Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
He Did the Best He Could
My patient “Ed” was a big man, even at 85 years old. He was over 6’4”, his broad shoulders hunched over a bit, with huge hands and feet. He was probably 6’6” when he was younger. He said he was a strawberry blonde as a young man, and his fair skin had so many cancers that I would remove one and schedule another surgery for the day we’d remove the stitches from the first one. His years in the Navy didn’t help.
He thought America was worth defending, so he volunteered for WWII after his freshman year of high school. He was not quite 16 years old and lied about his age. He was a big kid, so they believed him when he said he was older. And they needed guys, so who’s counting if he’s going to volunteer? He ended up on a warship in the Pacific (Battleship? Destroyer? Something else? I can’t remember.). As I was doing one surgery after another on him, I asked him endless questions, and I loved listening to his stories.
He told of one day when his ship sunk a Japanese warship. When the smoke cleared, there were hundreds of Japanese sailors in the water. Maritime law dictated that his ship was to do the best it could to rescue those enemy sailors and take them as prisoners of war, rather than leaving them to eventually die of sharks and exposure. So his ship eased closer and closer to the Japanese sailors, tossing flotation devices. As they got closer, the Japanese sailors would swim up to his ship, pull a pin on a grenade, and hold it against the water line as it blew. One after another, the Japanese sailors blew themselves up trying to sink his ship.
His commanding officer responded quickly. He started handing out rifles to his sailors, and said simply, “Shoot them.”
Ed had grown up in the mountains of east Tennessee, shooting rabbits and squirrels with a .22, so he knew how to handle a rifle. But he also knew the difference between self-defense and murder. He responded, “They’re helpless, in the water. We can’t shoot them.”
His commanding officer said, “You’re being commanded to shoot them. One of those grenades will hit something fragile, and then we go down too. Whose side are you on? Are you going to follow orders or not?”
Ed was a 16-year-old kid. Who was he to disobey a commanding officer? So he started shooting. Again, he was a crack shot, and he didn’t miss much. He’d steady his rifle on the railing, look into a man’s eyes, and shoot him point blank. Then chamber another round, find another man, and do it again. And again and again and again. And again and again and again and again. A couple of the men held up pictures of their families as Ed shot them.
He said it took over half an hour. Maybe much longer. He has no idea how many men he shot. He can’t remember the numbers. But he can remember their faces. Every single one of them.
He’d never met these men before.
But he’d meet them over and over again for years afterward – they were frequent visitors in his dreams for decades.
He tried to return to high school, but soon dropped out. He started drinking a lot. He got married, but then his wife left him. He couldn’t hold a job. His kids stopped talking to him. He hated waking up because he was exhausted, and he hated going to sleep, because he dreaded the men coming back to see him. His life was long and difficult.
All because of men he’d never actually met, who he absolutely refused to talk about. Nobody had any idea.
He said that the first time he told anyone about them was at 78 years old, in the hospital after a heart attack. He told his pastor, because he thought he was going to die that day. He was relieved when he survived his hospitalization, but disappointed when he had to start trying to sleep again.
After that, he told a few people. He told his kids, he told a couple of close friends, and he told me. His ex-wife had died by this time, so she never knew why she lost her husband.
Ed was a good man. He volunteered for little league baseball, after-school programs, and anything involving kids. He wanted every kid to have a cleaner, simpler, and more wholesome childhood than he did. He said once that he was so happy to see a little boy crying after he lost a little league baseball game – “His bad throw cost us a win. If that’s what haunts his dreams for the rest of his life, then that’s wonderful. That’s as good as it gets.” And then Ed started to cry. I wanted to console him, but I wasn’t sure what to say.
He’s right, I suppose. That’s wonderful. However, the kid who missed the throw would probably disagree. But what does that kid know? Nothing.
Which, to Ed, is wonderful.
Ed died some years ago. There were only about 10 people at his funeral, counting me and the pastor. The others had no idea what the man had seen, in his youth, and then in his dreams.
I hope Ed has had the opportunity up in heaven to work things out with the men he killed. I hope they understand that 16-year-old Ed was in an impossible situation. Of course, so were they.
The world is a complicated place. I hope heaven is simpler.
Ed did the best he could.
Published in General
My step-father was seventeen. He was tall, like Ed. He had to stoop down to fit within the height requirement. But he never saw combat.
God bless those who did.
He served his time in Hell. I hope he finds the peace he deserves that he didn’t find after the war when he returned home.
A bad situation to be sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those men held a grenade in their other hand.
What a story. Reminds me of my dad’s story about Pelilue and seeing Japanese soldiers without weapons who refused to give up that the Marines then killed. He was a pilot who drafted temporarily into the infantry by Chester Puller when the Japanese shut down the air base for few days. He was good hunter as a kid from Kansas but did not want to shoot anyone and did not have to.
Thanks Doc
All your posts are good, but this is the best so far.
Something sticks out to me in the story – why didn’t the commander of the ship just order full speed ahead and leave the enemy sailors to the sea? Why did he order them to be shot en masse? Even a large warship is going to leave a would-be suicide bomber in its wake, and it would probably be safer for the ship to keep moving as opposed to sitting there blazing away.
This is also wartime maritime protocol – if there is a threat to a ship, even properly surrendering POWs can get abandoned. I believe a lot of the Bismark’s crew ended up left behind to die since there was a possible u-boat sighting
There’s got to be something missing here.
Maybe is was merciful.
I asked him that. Why didn’t they just leave?
He didn’t know. He said they stayed there for several days afterwards. He didn’t know why.
