by Sandi Gamble
I felt a shiver pass through me. Then I nodded slightly. “Yes, sir,” I said, trying to firm up my voice so that I sounded absolutely certain. In truth, I was feeling very uncertain. Jace had gone through the experience only a few days earlier. It had shaken him. When I asked him about it, he just shook his head sadly.
That unnerved me.
“I am placing a device in your hand,” he said as he pressed a small object into my right palm. “If at any time, the experience becomes too disturbing, you are to press the device. Do you understand?”
I nodded again. “Yes.”
“Yes, what? You have to say exactly what you understand.”
I knew that he was following a script, but the preciseness of the script was unnerving as well. I swallowed hard. “I understand that if at any time the experience becomes too disturbing to me, I am to press the device,” I said. I also knew that I had to pass this session so that it was not presented to me again. From Jace’s reaction, it was something that I knew I would only want to experience once.
“Good. I will not be far away.” His voice trailed off.
With that, the pitch darkness gave way to a gray fog. My body was immersed in a chill as I found myself outside a primitive hut, looking in through a window. Without knowing how I knew, I knew that I was in Russia at the time of the tsar, but which tsar, I could not say. What I did know was, that before me in the primitive hut, were three soldiers dressed in heavy coats, their horses champing outside, sending fierce clouds of vapor from their nostrils. In front of these soldiers, a woman of undetermined age crouched in a posture of supplication and fear.
She held two children, one an infant, close to her. Behind her, with looks of terror on their faces, were two other children, wearing little more than rags; they looked to be six or seven years old.
“I don’t know, I swear,” the woman cried to the soldiers. “If I knew, I would tell you.”
“I don’t believe you,” snarled one of the soldiers. “You know where he is and we want to know… now!” He took a menacing step toward the woman, causing her to shriek and pull back.
“I don’t, I don’t!”
“I can make her talk,” one of the other soldiers said.
The taller one, the one who had been addressing the woman, turned and looked at the younger soldier. In truth, the younger soldier looked little more than a boy, perhaps even younger than Jace or I. The older soldier’s lips turned up in a cruel smile. “You can?”
The younger soldier nodded, his pale blue eyes showing a cold cruelty I cannot adequately describe.
“How?”
“May I show you, sir?”
The older, taller soldier stepped back as if to give the younger soldier free range. There was a curious, artificial quiet in the small hut. The young soldier stepped forward. He smiled at the woman clutching to the baby and the young child. The other two children cowered deeper into a shadowy corner.
“We don’t want to hurt you,” the young man said, the strange smile animating his features in a cold, harsh manner.
A slight whimper escaped the woman’s lips.
“We just need to know where your husband is. We don’t mean him any harm. We have to ask him a few questions is all.”
The woman clutched her children tighter to her breast. Just then, the infant began to whimper and cry. Perhaps he was hungry, and the closeness to his mother’s breast made him aware of his hunger. Perhaps she simply squeezed him too tight. Who knows? Who can ever know such things?
The young soldier frowned at the baby’s cries. “Shhh, shhh,” he intoned. Although the sound was a comforting sound, nothing was comforting about his posture. He smiled. He went to great lengths to present himself as a “friend” who wanted to do no harm and yet his entire presence spoke of such terrible menace that I couldn’t help but shiver as I observed these things.
The soldier extended his hand. “Let me comfort the baby and stop him from crying,” he said.
The woman visibly trembled and pulled back.
“Don’t be like that,” he said, his voice cold as ice. “I only want to help. The child is unhappy.” He leaned forward and grabbed the baby’s arm and, after a struggle, wrenched him from the woman.
In the struggle, the baby began to cry louder.
“There, there,” he said, his eyes focused on the baby. “Stop your crying.”
The baby, of course, did not stop crying. He actually began to screech louder.
“Shut that creature up,” the older soldier snapped, clearly tired of this little scene.
But the younger soldier seemed not to listen. He was following a plan that only he fully understood. He shook his head at the older soldier. “She will tell us what we want to know,” he said, his voice certain.
He turned to the woman. “Where is he?”
The woman’s eyes widened in terror. “I don’t know. I told you I don’t know. Why won’t you believe me?”
“Because you are lying,” he said in a calm voice.
“Quiet that baby!” the other soldier shouted.
Holding the baby in one arm, the young soldier stepped back and pulled out his sword, the cold metal substance glittered in the firelight. Holding the child in one arm and his sword in the other, he began to bounce the baby. “There, there,” he cooed. “Mama won’t tell me what I want to know.”
“Please…” implored the woman, sensing that something terrible was about to happen. “Please.”
The young soldier stared at her. “You want something from me, but you won’t give me what I want?” he snapped. “One last time. Where is he?”
The woman sobbed. “I told you, I don’t know.”
The soldier shrugged. Then, with no more emotion than if he was tossing a soccer ball in the air, he tossed the baby up and caught him. “Tell me!”
The woman sobbed.
