As I was making my rounds today carrying out the mundane but highly technical tasks of a REMF, I chanced upon the camera gear that represents a physical connection to the last few moments of the lives of Paul Douglas and James Brolan. Their shattered equipment, which they used to record and report events in Iraq, lay broken and twisted on the floor, covered in specks of blood and pierced in various places by the shrapnel that always accompanies an IED’s concussive force in the milliseconds after the triggerman sets it off.
I do not know what ran through their minds in their last moments on this earth, but I hope they found comfort in whatever faiths they may have practiced. Death hasn’t touched me much on this deployment. The deaths of these two men did, because I had shared the same air they breathed on more than one occasion. They were observers, not combatants. They were human beings who hoped for better days for the nation and people of Iraq. They did not deserve to die.
If anything their murder hardens my resolve to support the continuation of the imperfect process that is underway here in the Middle East. The beliefs of fundamentalist fanatics willing to kill anyone by any means to achieve their personal goals and visions cannot be tolerated. I am not responsible for the turmoil that is brewing in the minds of murderers like Osama bin Laden and Musab al-Zarqawi. I only truly began to pay attention to men like them on September 11, 2001. Prior to that day, fundamentalist religious fanatics had only touched on my life in theoretical, distant ways. They were people I despised from afar but had little interest in because in my naiveté I thought they could not touch my life. On September 11, 2001 my aloof interest in religiously motivated fanaticism became much more personal, and has only grown more so as time passes and atrocities continue to be carried out.
I would rather die than submit to the type of men who are willing to kill indiscriminately to wield power, especially in the name of a higher being. How dare they tell me who God is and what God demands from me! No matter who they are or what arguments they attempt to use to justify their evil, they are wrong and must be fought. A life lived without moral boundaries is a life that burns through the lives around it like acid. These barbarians must be held back, corralled and subdued, no matter the cost. The alternative will only mean more shattered detritus speckled with blood reminding us of faces that will smile and laugh no more on this Earth.