Shooting unarmed people is not bravery. It is not courage. It is not even war. It is a crime.
Aysenur Ezgi Eygi – by Mr. Fish.
I know you. I met you in the dense canopies in the war in El Salvador. It was there that I first heard the single, high-pitched crack of the sniper bullet. Distinct. Ominous.
A sound that spreads terror. Army units I traveled with, enraged by the lethal accuracy of rebel snipers, set up heavy .50 caliber machine guns and sprayed the foliage overhead until your body, a bloodied and mangled pulp, dropped to the ground.
I saw you at work in Basra in Iraq and of course Gaza, where on a fall afternoon at the Netzarim Junction, you shot dead a young man a few feet away from me. We carried his limp body up the road.
I lived with you in Sarajevo during the war. You were only a few hundred yards away, perched in high rises that looked down on the city. I witnessed your daily carnage.
At dusk, I saw you fire a round in the gloom at an old man and his wife bent over their tiny vegetable plot. You missed. She ran, haltingly, for cover. He did not. You fired again.
I concede the light was fading. It was hard to see. Then, the third time, you killed him. This is one of those memories of war I see in my head over and over and over and never talk about. I watched it from the back of the Holiday Inn, but by now I have seen it, or the shadows of it, hundreds of times.
You targeted me, too. You struck down colleagues and friends.
I was in your sights traveling from northern Albania into Kosovo with 600 fighters from the Kosovo Liberation Army, each insurgent carrying an extra AK-47 to hand off to a comrade.
Three shots. That crisp crack, too familiar. You must have been far away. Or maybe you were a bad shot, although you came close. I scrambled for cover behind a rock. My two bodyguards bent over me, panting, the green pouches strapped to their chests packed full of grenades.
I know how you talk. The black humor. “Pint sized terrorists” you say of the children you kill. You are proud of your skills. It gives you cachet. You cradle your weapon as if it is an extension of your body. You admire its despicable beauty. This is who you are. A killer.
In your society of killers, you are respected, rewarded, promoted. You are numb to the suffering you inflict. Maybe you enjoy it. Maybe you think you are protecting yourself, your identity, your comrades, your nation.
Maybe you believe the killing is a necessary evil, a way to make sure Palestinians die before they can strike. Maybe you have surrendered your morality to the blind obedience of the military, subsumed yourself into the industrial machinery of death.
Maybe you are scared to die. Maybe you want to prove to yourself and others that you are tough, you can kill. Maybe your mind is so warped that you believe killing is righteous.
You are intoxicated by the god-like power to revoke another person’s charter to live on this earth. You revel in the intimacy of it. You see in fine detail through the telescopic sight, the nose and mouth of your victim.
The triangle of death. You hold your breath. You pull slowly, gently on the trigger. And then the pink puff. Severed spinal cord. Death. It is over.
You were the last person to see Aysenur alive. You were the first person to see her dead.
This is you now. And now no one can reach you. You are death’s angel. You are numb and cold. But, I suspect, this will not last.
I covered war for a long time. I know, even if you do not, the next chapter of your life. I know what happens when you leave the embrace of the military, when you are no longer a cog in these factories of death. I know the hell you are about to enter.
It starts like this. All the skills you acquired as a killer on the outside are useless. Maybe you go back. Maybe you become a gun for hire. But this will only delay the inevitable.
You can run, for a while, but you cannot run forever. There will be reckoning. And it is the reckoning I will tell you about.
You will face a choice. Live the rest of your life, stunted, numb, cut off from yourself, cut off from those around you. Descend into a psychopathic fog, trapped in the absurd, interdependent lies that justify mass murder.
There are killers, years later, who say they are proud of their work, who claim not a moment’s regret. But I have not been inside their nightmares. If this is you then you will never again truly live.
Sniper’s Eye View, 1968. (USMC Archives, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
Of course, you do not talk about what you did to those around you, certainly not to your family. They think you are a good person. You know this is a lie.
