How It Feels to Kill and 

Other Fun Topics

Essays by Charles Sheehan-Miles

Published by Cincinnatus Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Charles Sheehan-Miles.

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Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is unintentional, with the exception of certain named historical characters.

Contents

Author's Note

How it Feels To Kill (2008)

Coming Home (1992)

Bush Uses American MIA to Justify War Aims (March 2002)

What will I tell my Children (September 2002)  

Who am I to Question the Commander in Chief (September 2002)  

Low Balling the Cost of War (October 2002)

Another Gulf War Vet Opens Fire (October 2002)

The Missing Candidates (November 2002)  

Shoot First, Ask Questions Later (December 2002)  

And the State of the Union Is... None of Your Business (December 2002)

Anniversary of Iraq War: Time to Listen to the Vets (January 2003)   

Going Too Far: Israel Plans Killings on US Soil (January 2003)     

State of the Union (January 2003)

Author's Note

How it Feels to Kill and Other Fun Topics is primarily a series of essays and notes I wrote in the days following September 11, 2001 and during the run up to the Iraq War. Originally published in a variety of outlets including Alternet, The Nation, Antiwar.com and others, I am collecting them in one place for the first time. Covering topics of war, civil liberties, the Bush administration and more, I hope you'll find them interesting and useful.

How It Feels to Kill

A slightly different version of this was written for the anthology Peace Not Terror: Leaders of the Antiwar Movement Speak Out Against U.S. Foreign Policy Post 9/11 (Lexington Press, March 2008), Edited by Mary Susannah Robbins. 

"So, man, what did it feel like to kill somebody?"

I tensed at the question.  It was three a.m., and I was sitting in a Waffle House in Macon, Georgia, with a girl I liked, and I had the misfortune to be wearing my uniform. Somebody had to ask: did I just get home from the war?  Yeah.  That led to the question, the big question, the one I didn't want to answer, even to myself.

"So what did it feel like to kill somebody?"

None of your god damn business, and who the hell do you think you are to ask something like that anyway?

I didn't actually respond that way.  In fact, I don't remember what I said.  In due course, the girl I was with became my fiancé, then my ex-fiancé, and life rolled on.  But let's face it: the question never went away, did it?

In fact, it's come up again, once or twice. People too stupid or misguided to know better always ask.  Did you kill anybody?  What was it like?

Bastards.

So how did it feel?

This time I think maybe I'll actually answer the question.  But first, let me lay the background.

My life is logically divided into a before and after.  The before is everything up until about two in the morning on February 26, 1991.  Up until that time, I'd shot at targets, on the range, and even in a lengthy battle on the afternoon on February 25. But to be honest, I was so scared out of my mind on the 25th I barely looked where I was aiming.  Bunker that way?  Yeah, pull the trigger and hope for the best.  Keep firing, the spent brass falling from the machine gun with a rattle, then jump down into the turret to reload a main gun round.  Surely some of those main gun rounds killed, but it's not the same when you can't see it.

Then came the moment that neatly bisected my life, and not so neatly ended someone else's.

The tactical details (that's a lot easier to discuss than the emotional): our company was stopped just on the north side of Highway Eight, not very far from Nasiriyah in southern Iraq.  It was just about as far north as any American forces got in the 1991 Gulf War.  We'd had no sleep to speak of, and the situation was incredibly tense after that lengthy rolling battle through what I later learned was called "Battle Position 102."

I was drifting, asleep in the loader's seat when someone - I think it was our Company Commander, called over the radio.  Trucks to our front.  We all jumped up, in a panic I think, and the first shot fired hit one of the trucks and it exploded, spraying burning fuel all over the other truck, which also caught fire.

For the record, when the first guy ran out, I pulled the trigger, and discovered the hard way my safety was on.  I fumbled with it, until my platoon sergeant, with more than a little impatience, reached over, hit the safety, and walked the stream of bullets until it hit the guy and he went down.

The second one didn't have as much time.  As soon as he was in sight I opened fire.  Just like training, except that this guy was running away and on fire - I had to chase him down with the tracers.

Another one ran out, and his end was quicker.  Our wingman tank opened fire, but the gunner forgot to switch the computer to the coax machine gun.  The Iraqi was cut in half by a main gun round.

Then it was over, in one sense.  In another sense, it never ended, because that moment never ended, not for me and certainly for the families of the Iraqis we cut down. I've been worrying that moment in my mind for a decade, rubbing my tongue against it like a bad tooth, every once in a while discovering some new aspect of it to keep me awake at night.

***

A few days later - not long at all in objective time, but a lifetime, it seemed, for me, we had a cease-fire, and I took a long and healthy look down the barrel of my .45.  It was a model M1911A1 Colt, with extremely worn palm grips, a rifled barrel, and a heft completely absent in the 9mm Berettas we'd trained with in basic training.  At fifty feet it shot about six inches to the right, but I'd learned to compensate.

It didn't matter anyway, jammed up in the mouth, whether it shot to the right or not.

It's actually kind of awkward to shoot yourself with a .45, at least that model.  Along with the regular thumb safety, and the half-cocked position, the .45 features a third safety, on the back of the pistol grip, to prevent it from being fired unless it's actually gripped in someone's hand.  But you can work around that, and I almost did, but I was a bit of a coward after all, and though I wanted to do it, and didn't really have much reason not too, I just couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger.  It would have made a god-awful mess in the turret, which my crew would have had to clean up.

I told myself later, it's because of the guys.  They depend on me - if I were to pop a cap into my forehead I'd probably get replaced by some dumb head right out of basic training.  I could live with being responsible for my own death, but not my crew's. See, don't I sound noble?  Not that I'd have to live with it.  It sounded better than 'I chickened out'.  But in reality, what I thought was that I was just too much of a fucking weasel to blow myself away. Instead, I'd continue on, poisoning the world and the people I loved with my own brand of sickness. By that time I hated myself so thoroughly that anything I did seemed wrong.

