Fodder

There’s a Star Trek: Next Generation episode about some guy who, on his home planet, was raised from birth to be a killing machine, to go to war and kill with no regrets. Can’t remember the episode name, but it serves my point. He’s a nice guy, just with the fault that he’s been so trained to defend himself (and kill in that defense) that he’s remarkably unable to settle down and is basically a human time bomb.

Well, just look at this article.

How reasonable is it for us to train someone to kill, put him in a situation where at any time he could realistically be blown to bits of flesh, and then expect him to put on a suit and tie and go to work on his return to civilisation?

Can you sense the paradox here? He no longer has any place in our society, and knows it. Very few people have been where he’s been and he feels abandoned. People go to work every day, they eat at McDonald’s, they argue and go to sleep. That has not been his world for perhaps years. He’s been constantly under pressure in a foreign land, with people who most definitely want to see him as a charred corpse, a place where you most sincerely can’t be messing around. Even here, being a policeman is a relatively safe endeavor. At least there aren’t a bunch of idiots with you in their crosshairs just for sport. How many of us have been through that? Huh?

“Hi, I’d like to apply for a job. I’ve been trained to kill people.”

There’s no huge support group. The rest of the country is preoccupied with a downturn in the economy, not a forgotten war thousands of miles away.

No, I’ve never been in the armed forces, but I’ve spoken about it before and I’ll say it again: these boys (and mostly they are only boys, cannon fodder) are shoved into an environment as alien to them as it is to you and me and then are expected to just come back like nothing happened.

Well, excuse me, something happened.

And you and I should make it our business to take care of those who take care of us.