War is Hell

The son-in-law of a fraternity brother is an Iranian Kurd and a corespondent for the BBC. He recently reported on the brutal killing of a female Kurdish soldier by the Syrian militia under Turkish control. Read the whole narrative here: BBC Story.  Jiyar Gol is his name and he chronicles the roadside murder of Amara Ramas, a member of a ferocious all-female Kurdish brigade. Her fate is an emotion grabber.

It evokes all kinds of thoughts about the horrors of war ... one of which we learned from Stephen Crane in “The Red Badge of Courage” — if you don’t kill the enemy first, they will likely kill you. However, it is how you kill the enemy that makes the difference. Humiliating your enemies before or after dispatching them is what we are dealing with here ... aptly, but ironically, labeled war crimes.

Such war crimes unfortunately too often happen in the heat of battle. Emotions run wild when soldiers see comrades cut down or when the enemy performs heinous acts ... to the point where soldiers often lose control. American soldiers have been known to urinate on Afghan enemy corpses and, after World War 2 ended, German soldiers who refused to surrender (wolverines) were summarily executed by American soldiers.

Does this excuse these Syrian army atrocities? Of course not! But will my feeble words stop such horror. You know that answer. It is quite likely that Kurdish emotions will be inflamed by this incident and revenge will be sought. And on and on. These battles have been going on for hundreds of years and are unlikely to be resolved soon.

I am convinced that revenge and war might be encoded as a sequence in the DNA of most humans. And the only time the world will find John Lennon’s imagined peace might be at some distant time when science can identify this sequence and repair it. In the meantime there will be lots of senseless killings such as Amara’s.