don't exist. But in Iraq and Palestine they don't really have that option. They learn to live with it, compensate, move themselves around and negotiate to survive, but in the end they are caught. They exist in an impossible political situation with an uncertain future. They feel abandoned by the world. They've stopped listening to the promises. When the promises come and then break for forty years (West Bank and Gaza) you learn not to expect much in the way of change.
But changes do come, usually not for the better. What stays the same are the soldiers. Children learn all the latest lines of weaponry and munitions. They learn what landmines and cluster bombs look like. They learn where not to play. And to the rest of the world it sounds like it's not their problem. But it is! Oh God it is! This Military Occupation thing is no isolated incident. Some political strategists firmly believe in it. Think its a great idea. We must speak out to stop them. Before we see little Iraqs everywhere. Personally, I doubt very much that a soldier can handle being a kindly killer. Soldiers are for war, not policing. It was George W. Bush who originally admitted he wasn't into nation building. Now his administration claims that Iraq is the dawn of a new democracy for the world. One in which Military Occupation is just and humane and has innocent civilians in mind. How much cognitive disonance like that can any people handle?