He tossed the baby in the air again, this time higher. But rather than reach out to catch the baby with his arm, he repositioned his sword under the baby so that when the baby came down, the blade pierced cleanly through the child.
The woman shrieked a shriek that was animalistic in its agony. The soldier shook the baby free of the bayonet, letting it’s small frail body fall to the floor of the hut with a thud.
I felt a sickness in my stomach. I squeezed the device in my hand. The helmet was pulled from my head and I gasped for air.
“Are you all right?”
I felt as if I might pass out but after a couple of breaths, I was able to nod and then look up. “Yes, sir.”
“Good.”
“How could he be so cruel?” I asked, half to myself.
I had seen just one example of the horrific cruelty that people had visited upon one another. Others saw other examples. These horrors were gut-wrenching, they far surpassed the worst nightmares I’d ever experienced. I know that I woke up for several nights running, my heart pounding and my skin drenched in a cold sweat, an image of that young soldier’s cruel smile slowly fading from my mind.
I knew that every other student was experiencing what I was. For weeks after we were exposed to this violence, students were distracted and came to class with dark circles under their eyes. None of us could erase these images from our memories; some things cannot be unseen.
There was nothing in our histories or our upbringing that could have prepared us for such ugliness. Not even the long talks that we had with our parents before we left home. No, nothing came close. But those first immersion exposures were only the first step. The purpose of our exposure was not only to disturb us, of course. It was to prepare us for our exposure to the realities of warfare. For, without the ability to exact profound cruelty upon one another, how could there ever have been wars?
The lesson sunk in.
The first class lesson I attended on the history of warfare demonstrated what happened when wars took place centuries ago, before our current millennium. I was not sure why we were shown the wars. I suppose we needed to garner our knowle
dge from some point of view and, when it came to the barbarism and cruelty of war any point of reference was as good as another – all that changed was the technology of cruelty. But why that time, and those weapons? I would later learn that the reason we live the way that we do was a direct historical consequence of these wars.
As soon as we were instructed to don our immersion helmets in class and we were cast into that deep darkness, we all re-experienced the barbarism we had been individually exposed to. Our heart rates increased, and I for one could feel a prickly heat make the skin on my arms and back pucker. I would later learn that every student reacted to the sensation in a very visceral way. Some got dizzy. Some became short of breath. One student vomited. Another nearly collapsed and had to remain on the floor with his legs propped up until he had regained his inner balance.
The instructors, understanding what our reaction would be, waited several moments before our inside screens came to life and we were shown footage of foot soldiers entering cities. They fired their weapons indiscriminately – into small gatherings of people, huddled together for safety or at individual citizens fleeing the scene. They seemed not to care a whit if their “targets” were civilians or soldiers. In their practice of warfare, everyone was a legitimate target. So it was that these soldiers, cloaked head to toe in thick body armor, shot at people for no discernable reason at all. Their weapons glittered in the harsh sun, metal guns that demonstrated clearly over and over again that they were capable of cutting a person in half. When these weapons weren’t being fired, they were carried at the ready, draped onto the backs of the soldiers roaming the streets like packs of vicious predators. In jackboots and heavy gloves, they roughed up citizens they did not simply shoot down.
A recurrent behavior was for a soldier to arbitrarily grab a citizen and shove him or her to the hard ground. The soldier would then place his heavy boot against his victim’s back. Then with calm cruelty, he would bring the barrel of his weapon forward, pressing it finally against his victim’s head.
Sometimes the soldiers spoke. Sometimes they demanded something from their victims, usually an admission of guilt in something or for something. Other times, they were silent. But however they approached the situation, the ending was always the same. The head of the victim would be prodded with the barrel of the gun. The camera would show us a close-up of the victim’s eyes, wide with terror. And then the soldier would pull the trigger. Bone, blood, flesh and brain would splatter. The soldier would laugh and kick the lifeless body aside before moving on to his next victim.
There was an almost numbing monotonous rhythm to these killings, but every once in a while, something would be different. A child would be shot. And grandfather would have his beard torn from his chin. A young woman, clearly in the bloom of her femininity would be pushed down and, sometimes before and sometimes after the trigger was pulled, would be wantonly displayed and her body toyed with in the most immoral and disturbing ways.
I felt sickened by the display.
And the laughter of the soldiers! Were there no morals then? No decency? Did these people place no value on their fellows?
If this “hand on hand” nature of cruelty was bad, the scale of the cruelty was even more astonishing when the other tools of warfare and destruction were demonstrated. We saw gargantuan machines that drove men into combat situations that could easily roll across or over everything in their paths. They were surmounted by huge guns capable of blowing out the sides of houses or buildings. From my view, it didn’t seem to make one bit of difference if there were people inside those buildings or not. “Collateral damage” we learned to call it in subsequent classes.
“You mean,” I asked, “that it was simply acceptable for non-combatants to be slaughtered?”
“Yes.”
