The other day I saw this article in the Daily Mail titled:
‘Did we just kill a kid?’: The moment drone operator who assassinated Afghans with the push of a button on a computer in the U.S. followed orders to shoot a child… and decided he had to quit
Kudos to Daily Mail for calling it what it is, assassination, but the headline is misleading, even with the ellipsis.
I’ve written about drones here, here, here, here, here, and here.
The tone of this article is just awful and the first sentence makes you sick.
A former U.S. drone operator has opened up about the toll of killing scores of innocent people by pressing a button from a control room in New Mexico.
As we find out later in the story, the “toll” the writer is concerned with seems to be mostly on the drone operator himself, Brandon Bryant, not the people he’s been murdering with drones.
He continues:
‘I saw men, women and children die during that time,’ he told Spiegel Online. ‘I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I couldn’t kill anyone at all.’
But it began to take its toll immediately.
The first time he fired a missile, he killed two men instantly and cried on his way home.
‘I felt disconnected from humanity for almost a week,’ he said.
But not disconnected enough to stop. Listen to the string of “I”s. It reminds me of Lu Lobello telling NPR that he forgave himself for killing Iraqis.
Moving on, we get to Bryant’s epiphany that led him to quit murdering people:
…it was an incident when a Predator drone was circling above a flat-roofed house made of mud in Afghanistan, more than 6,250 miles away, that really sticks in his mind.
Bryant and his pilot fired a Hellfire missile and killed a child while trying to destroy a goat hut.
Why we are trying to destroy goat huts in Afghanistan is a question not raised in this article.
‘Did we just kill a kid?’ he asked the pilot next to him.
‘Yeah, I guess that was a kid,’ the man replied.
Thoughts jotted in his diary on uneventful days clearly show the heavy burden his job was placing on him.
‘On the battlefield there are no sides, just bloodshed. Total war. Every horror witnessed. I wish my eyes would rot,’ he wrote on one occasion.
One would think at this point Bryant would be ready to call it quits, but no.
The “incident” was taking such a toll that Bryant was “doubling over and spitting blood”, which forced him to take time off from mass murder. But six months later he got back in the “cockpit” and started killing again until he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and left the military.
We’re left with this, which is to make us feel better about Bryant I suppose:
Now Bryant has left the military and is living back at home in Montana where he feels he is slowly recuperating.
‘I haven’t been dreaming in infrared for four months,’ he said with a smile.
The hypocrisy and double standard is staggering.
While we rightly mourn the deaths of those children in Newtown, CT by a madman, this article mourns the emotional difficulties faced by Bryant because he chose to murder innocent people at the touch of a button.
Filed under: drones, The Empire, War and Peace, Worship of the Military Tagged: Afghanistan, drones, military Image may be NSFW.
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