USNA69,
this is interesting because i'd like to select SNA or SNFO and i've thought about the mission of these pilots and the enemies they kill. and how as a christian, i could deal and reconcile that.
is the above spoken from 1st hand experience? i mean, as a former navy pilot, did you find it harder to cope with the death you were dealing than perhaps an infantry soldier in the battlefield?
I think as a Christian society you have posed a question way to deep for a simple forum post response. First off, my perspective. I am from a different generation. Before I first went off to war, the military history that I had studied in school was not too different than back in Medieval times when knights faced each other with lances. Your enemy was in direct sight, right in front of you, similarly armed and it was a survival of the fittest. Wars were just, usually involving physical borders, and not a lot of ethical and moral quandary about the whole episode. Moral quandaries usually involved the senselessness of it all, specifically dealing more with buddies dying than killing the enemy. You who grew up during the Cold War probably have an entirely different outlook on war.
Okay, a little background about me. My first tour in Vietnam was a grunt. I was a team leader for an electronic ground sensor team, monitoring infiltration along the Cambodian border, just north of Saigon. I was ambushed, I set up ambushes, and I “pushed the button”. This is more retrospect than anything. Maybe as a team leader I was remiss, but we didn’t talk about it much at the time. However, when we were ambushed, the goal was very defined. Get everyone’s ass home safely. Back at base, it usually involved a silent round of hugs and then, if the threat level was yellow or below (we really didn’t have that back then), we all got drunk. We set up claymore mine ambushes on ‘mules’ carrying supplies from North Vietnam into the Saigon area. Most didn’t even carry weapons. A successful mission usually caused a lot more introspective soul searching and any drunkedness was usually alone and not celebratory. I occasionally ‘pushed the button’ by calling in artillery and air strikes. The following day’s body count usually left me with the ‘the poor SOBs never knew what hit them’ . The air and artillery strikes which I had read about and studied as a teenager never involved an air strike as a result of a little electronic device buried along some trail and an enemy who never knew what hit him. Very much more introspective. This is where I developed my rationalization that I was saving lives.
My subsequent tour to Vietnam, I was an ‘airdale’. Combat SAR off the carriers. I suppose this might be more akin to someone joining the Coast Guard to save lives instead of kill people. However, the bad guys did not want us to save lives. No moral or ethical qualms whatsoever. Save a life or be killed. Nothing to think about.. The late night double double slider mid rats with the jet jocks also did not reveal any particular angst. The SAMs and Migs made it very akin to the knights with lances on horseback.
Fast forward to IAF and basically a Plexiglas cockpit with no real opposition. Pilots talk about the ‘golden BB’, the indiscriminate less than lethal round that somehow, against all odds, knocks them out of the sky. Maybe they now need this if they are schooled in the old knight vs knight warfare mindset. There is still someone out there trying to get them. I have watched my son, who flew the first carrier based flight of OIF and is on his third deployment over Iraq, mature from someone who was daily dodging SAMs and AA, to someone who, not to down play it too much, is a UPS delivery guy delivering bombs, rockets, and 20mm. His mindset has become the same as mine when knocking out the unarmed ordnance laden NVA troops in Vietnam. With every enemy and with every piece of ordnance destroyed, he is saving the lives of friendlies. Actually, his emails and phone calls in re successful missions usually begin with “well, I saved a few/some/a lot of lives today.
It is a factor. Whether more so in this modern standoff electronic age, is open for debate. There was a recent article in a magazine about UAVs and the operators have to be reminded occasionally that they are not playing video games. The attitude from a few members of this forum that one should either suck it up or they do not belong in the military, is extremely naïve.
) signup to defend america's shores and ports. i'm guessing that quiet a few view themselves as policemen and not soldiers. but historically, the U.S. Coast Guard has also had more active roles in wartime where tens of thousands of U.S. Coast Guardmen have died in battle however that is defined.
