The U.S. military is considering the creation of a new medal to be awarded soldiers who resist the temptation to kill civilians in foreign wars. To be known as a medal for “courageous restraint,” troops may soon be rewarded for not “using lethal force” where injury to non-combatants might occur. It was doubtless coincidental that news of this proposed medal was made sometime after Seymour Hersh’s reporting on the widespread use of ”battlefield executions” of prisoners by American soldiers in Afghanistan.
War is an insane enough activity without it being used as a parody of itself. Perhaps the idea for such a medal arose from the history of so many Nobel Peace Prize recipients, who were honored after they had ceased engaging in statist butchery: Woodrow Wilson, George C. Marshall, and Henry Kissinger being among the more prominent awardees. Even Barack Obama won the award, not long after assuming the presidency and as he was intensifying the war in Afghanistan. When Tom Lehrer declared that he stopped engaging in satire after Kissinger won this prize, one gets a sense of the absurdity of the war system parading as its opposite. The derangement implicit in the Strategic Air Command’s motto “peace is our profession” is recalled.
Are we now to imagine soldiers advising one another: ”Hey, Chuck, don’t blow away that family, and I’ll nominate you for a “courageous restraint medal”?
Wartime does occasionally provide men and women with limited opportunities to respect life. Fortunately, this sentiment usually finds expression in their refusing to participate in such madness in the first place. The name of the Vietnam War helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson, comes to mind as one deserving of such recognition. Thompson happened upon the massacre of civilians taking place by American soldiers at My Lai. He set his helicopter down between the soldiers and the innocent civilians, then ordered his gunnery sergeant to open fire on any of the soldiers who continued with the slaughter. The killing stopped. I suspect that Thompson would have been as revulsed as I at the thought of his receiving a medal for basic human decency!