Orders?
And people wonder why we nuked Japan to end the war instead of invading . . .
Well, yes. The commanding officers I’m sure had their reasons. But Ed didn’t know what they were.
Ed said that a few times. That if we hadn’t nuked Japan, we would’ve ended up killing every man, woman, and child with bayonets and handguns, door to door through every small town in the country. He said the Japanese NEVER would have surrendered. They just couldn’t.
He said that Harry Truman saved more Japanese lives than any man in history.
Hornfischer, James D.. The Fleet at Flood Tide (p. 16). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The world is a complicated place.
He did the best he could.
Sawadeeka read a book about the Rwandan genocide. She said nobody got PTSD after hacking their neighbors to death with a machete. I have not heard of any Japanese soldiers suffering from PTSD after slaughtering civilians in a manner equivalent to Nazis.
Why do some folks do atrocities and come out just fine while others spend their lives reliving self-defense?
That’s a great, great question.
It has to do with the deeply held cultural value assigned to human life.
What is the value of human life to those who would commit wanton killing, like the atrocities of Nanking? What is individual human value to men who blow themselves up in the chance, no matter how unlikely, of killing hundreds, whether suicide bombers or those who held grenades to a ship’s hull? What is the value system of a man who will kill himself due to the dishonor of personal failure even if it was not his fault? Who will kill a friend or family member over the honor of the family, or a group, or a divine emperor or a religious imam?
We can’t see that it could be any other way because we ultimately believe in the value of individual human life; and this is because we live in the vestiges of a Christian culture. In many cultures life is cheap. Ed suffered for life because he held all human life as of the highest value and yet was ordered to kill those whom he viewed as helpless individuals. But today one’s mileage may vary.
I wonder if his attitude would have changed if any of those “helpless individuals” had managed to damage or even sink the ship. As they were clearly trying to do.
I read this aloud to my husband sitting here on our front porch. Lily fragrance floats around us . . .the cicada are calling, the birds are loving the sunflower seed. . . and we’re fighting tears. What a loving, tender tribute to a fellow being who struggled to make peace with his past.
I agree. That it’s Christianity.
I also theorize (this is highly speculative) that if the parents highly value human life than the baby is programmed by epigenetics to innately value human life more. Alternatively, if a baby whose parents were told that their lives are nothing compared to the lives of the emperor than that baby is more capable of comittting Nanjing level atrocities. But that doesn’t explain the Nazis so maybe it’s all culture.
Living a life of peace and relative prosperity also makes one susceptible to PTSD. I heard that in medieval times it was normal to see a dead baby on the side of the road or to see other people die from diseases with great rapidity when one’s brain was still developing.
Still, I think the Christian regard for individual human life is the most important thing.
Sorry. Repost.
Seriously. Do you think he would have suffered more or less after killing 99% of the people and the ship want sunk by the last man? While he was shooting them he knew in the depths of his own mind that what he was doing was wrong, even if following the pragmatic order was ultimately right.
Do you think that any amount of superficial rationalization would have helped him sleep better at night?
The ship’s captain did the humane thing. The Japanese sailors in the water preferred to remain combatants. They had been taught it was better to die than be taken prisoner (projection?) by us. Ergo, as enemy combatants, they were legitimate targets. The captain was correct to order them to be shot. The captain failed re humanity, not for his treatment of the Japanese, but for failing your friend. He could have said what I wrote above and saved your friend the PTSD he had the rest of his life.
Yes, our religion makes us compassionate but it isn’t a suicide pact.
I’m not saying Christianity makes a suicide club. What I’m trying to say is that in Christianity, Thou Shalt Not Kill means more than simply not murdering people, it is accompanied by the knowledge that human life itself is sacred, being fashioned in the image of God Himself. I don’t think any other religion holds to anything close to this.
And more importantly, my argument is that the fundamental rules of Christianity are not so much taught as wordlessly embedded in Western culture and unconsciously instilled in minds from birth, through socialization. And these principles and teachings are transmitted even unconsciously from generation to generation. One of these is individual human beings are sacred in a way that trees and sky and livestock are not. And though the US has been under a powerful and arguably successful attack against these principle for a century or more, for a child born in 1925 or so, this cultural imperative against killing the defenseless was even stronger.
Ed reacted first with words were along the lines of “I cannot do this, it is wrong” but he voiced no other coherent objection. And after this, he followed rational verbal orders. But the rightness of the orders did not negate or surpass the unconscious prohibition of killing unarmed people no mater how dangerous they might be. And this is what Ed believed, that they were so defenseless that they could not save their own lives. So with his conscious mind, he followed orders. But in his unconscious mind, he knew he was killing the helpless, guilty but helpless.
This is my take on it.
Added: I’m not saying that it is immoral to kill in battle or even that what Ed was ordered to do was immoral. Just that it went against his fundamental understanding of right and wrong.
Sounds like the common confusion/conflation of “thou shalt not murder” to “thou shalt not kill.”
As an amateur psychiatrist, I suspect that Ed knew that:
a) He was killing men that could not defend themselves. And that is not killing men in war, that is murder.
b) He was following orders and protecting his countrymen .
And he knew both of those things. At the same time. And the conflict between those perspectives created psychiatric problems.
But what do I know?
There is more to it than just the English words. It’s not a conflation, it’s a distinction drawn from the language used. Murder is the better interpretation of the language.
Well, I think you know it right.
I feel bad for the sailor for not properly understanding the morality of the issue. The Japanese of the time were horrifically evil.