Killer's Regret

by Dennis Green

I watch a dramatization of a story I feel as if I have heard before. An old man’s voice recounts the events of several days during the Battle of the Bulge. As an American soldier, this man shot and killed a young German soldier, not well but badly, and the other man took two days to die. There in the snow, under bombardment, the old man says, they were stranded only a few feet apart in separate cavities in the ground.

“I saw him when I shot him, a young man, fair, with blonde hair and calm blue eyes. I could hear him lying there dying. All night long. The next day, he was still muttering and coughing, and then, finally, he fell silent. I haven’t been able to forget him. All my life, ever since then, I wake up in the middle of the night thinking of him. I can’t get him out of my mind…”

The man who speaks these words, we are told, died at the age of 90 a few years ago, a short time after this recording was made. The visuals are uncertain, showing snow, and a snow bank, and a dark night sky. But we believe him.

And I wonder to myself, Did that German soldier who shot and killed my cousin Stanley in that same protracted battle survive the night? The war? Did he have such nightmares? Could he never get the image of Cousin Stanley out of his head? Did Stanley’s killer feel any regret?

For that’s what they are, all of them. Killers. Many of them are decorated with ribbons and precious metal. But they are still killers. They defy the Sixth Commandment, contorting logic and reason to justify what they do. Warriors like me know exactly what they do. They kill. They damn themselves to eternal fires, just from that one moment. Fire first.

I know that our species is conflicted. We hail the Ten Commandments until they get in the way of our natural instincts, to fuck, to cheat, to kill, to steal, to covet our neighbor’s ass, especially if she’s gorgeous. We are every bit as hypocritical as Muslims who kill Muslims in defiance of the Qu’ran.

The Commandment in the Old Testament is either serious, or it’s not. There is nothing in the Bible to justify the excuses and the ducking of its meaning…”Well, we didn’t really mean warfare or capital punishment or cops shooting a suspect who reaches for his waistband…” The shooting, in the back, of an unarmed man on a BART platform on New Year’s Eve last year has prompted outcries of injustice only from the Black Community of Oakland. How many white ministers joined those protests? Is religion color-blind, or not?

And now, the latest Pentagon documents released by Wikileaks details the 150,000 civilian deaths in Iraq caused by the U.S. invasion, occupation and war. Only a fraction of those are attributed to our enemy. And in those same documents, the callous and deliberate torture of prisoners is also described in cold-hearted, chilling detail.

The U.S. and its leaders are obviously guilty of war crimes, and if we ever lose our military power to wage war, some of the guilty may one day be brought to justice. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has given us, yet again, a reputation as bullies and killers all around the world.

So when I heard that old soldier’s lifelong regret for, as a young man, shooting and killing another young man, who lay moaning and dying, weeping and calling out to his mother, and how those sounds and images stayed with him the rest of his life, I can’t help but wonder how many thousands of our own boys come home with similar nightmarish memories. And on this Sunday morning, I pray for their eternal souls.

©2010 Dennis Green