With oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico at an unprecedented rate and vessels carrying humanitarian aid being attacked, there's not a whole lot of good news going around. I wanted to share this feel good story (about a US soldier serving in Iraq) to help people see that in spite of all the bad, there's still plenty of good left in the world.
About a month ago I was rock climbing with some friends and they ran into somebody they knew. We were all shooting the breeze and eventually someone asked what tattoo people would get if they got one. This man, I never caught his name, said that he wanted the word "life" in Arabic tattooed on his right index finger. As it turned out, he had just come back from serving in Iraq.
His explanation for his tattoo was really beautiful to me. Find it below the fold.
He told us that while serving in Iraq he made a conscious effort to ask himself every time before he pulled the trigger, "do I absolutely need to do this for my safety or the safety of my fellow soldiers?" He would go on to remind himself that each person he might have to shoot could be a father, a son, a brother (as they were usually men) and have a family that would be devastated to lose them.
While I really appreciated his sentiment here, the skeptic in me wondered if this ever made a tangible difference. I asked him if pausing to consider these things ever made him decide not to shoot. In response, he started telling a story about one time when he was the gunman for a convoy. They were driving down an empty stretch of road and they saw a car with two men coming towards them. In accordance to protocol they first gave spoken warnings that they should get off the road. Then when these were not heeded (the men looked absolutely bewildered) the soldier fired a couple warning shots. The men did not stop.
The next step in protocol would be to essentially blast the hell out of the car, but before doing this the soldier asked himself whether this was absolutely necessary, realizing that the two men had families who would miss them dearly. After considering a few things-that the men couldn't have known the convoy would be there, that they were totally bewildered and confused-he decided that he didn't need to shoot the men in the car.
And just like that he saved two lives. The car drove past the convoy without incident. The soldier told me that for the next few days he was made fun of a bit by his companions for not blasting the car to bits, but it was a decision that lets him sleep at night.
Hearing this story left me feeling grateful to know that at least some of our men and women in uniform are working very hard to save lives.