The Silent Guardian
Warning: the following took place here in
Tuesday night I ate dinner at Sarah’s apartment. Not, loyal readers, the Buddhic Sarah of OI fame whose profile appeared in a prior installment of this blog, but rather Sarah the recent Yale graduate and Fulbright scholar. She has a beautiful apartment in the upscale Airport Residential neighborhood of
After dinner had finished the doorbell rang and it was Ryan, one of the six US Marines stationed in
I mentioned the article to Ryan, who had not heard of the Silent Guardian but thought it sounded “cool”. He chuckled and advised me that I should never volunteer to be a test subject for a non-lethal weapon. I didn’t need much convincing.
He went on to describe the general purpose of non-lethal weapons and he mentioned a few examples that he had seen or experienced firsthand. “’Non-lethal’ just means ‘pain-compliance’,” he said—that is, distinct from impositions of force designed to incapacitate a target. When you shoot a would-be attacker in the leg (or in the head) the idea is to render him physically incapable of harming you, but the pain-compliance approach seeks to make the would-be attacker decide not to harm you. In the former, pain is a side effect; in the latter, it is a means to an end.
Consider the following from John Alexander, formerly of the US Army Special Operations and now an advocate for non-lethal weapons: “There is a misconception that war is about killing. War is about the imposition of will.”
Indeed, the
Tear gas is similar to mace, but is neither as strong nor as non-lethal—there have been deaths from exposure to very high concentrations of the gas. Typically, though, it is used on large crowds in open areas, while mace is usually applied at close range; its effects are comparatively mild. Ryan suggested that they ought to make a similar crowd-control device with an oscillating sprinkler mounted on a Humvee and connected to a tank of mace inside, thus combining the broad application strategy with the increased pain (read “compliance”).
Finally there are the rubber bullets or, more broadly, any projectile shot from a non-lethal launcher. This is an air-powered rifle with a .62” barrel (like a paintball gun) that shoots missile-shaped projectiles. These may be designed to burst and distribute a payload (e.g. mace or tear gas), or they may simply be made of hard rubber. The weapon is rated non-lethal for 3-150 yards so long as you don’t shoot anybody in the face. While he was on guard duty at a base in the
He mockingly emphasized the word just as people mockingly emphasize other poorly-defined or generally ridiculous terms from the vocabulary of political correctness. Ultimately his attitude was that such a nebulous concept was ill-adapted to the strict utilitarian calculus of military decision-making, and so it ought to be abandoned up front. If nothing else, this seems, to me, (brutally) honest.
But the untraceable and excruciating pain of a concentrated energy beam as a means of persuasion? This is dark magic and finds application in places where blatant military force has generally been deemed inappropriate: places where, when it is put to use despite general condemnation, the best way to fight back is to make public some record of the brutality. An unseemly demonstration or a tight-lipped suspect under interrogation? Zap and it’s a memory—and who can tell the story of the suffering under the ray? There is no scar to testify to the ordeal.
The ease with which Ryan imagined these scenarios suggested that the military has in mind uses of precisely this sort. Imagine the irony: you might be at a rally protesting the use of these weapons when you hear, from the Humvee behind the barricades, the mechanical whine of the Silent Guardian’s dish pivoting to focus on you…
But one hopes such fears won't be realized, so long as we all stay in line. Reassuring, no?
2 comments:
I don't know man... the Silent Guardian has been generating alot of buzz back home, particularly in the district. Realizing who the sources are, it does seem to be a much more "humane" way of accomplishing various peace-keeping and reconstruction efforts (in Iraq and beyond) in contrast to shooting the assailant with a lethal weapon. More thoughts to come in an email after class ends...
And in the face of such humane torture, how dare we celebrate our status as the paragon of animals? Who are these cretins, anyway? Were they born of woman? Lower than the ignominious toad are the cowards who hide behind their designer weapons and do not face the enemy they fry into incapacitation, for in pretending to be humane, they deny their humanity. By all who love and breathe and touch, whose lives are occasionally lit by the sweet reason of discourse, do we read idly and abstractly in our swivel chairs about the prospect of being bludgeoned electronically into charred cinders or blithering wall-eyed masses of protoplasm (pick one), victims in some idiot's reality video game? Give me the honesty of lion's claw! I'd welcome the tooth of a rabid rat any day, rather than endure one of my kid's college chums aiming a KMart Krapola zap gun at my head as I attend a Quaker meeting to speak "Peace," or gather with fellow burghers in Lafayette Park for a picnic one spring afternoon. Raise your voice against the Silent Guardian in a din sufficient to turn the khaki pink! May the phoenix then rise from the ashes, have courage to flash and sing, beat back the military madness with wings of forgiveness and hope.
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