Catch-22 in No Man’s Land
I yearned to understand my son and for him to know, “I support you and hope you process any false guilt or shame.” This momma lioness wanted him to be assured that nothing he did in a war zone could ever destroy my perception of who he is or shake my unconditional love for him.
Knowing how my son felt on the subject would have helped me process the unspoken moral wounds our hearts shared. Armed with just enough shards of information that I’d researched, worry tortured my heart. Without an indoctrination program to help me understand the kill-or-be-killed warrior mindset, I cobbled together what I could.
As a non-military parent, I had not one clue how to process my thoughts or feelings. Before the military allows our chests to burst with pride watching our naive, young adults graduate from basic training, it would help nonmilitary parents to undergo some basic training themselves. How about adding a required indoctrination training course entitled Warriors, War-making, and the Warrior Mentality 101 during orientation for nonmilitary parents? Family members, who served in the military, perhaps understand the steeling of the warrior mentality.
My upbringing and life experience background? Ministry — winning hearts and minds to Jehovah Elohim’s Son — the image of God on earth — the fullest expression of what God intended man to be. The only warrior mentality I’d learned sitting on a cushioned pew surrounded by stained glass was from sermons on Ephesians 6:10-18 urging those confronted by pure evil to put on the “full armor of God.”
Since we don’t live in biblical times or the Middle Ages, the word picture — girding my loins with truth, putting on the breastplate of righteousness, taking up the shield of faith, and taking the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, God’s Word to extinguish the flaming arrows of the evil one — was as much an alien cultural concept to me as the alien military culture. I understood the spiritual connotations. Stand firm. Resist the enemies of your soul. A mental Kevlar body armor insulated my mind, deflecting any real grasp of the ancient or modern military’s warrior way of thinking.
I’d always hoped my son’s first cultural shock would occur on a missionary trip and honestly? I was disappointed his first trip overseas was his first deployment for Operation Enduring Freedom. When he returned, he phoned and I heard the astonishment in his voice as he expressed his cultural shock, wake-up call, “Mom, the five and six-year-olds carry AK-47s!” And I thought, What kind of uncivilized tribal culture abuses their children by teaching preschoolers and kindergartners to shoot and kill another human being?
Crime, Context, and Consequences
Some believe the God of the Hebrew Bible was a killer god, a mass murderer, thus equating Him with the sinister war practices of ancient, brutish regimes. Like the kosher laws of compassion to slaughter an animal with respect by employing a swift, smooth cut of a sharp knife by a trained hand, God’s rules of warrior engagement differed from the grizzly Assyrian tortures recorded on baked clay cuneiforms or sculpted on alabaster slabs: decapitated heads severed from bodies, bodies minus arms, and feet impaled on stakes, tongues sliced from mouths, eyes gouged out, prisoners skinned alive and set on fire, male heads stacked on stakes like human totem poles, or hooks or rings pierced through the noses or lips of political prisoners to lead them button-holed into the regime’s royal presence.[1]
Like transnational violent, ultra-militants who claim to be Muslims, the ferocious Assyrians practiced genocide, mass extermination, and gendercide, killing the males and kidnapping, raping, and impregnating women and child ‘brides’ to incorporate their offspring into their bloodlines through sexual violence.
Like Daesh — an acronym for “The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” (al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham) that mimics this Arabic word: Daes meaning “to trample, or one who crushes something underfoot” — the Assyrian Ashurnasirpal, who called himself “trampler of all enemies” recorded: “I flayed as many nobles as had rebelled against me [and] draped their skins over the pile [of corpses]; some I spread out within the pile, some I erected on stakes upon the pile … I flayed many right through my land [and] draped their skins over the walls.”[2]
The Assyrian king, whose capital and palace was located in Nineveh, modern-day Mosel, Sennacherib boasted: “I cut their throats like lambs. I cut off their precious lives (as one cuts) a string. Like the many waters of a storm, I made (the contents of) their gullets and entrails run down upon the wide earth. My prancing steeds harnessed for my riding plunged into the streams of their blood as (into) a river. The wheels of my war chariot, which brings low the wicked and the evil, were bespattered with blood and filth. With the bodies of their warriors, I filled the plain, like grass. (Their) testicles I cut off, and tore out their privates like the seeds of cucumbers.”[3]
Compared to Assyrian moral atrocities, Jehovah Elohim’s boundaries regarding war read like the Geneva Convention. The Torah records in Deuteronomy 20, the LORD God, Jehovah Elohim’s rules for warfare begins with His command to broker peace first, and if rejected by an angry adversary who prefers to make war, protect non-combatants, women, children, animals, and even fruit trees!
History, archeology, and theology fuel my imagination that can never fully grasp the reality and horrors of war experienced firsthand. Just as my God instilled in me the same Momma’s-gonna-protect-my-young — no matter what — when the situation presents us with two lesser than ideal choices, God called courageous warriors to violence to preserve the ultimate absolute ethic — the sacredness of life.[4]
If a ruthless murderer or rapist sought to overrun me, violate a friend or a vulnerable, disabled individual, or ravage my child or another person’s child in my care, I’d do everything physically possible to resist or stop, even kill him — no remorse. Horror? Yes. Guilt or shame? No. Is fighting or killing my normative, everyday behavior in my community? No. Would stopping sheer evil dead make me a killer goddess? Hardly.
Momma lioness would risk dying to fight to protect my life and the lives of the innocent and the helpless from the pillage of a murderer or rapist whose actions redefine the value of life. And that’s why I appreciate the police and military who protect us from plunderers and mutilators of the sacredness of human life.
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