It's not like I really wanted to kill that guy anyway. Hell, he was on fire, and running across the field of view of 14 enemy tanks.   He was going to die, no matter what I did.  But I was really fucking eager to do it.

S.L.A. Marshall, probably the most influential military historian of the last century and chronicler of, among other things, the forces in Europe in World War II, wrote that as few as one-fifth of soldiers in wartime ever actually fire at the enemy.  The rest simply fire in the general direction of the enemy, like a pre-industrial army refusing to actually aim - or firing deliberately low or high.  In World War I, whole units established informal cease fires with their opposite numbers in the trenches, and had to be provoked by their own commanders into firing a shot.

It would seem that, despite all our beliefs to the contrary, there is a native reluctance to kill.  Despite all the horror and bloodshed of our century, and the many proceeding it, the natural state of humanity is generally to leave each other alone.

I don't know if the more efficient training methods of modern-day basic training have been effective in overcoming that reluctance.  I suspect so - the emphasis on training by rote, and doing the same tasks a thousand times until they become second nature, is designed to take away the human aspect of combat.  When you ride an Abrams tank into combat, it's not so different from going downrange during gunnery, after all, except that you are scared out of your god damned mind, and the targets move around and shoot back.  Not that the Iraqis ever had a chance to do much of that.

The question at hand is: why am I part of the one-fifth who actually pull the trigger?  Am I defective or sociopath?  Why the hell did I pull the trigger and shoot some guy in the back when I didn't even have to? 

Maybe the idiots of the world should stop asking, "What was it like to kill somebody?" and start asking, "Why?"

***

When people ask the damn question, they always have one of two looks in their eyes.

The first look is pity.  Those are the people who look at you, concern in their eyes, as they listen to the story.  They're the ones who say, "Boy am I glad I never enlisted: I'd never be able to kill someone."

Idiots.  Of course you could, it's so fucking easy to kill you wouldn't believe. All you have to do is do what you are told.

Besides, unless you were out protesting against the war, you pulled the goddamn trigger, too.  We all did, including those who are too uninterested or tuned out to vote.  You mean you didn't vote?  You're a killer, too. Welcome to democracy.

I can live with those folks, the ones who are concerned and questioning and just don't know enough to mind their own damn business.

It's the other ones who worry me.  The other look some people get, when they ask the question, is one of eager interest.  "So what was it like, huh? Huh? How did it feel?"

The look is one of lust: vicarious lust, they want to know what its like.  These are the folks who most often say, "I would have joined the Army, but the dog ate my AFSVAB test," or "I almost enlisted in the Navy Seals, but I broke my big toe," and they just freaking piss me off.

It's the same impulse that drives some of the violent movies and games, I think, and I'll be the first to admit that I too, like my share of violent entertainment.  Why? Are we the Romans? Will the next step in reality TV be a two thousand year step backwards? The ultimate in reality TV will be an American infantry platoon in combat, and guess what folks, its not that far out a concept. It wouldn't be out of character. I finally realized that the reason few Americans were concerned about the impact of sanctions in Iraq (much less the impact of bombs) is because to them, it just wasn't real. Except for the eldest among us, few Americans have any conception of what real suffering means.  To us, real suffering is having to wait three hours while our SUV gets fixed up, or suffering a thirty minute power outage. September 11 was a terrible anomaly, a shock and a tragedy to be sure, but familiar to the rest of the world. It was such a shock to us precisely because we largely lead sheltered, privileged lives.

To the Iraqis, suffering was watching your kid slowly starve. Or never knowing what happened to a missing loved one. Having a father killed in the war with Iran, or in Kuwait, or in one of two wars with America.

Here's what I knew about the Iraqis in 1991:

They had the fourth largest army in the world, a fierce, battle hardened force.

They threw babies out of incubators and speared them on their bayonets.

They tortured their prisoners.

They were in my fucking way if I was ever going home.

I knew all of that then, but now I don't know any of it.  Turned out the baby incubator story was an out-and-out lie, invented by a Washington public relations firm and supplemented by the testimony of the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and a Congress which took no steps at all to determine if they were being lied to.  To you it may be academic that they lied about it, but to me it determined the shape of my life, because I killed for that lie. Some might think the lies that launched us into war are irrelevant, but those people never pulled the trigger, or looked at a stack of dismembered human bodies, or machine gunned a burning man who ran away.

They told us the Iraqis lied to their own troops.  The Iraqis have been told that Americans will torture them, or shoot them. What about the lies they told us?

You would think, after a dozen years, and three-or-four more wars, a new life with a family and a job and whatever, I wouldn't still be so goddamn angry about it.  

If you thought that, you would be wrong.  I thought that, but then, a few months ago, I watched on television as the Third Infantry Division crossed the border into Iraq for the second time, and I felt a strange  pulsing above my left eyebrow as my blood pressure climbed, and I knew that another generation of soldiers and civilians was about to go through hell. Some of them I know, because they were there the last time, too.

This time it is worse, far worse.  Even though it took lies to get Congress to vote for the last war, at least there was some provocation.  After all, Iraq did invade Kuwait.  But what about this time? Prior to the war I believed they were lying, and now we know for a fact that they were.  To the pundits or people watching television, it is academic.  It might be scandalous that the President lied, but no one, except on the hardcore left, is calling for his impeachment or resignation. For my neighbors and for many of us in this country, it is, once again, an academic question.

To the soldiers and civilians whose lives have been laid waste, it is anything but.