- AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth
- An unmanned U.S. Predator drone
Chivalry is a spent force in warfare, drones are the latest culprit, and the dramatic arts have taken up the case. In a new movie, Good Kill, Ethan Hawke is a former pilot who operates drones from a trailer outside Las Vegas but longs to be back in the cockpit. According to the New York Times reviewer, it’s a “blunt, outspoken critique of remote-control warfare, which is transforming the ugly reality of battlefield carnage into a video game whose casualties are pixels on a screen.” It makes a “persuasive case that our blind infatuation with all-powerful technology is stripping us of our humanity.”
As I recall, I was grateful to Stark for validating this important point in what had become the standard litany of reasons to denounce the war. But I was happy to give air force lieutenant commander Jack Van Loan, also shot down in 1967, the last word. “‘I’ll tell you,” said Van Loan, “when you start engaging 85- and 100-millimeter shells it’s pretty damn personal. You may not see the face of Ho Chi Minh on those shells but it’s pretty damn personal. You don’t have to see a face behind those guns for it to be personal. . . . When you see those tracers flying by, and you realize there are people down there who don’t like you, it’s very damn personal.”
Nothing in the worldCan ever compareTo the desperate, hollow feeling,Of seeing death’s hungry eyesStaring through to very soul! And then to escape unscathed,To dance alone in the high, morning sun.To flip off death….and the whole fucking world!
A skein of sadness runs through the history of war over its noble but vanishing ways to die. When it’s reduced to computers fighting each other, we might as well not bother.