I was stunned, not just by the answer but also by the absoluteness of it. No additional information. No explanation. Just, “yes.”
It seemed to say it all.
But of course, when it came to the destruction and cruelty, there was always something more to say. As we continued to learn, at the time such murders and deaths were dismissed with the antiseptic label, “collateral damage”. Which, from what I could understand, meant that these poor people just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time through no fault of their own. People who, only weeks, days or hours earlier had had every reason to go about their daily lives, eating, sleeping, dreaming, loving, hoping, and then suddenly had it all wrenched away from them. And for what? What had their deaths and misery done to add to the perpetrator’s strategic aims? Not a thing.
It was beyond horrific. I could not help but feel disgust when I considered how our forebears behaved, how, despite their literature and art, their high moral prognostications, their surety about “right and wrong” sunk to such despicable immorality and degradation. That such a label as “collateral damage” was not only allowed to exist but seemed to have been embraced as an excuse or even a reason for militaristic brutality nauseated all of us.
Of course, there was more – as we were coming to learn. There was something known as MOAB, “affectionately” called the “Mother of All Bombs” but which really was an acronym for Massive Ordinance Air Blast. The MOAB was a large-yield conventional bomb – that is to say ‘non-nuclear’ – that was developed for the United States military.
This explosive device could be dropped on hills and mountains and penetrate deep underground, blowing the mountainside out similar to the eruption of a volcano. Because it was not a “nuclear” weapon, it was somehow considered “allowable” during the warfare of the period.
Of course, it would be easy to point to the United States in its determination to exact the greatest destruction on its foes, the fact was that each country was as bad as the other, all stockpiled weapons that could kill and maim a whole generation of humans in another country.
“And for what purpose?”
Our instructors asked the same question that had been forming in our own minds. For what purpose and to what end? What was accomplished by the use of these terrible weapons? What had been gained? Financial wealth for a few? Momentary advantage for one country over another?
Sometimes, the instructors asked the question and waited, waited long minutes as we stammered some inane excuse, trying desperately to fathom some explanation for the use of such violence and weaponry.
Ultimately, none of us were able to come up with anything near to an adequate answer.
“Do you know why you cannot answer the question?” our teachers asked.
We waited. Perhaps a deficiency in our learning or prior education, we thought.
“Because,” they said, “there is no adequate answer!”
And that was, of course, the point of the study. As we were presented with the awful and barbaric behavior, all we could do was sit and stare in shock at the barbaric nature of these weapons and the aftermath of their use. Gasps were heard around the auditorium, an occasional shriek. At different times, students ran from the room to the corridor outside. Some felt faint. Others, sickened. It made no sense to any of us.
I felt so nauseated thinking of the devastation and loss of life, I was thankful that we possessed no such arsenal of weapons now. I could not help but feel grateful when I reflected on the fact that we lived the way we do, protected from such senseless violence. I took pride in our being a peace loving people, that our neighbors were our friends who in times of need – and there have been such times – have pitched in to help us as we have pitched in to help them. I was thankful to live at a time when there were no longer many races, just one. The ‘Human Race’.
Nobody was left behind. Not a person, nor country, nor living being – human or animal. I shuddered at the conclusion of the presentation, unable to imagine ever treating another living being in the manner that I saw humans treat one another in the presentation.
Having been confronted by the reality of war’s brutality and cruelty, we were then taught that, despite the violence
and the destruction, wars never solved anything. In fact, as history made only too clear, they only ever made things worse.
Many generations ago, wars were waged against innocent countries by governments controlled by greedy corporates wanting to control resources, food supplies and much more. The corporates were controlled by the banks, and in the end, they were all controlled by the persons with the most wealth, who could not buy anything more with their money, so they wanted power at all costs.
Those in charge went to great lengths to disguise the true reasons for these wars, claiming that they were religious in nature or that one person was a Dictator and should be removed for his crimes against humanity. Or simple greed and perceived opportunity triggered them. Uneven resource distribution was a common trigger. One country may not have had enough food so they would attack another.
Many wars were fought for control of fossil fuels – the very things that would wreak such havoc on the environment. To our minds, we could not understand such brutality for fuels like oil and coal. Surely they had the means to develop technologies that allowed them to do without it.
Perhaps the most disturbing cry for war was when leaders employed what came to be known as “false flag” events – events when they committed crimes against their own populations and blamed another country or group. This allowed the leaders to rally their populations around their leadership, convincing them that they were actually solving problems when it had been them that started it all. The leaders ended up with a “mandate” to start another war.
This technique was perfected until leaders were so good at barraging people with all types of conflicting media that they managed not only to brainwash their citizens into believing in their cause but convinced the population to go and kill each other for the love of their country!
When we questioned how people could be so gullible as to accept this brainwashing, our teachers explained that the residents of earth had been made amenable to this type of brainwashing. Most had been programmed from birth to sit in front of media boxes that entertained their minds, or to escape from their realities into electronic devices that took away their interest in what was happening in the outside world around them.
