Five years ago, a young man told me his dream was to become a youth pastor. The last time I saw this young man, he was describing how, if the Afghan driver in front of him (it could have been an Iraqi as he had been to both countries) wasn’t driving as fast as the Americans thought he should, they would speed up and push the driver off the road. He smiled but without good feeling or humor. In those five years, the man who wanted to spend his life helping people had changed into someone who couldn’t even see people as people. How can this happen?
Start by putting them in situations in which their job and their life depends on them mistrusting everyone around them. Most of us can’t imagine pointing a gun at another human with the very real intention of shooting them to death if the occasion demands it. Soldiers do it day in and day out, that and a hundred other assaults on their humanity we never see. Could you do the same year after year, deployment after deployment, without your soul hiding behind the fallacy that these aren’t really humans we are doing this to?
J. Christopher Cleveland
Vancouver
