Alright.

I once wanted to kill somebody.

Not the blustering "I'm going to kill you" people sometimes shout when they're mad -- I literally wanted to up-close-and-personal take someone's life. I didn't know who that someone was, but that was beside the point. Or maybe that was part of the point. I'm not sure. But I didn't get the chance, which is just as well, since I probably would've been killed myself long before I got the chance to exact my revenge.

It was the night of 25 June 1996. I was thirteen days into my 92-day deployment to Saudi Arabia. Some people who didn't want us there set off a truck bomb, estimated at 20,000 lbs TNT-equivalent. I was 700 feet from the blast. I won't go into the details of that night.

At the primary casualty collection area, there were rumors flying of terrorists coming through the breach. This was a particularly appealing rumor because
a) it was a bad scenario;
b) it's what *we* would do (maintain the initiative);
c) there *were* local civilians gathering around the breach, trying to see if they could help (this was probably the source of the rumor); and
d) at least in my case, it was what I wanted at a gut-level.

At one point, things had gotten relatively calm, and I had a moment to pause. Squatting there, clutching my pocket knife, I found that I really wanted a sidearm, and even more strongly, I found I was wishing for the terrorists to come charging at us. Lacking a sidearm, I wanted to grab one by the throat, stick my knife in his gut, and twist the blade while sqeezing his throat tighter and tighter. I wanted to see the spark in his eye fade.

I snapped out of it and didn't allow myself such a pause again for several hours. To this day, I still don't know whether I'm more unhappy about the attack or about not being able to fight back.

I think your urge to kill someone in that scenario was entirely understandable. It's certainly better than freezing up on scene.

My dad is a Viet Nam veteran, but he never really talked about it. But he did read a lot of books where Viet Nam was the setting, so I read a bunch of those as well. It always seemed to me that the books based on true experiences, like Chickenhawk and Once a Warrior King (The author of this book and my dad had the same job: this is the book he'd always recommend first) were more compelling than the fictional accounts.

It was just a little unnerving to discover that if you scratch a little at the facade of civilization and rational thought, there's an instinctual animal to whom conventions of "right" and "wrong" are irrelevant. Sure, I believed it for years, but it's another matter entirely to catch a glimpse of Hyde.

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Originally posted by EngrBohn:
It was just a little unnerving to discover that if you scratch a little at the facade of civilization and rational thought, there's an instinctual animal to whom conventions of "right" and "wrong" are irrelevant. Sure, I believed it for years, but it's another matter entirely to catch a glimpse of Hyde.

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About 10 years ago there was a guy on the subway who killed (or mayb just beat the shit out of) another passanger who started to attack his (the first one's) daughter. There was a highly publicized trial, and the jury aquitted him. It was clear that he had used excessive force, but the reaction of the jury and the public was that when defense of your child is involved, we stop making highly rational choices. As a parent, I think I might have done the same.

quote:

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Originally posted by EngrBohn:
It was just a little unnerving to discover that if you scratch a little at the facade of civilization and rational thought, there's an instinctual animal to whom conventions of "right" and "wrong" are irrelevant. Sure, I believed it for years, but it's another matter entirely to catch a glimpse of Hyde.

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Obviously, the circumstances are different. Marlow witnessed the depravity, but he mainly reported on what he observed, rather than any such urges he might have experienced. We also don't get much insight from Kurtz other than the suggestion that the complete absence from western civilization stripped him of his inhibitions and led to his insanity. And that's really what I got from the book -- that people do "bad" things when their civilized inhibitions are removed. (That, and some people are just stupid and don't even realize it.) Sure, I've seen this, and it may be the beast peaking through.

But what I experienced was not described in the book; at best, I can read it as one factor among many that are behind some of the behavior described to us. What I experienced was raw animal instinct that had no concern with wealth or reputation.

Some years ago, I saw a documentary that showed a troupe of monkeys (or maybe they were apes; I don't recall precisely) driving a couple monkeys from a rival troupe though the treetops into an ambush, where the victims were lamed and then struck repeatedly with clubs and stones until they were a mass of goo. THAT's the level of instinct - of inhumanity - that I felt. Except that I don't think that the degree of planning the monkeys demonstrated was within my capacity.

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