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May 13, 2005
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There was an investigation, of course, but the conclusion was never really in doubt. The little girl's shoeshine kit hadn't contained polish or rags. Just the bomb. She hadn't been reaching for a brush; she'd been reaching for the triggering device. Given another second or two, that beautiful little girl would have killed herself and murdered Jack's friends.
Everyone assured Jack that he had done the right thing; he had made the only possible choice. But Jack couldn't see anything right about his choice. He had shot a little girl in the back of the head. How could that possibly be right? How could that possibly be justified?
The night Jack told me about Saigon, he confessed to having nightmares about the shooting. That seemed perfectly reasonable to me. I couldn't imagine going through something like that and not having nightmares afterward.
According to Jack, his nightmare comes in two versions. Sometimes his dream plays out the way the real event did, and it ends the same way: with Jack holding a smoking 45 and the little girl lying dead in the street. The other version of Jack's nightmare is even more horrific: he sees the Vietnamese girl reach into the shoeshine kit, but he cannot force himself to pull the trigger. He watches helplessly as she and his buddies are ripped to bloody shreds by the explosion. This dream also ends with the little girl lying dead in the street, but now she is surrounded by the bodies of Jack's friends.
We're taught that life is a series of choices, and that the decisions we make shape our development as human beings. Implicit in that idea is the unspoken assumption that every decision point provides an opportunity to choose between good and evil, between light and darkness.
But life frequently refuses to divide itself into our neat dichotomy of black and white. The real world is messier and more complex than we like to imagine. Sometimes we are forced to choose between bad and worse -- between darkness and greater darkness.
Standing in that Saigon street, Jack wasn't given any good option at all. In the space of a second and a half, he had to choose between evil, and monstrous evil. None of his options were even remotely good. He wasn't even given the opportunity to abstain or walk away from the dilemma, because even the decision not to act carried lethal consequences. In a second and a half, someone was going to be dead. Jack's only choice was who and how many.
The compassionate side of me likes to pretend that this sort of moral deadlock is freakishly rare. That little bit of self-deception enables me to keep my ethical model of the universe more or less intact most of the time. But, in reality, unsolvable dilemmas are not rare at all. Our military personnel face them every day.
Every time a group of insurgents opens fire from a mosque, our troops find themselves in a lose-lose situation. If they don't return fire, the insurgents will pin them down and cut them to ribbons. Failure to return fire will also encourage the insurgents to continue using mosques as fortresses or sniper nests. Both factors are likely to result in casualties to U.S. troops. If our Soldiers do return fire, the media will castigate them for desecrating a Moslem holy site, and radical religious leaders will use the incident to incite further attacks on U.S. forces. There is no good choice, only a bad choice and a worse one.
Every time a car fails to stop for a security checkpoint in Iraq, American Soldiers must make a life or death decision in which there may be no correct answer. Even an attempt to disable the vehicle can lead to injury and death, as with the recent incident involving Italian reporter Giuliana Sgrena. Ms. Sgrena's driver either ignored or didn't see repeated warnings by checkpoint Soldiers. Finally, the Soldiers fired into the car's engine, accidentally wounding Ms. Sgrena and killing a bodyguard.
Could the Soldiers have allowed the car to run the security checkpoint? Certainly. But would that choice be less dangerous? Less than a week earlier, a car bomb in Hilla, Iraq killed over 120 people and injured 150 others. If that car had been stopped at a checkpoint, the bloodiest insurgent attack in Iraq might have been averted.
In April of 2003, three U.S. Soldiers were killed by a car bomb. In addition to a male driver, the car carried two pregnant women, one of whom leapt out of the vehicle and began screaming in apparent terror. The Soldiers moved toward the woman in distress, their instinctive desire to help overriding their caution. The car detonated, killing the Soldiers and wounding two others. By the next day the Arabic television station al-Jazeera was broadcasting pre-recorded videotapes of the two Iraqi women, boasting of their impending martyrdom and calling for jihad against America, Britain, and Israel. The pregnant women were bait, and their trap was successful because American troops were not prepared to shoot pregnant women. Our Soldiers chose the other option and paid for it with their lives.
Time and time again, our Soldiers are thrust into situations that force them to choose between options that any rational human would find unacceptable. They cannot escape their terrible dilemmas any more than my friend Jack could escape his. They must choose from unthinkable options, and then live or die with the consequences. When it's all over -- if they make it home by the grace of God -- they get to live with the regrets, and the nightmares, and the endless mental replays. They get to spend the rest of their lives wondering if they should have chosen a different shade of black.
