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Thursday, November 10, 2005

balance

“How do you deal with your inclination to save when you're a military man?”


Perhaps you are also asking, how do I balance my desire to save someone vs killing someone? If that is what you meant, I balance it because of my mom and dad, my sister, my friends, my cousins and there kids, my neighbors, my high school wood shop teacher, my old boy scout troop leader, and for you. I had to realize that there are people out there who would kill or hurt all of the people above, I refuse to stand by and let that happen, if it takes killing them, than fine. I would rather that no one ever be killed ( I did not say never die, death is necessary part of life, but killed, as in a violent ending another’s life) but I will kill someone if I have to. That also begs the question of how do I know that, how do I know that some guy sitting on a sand dune over in the desert is really a threat to my sister? I don’t. I realize that the possibility exists that I have directly or indirectly killed someone who was just out getting a tan, that is something that I have to deal with, there is no cheap solution or easy way to clean that one up. In some ways it is also similar to how I deal with multiple people who are hurt at the same time, I have to pick someone who I think that I can help and who needs my help the most, that has meant abandoning someone to there fate. Every time I have dealt with a patent, I have formed a bond with them, I risk my life for them and sometimes, I had to just let them die. If I tried to help every person at a scene, they all might die, you have to pick someone and help them, if the other people die, you can justify that because you helped your patent, and perhaps they live, but it’s a choice. I chose to help every chance I get, but I will fight and if I have to, probably only to save someone else, I have a low sense of self preservation, but a high sense of responsibility to help others, it causes me to be much more willing to kill/die in order to defend someone else, but less to defend myself. Make sense? I have a relationship with these people around me, so I will defend them, its not an exact cross (from the car crash to military) but I think that you might get the idea. My first and foremost desire is to help, this last weekend, some of the wounded people were our simulated bad guys, they were the enemy, but in my mind, they stopped being the enemy when they got hurt, they became someone who needed my help. I risked my “life” just the same to get to them and help them, when it came time to evac, I made them take the wounded enemy in the working hummer, and our less wounded people had to walk out. I did not help “the enemy” any less just because they were the bad guy, the priority was how badly wounded the person was, not the uniform he was wearing.

M@
“Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?” ~Abraham Lincoln

2 comments:

Patty said...

Great reading. I will comment on the other post later, but, I just wanted to say that I'd read that Abraham Lincoln quote recently. That is a powerful and thought provoking quote.

Helping the wounded without regard to their position in a war, this reminded me of the scene in the movie, The Patriot where he is housing the enemy. This theme goes right along with your other post, which I will comment on soon.

Anna said...

A very good answer, and all the better because it's tempered with experience.