Posted on 10/27/2001 4:15:12 PM PDT by Starbreed
TIPS ON TERRORISTS FROM T.E.LAWRENCE The fight eventually overmasters the cause. Achieving victory obliterates any other consideration. The everlasting battle stripped from us care of our own lives or of others'. Everyone is expendable. Expect civilians to be used as willing shields. We had ropes about our necks, and on our heads prices which showed that the enemy intended hideous tortures for us if we were caught. Each day some of us passed on and the living knew themselves just sentient puppets of God's stage…our taskmaster was merciless, merciless, so long as our bruised feet could stagger forward on the road. Death is not martyrdom but an awaited release from an awful life for men who are manipulated by the cause. The enemy will be merciless and so too the taskmaster that drives for victory. Mercy is meaningless and therefore useless. We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling. Fear and exultation are a constant familiar environment so their addition or subtraction will not offer any psychological advantage. We had learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were hum drum once more. The Taliban are people whose thinking has been deadened by extreme fear, grief, and physical pain. Don't expect rational decisions regarding surrender or religious holidays. Such exaltation of thought, while it let adrift the spirit, and gave it licence(sic) in strange airs, lost it the old patient rule over the body. Lawrence begins his explanation of homosexuality in the forces. Broadly, this suggests that morality, recognizable in the Afghan people as a whole, is non-existant in the troops and we must not count on any virtues of the people adhering to the Taliban. Wounding and killing seemed ephemeral pains, so very brief and sore was life with us. With sorrow of living so great, the sorrow of punishment had to be pitiless. Life is so excruciating that death to themselves or others seems incidental. Moreover, punishment, to make its point, has to be worse than everyday existance, which explains skinning prisoners. Torture, with this mindset, must be unimaginable to be effective.
DoD and State Dept take notice As time went by our need to fight for the ideal increased to an unquestioning possession, riding with spur and rein over our doubts; Willy-nilly it became a faith. We had sold ourselves into its slavery, …bowed ourselves to serve its holiness with all our good and ill content. …we had surrendered, not body alone, but soul to the overmastering greed of victory. By our own act we were drained of morality, of volition, of responsibility, like dead leaves in the wind.
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