Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteThe time in Afghanistan: 7:32 p.m.
The status of the 21 surviving, two of them nearing death on their own, Koreans: still alive, according to Reuters about two hours ago.
So many devices in war deploy with a clean conscience. Bombs, for example, send all of Ummah to heaven and all of the infidel to hell; the crew in helicopter gun ships, to be fair, can't tell an armed militant from a disarming photographer in the right wrong place when it comes to firing a rocket at just about anything moving (or appearing to escape). As I've read from one recruit somewhere, "they let you fire the mortar" in range practice, "but you can't go down and see what it's done." Something like that would seem to operate with, say, IED's, RPG's, and SAM's.
Who really wants to look?
And if up close and personal, intimidation and torture create the impersonal and ritual distance. The soul of the other cries out to God and the bullet that follows can be only merciful.
Up close and too personal, however--the frailty of women; the erosion of one's will by time; the confrontation not with "enemy" or "pawns in a game" but, finally, the intimacy of the introduction to person, family, illness, and unremarkable suffering.
Much has been written over the years about prisoners identifying with their captors--that whole Patty Hearst thing--but less has been said about captors brought back to life and made sensible by their prisoners.
If I had the guns and were of a practical mind in this business, I think I'd keep the memory, leave the hostages with a cell phone, gather up the posse, and head for the hills.
1. "Koreans alive, Afghans warn of operations." Reuters, August 1, 2007, 12:19 EDT
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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