Suicide Bombers

by Dennis Green

If you believe that only Muslim extremists function as suicide bombers, re-consider. Go read Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, the story of a near-suicide mission by American pilots and bombardiers over Japan early in World War II. Captain Jimmy Doolittle, leader of that attack, didn’t expect to come back, and neither did the other pilots and crews, and many of them didn’t.

Many of the pilots and bombing crews flying B27s over Germany during that same war also didn’t survive, and after a hundred missions or so, didn’t really expect to. Likewise, many pilots on bombing missions over North Korea and Vietnam, including John McCain, knew the odds were against them, yet they persisted.

One old friend, a Navy SEAL with a Navy Cross, writes, “It is easy getting in but getting back out is the killer…” And he didn’t even believe there were 72 virgins waiting for him in Paradise if he died. But don’t tell me that only Muslim extremists are willing to die in battle for their beliefs!

And those passengers who brought that airliner down into that field in Pennsylvania rather than letting the terrorists crash it into the White House? Suicides. And very brave, but they took themselves and all those other passengers to a certain death. To save a monument. Well, and perhaps Laura, since George was safely in Texas at the time…

But the precedent is there. Even Jeshua, we like to think, sacrificed himself, went knowingly and willingly to his death, committed suicide at the hands of the Romans and Jewish priests, to save believers from their sins. His destiny was obvious. Nevertheless, it seems he didn’t flinch when he saw it coming. Except near the very end.

One man’s religious fanaticism is another man’s fervent dedication to the mission at hand.

But troops in the battlefield don’t get that hundred yard stare, or all those medals, or that post-traumatic stress disorder without constantly, willingly, knowingly exposing themselves to danger and probable death. Without any reasonable expectation of another day on earth.

And to be fair, life itself is a suicide mission. We all have, with a certainty we like to think only our species possesses, a foreknowledge of the end of life, our own, of our mortality. And the longer we survive, the longer the odds become against our surviving another day. Yet we persist…to imagine…what? That somehow, we will be spared? That some miracle cure will be invented, that we will be cloned or our brains kept alive forever in a jar somewhere indulging The Methuselah Complex? No matter how unlikely it is…

So we all face choices. We can live life cautiously, circumspectly, pulling back and away from any threatening encounter, or not. We can go for duration, even if its dull as hell, or we can have some fun, a few adventures, a risky life in spite of our mortality. We all have choices.

And we never know. Some lives of the most conservative and conventional sort, planned that way, end early. Stuff happens, and sometimes it happens to us. The reckless or drunken driver, the stray microbe, the faulty valve. Sometimes, we just happen to be living in a war zone and wind up as “collateral damage” or the victims of “friendly fire.” And sometimes, the most edgy, reckless, risky person lives to be a hundred.

So live every day as if it were your last, even if it isn’t. But don’t kid yourself. You’re on a suicide mission, and there are no virgins in Hell.

©2009 Dennis Green