The numbness, usually, wears off. You look in the mirror, and if you have any shred of conscience left, your reflection disturbs you. But you repress the bitterness. You escape down the rabbit hole of opioids and alcohol.
Your intimate relationships, because you cannot feel, because you bury your self-loathing, disintegrate. This escape works. For a while. But then you go into such darkness that the stimulants you use to blunt your pain begin to destroy you.
And maybe that is how you die. I have known many who died like that. And I have known those who ended it quickly. A gun to the head.
Between 1973 and 2024, 1,227 Israeli soldiers committed suicide according to official statistics, but the actual number is believed to be far higher. In the U.S. an average of 16 veterans commit suicide every day.
I have trauma from war. But the worst trauma I do not have. The worst trauma from war is not what you saw. It is not what you experienced. The worst trauma is what you did.
They have names for it. Moral injury. Perpetrator Induced Traumatic Stress. But that seems tepid given the hot, burning coals of rage, the night terrors, the despair.
Those around you know something is terribly, terribly wrong. They fear your darkness. But you do not let them into your labyrinth of pain.
And then, one day, you reach out for love. Love is the opposite of war. War is about smut. It is about pornography. It is about turning other human beings into objects, maybe sexual objects, but I also mean this literally, for war turns people into corpses.
Corpses are the end product of war, what comes off its assembly line. So, you will want love, but the angel of death has made a Faustian bargain.
It is this. It is the hell of not being able to love. You will carry this death inside you for the rest of your life. It corrodes your soul. Yes. We have souls. You sold yours.
And the cost is very, very high. It means that what you want, what you most desperately need in life, you cannot attain.
Then one day, maybe you are a father or a mother or an uncle or an aunt, and a young woman you love, or want to love as a daughter, comes into your life. You see in her, it will come in a flash, Aysenur’s face.
The young woman you murdered. Come back to life. Israeli now. Speaking Hebrew. Innocent. Good. Full of hope. The full force of what you did, who you were, who you are, will hit you like an avalanche.
You will spend days wanting to cry and not knowing why. You will be consumed by guilt. You will believe that because of what you did the life of this other young woman is in danger. Divine retribution.
You will tell yourself this is absurd, but you will believe it anyway. Your life will start to include little offerings of goodness to others as if these offerings will appease a vengeful god, as if these offerings will save her from harm, from death. But nothing can wipe away the stain of murder.
Yes. You killed Aysenur. You killed others. Palestinians who you dehumanized and taught yourself to hate. Human animals. Terrorists. Barbarians.
But it is harder to dehumanize her. You know, you saw it through your scope, she was no threat. She did not throw rocks, the paltry justification the Israeli army uses to shoot live rounds at Palestinians, including children.
You will be overwhelmed with sorrow. Regret. Shame. Grief. Despair. Alienation. You will have an existential crisis. You will know that all the values you were taught to honor in school, at worship, in your home, are not the values you upheld. You will hate yourself. You will not say this out loud. You may, one way or another, extinguish yourself.
There is a part of me that says you deserve this torment. There is a part of me that wants you to suffer for the loss you inflicted on Aysenur’s family and friends, to pay for taking the life of this courageous and gifted woman.
Shooting unarmed people is not bravery. It is not courage. It is not even war. It is a crime. It is murder. You are a murderer.
I am sure you were not ordered to kill Aysenur. You shot Aysenur in the head because you could, because you felt like it. Israel runs an open-air shooting gallery in Gaza and the West Bank. Total impunity. Murder as sport.
You will, one day, not be the killer you are now. You will exhaust yourself trying to ward off demons. You will desperately want to be human. You will want to love and be loved. Maybe you will make it.
Being human again. But that will mean a life of contrition. It will mean making your crime public. It will mean begging, on your knees, for forgiveness. It will mean forgiving yourself.
This is very hard. It will mean orientating every aspect of your life to nurturing life rather than extinguishing it. This will be your only hope for salvation. If you do not take it, you are damned.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This article is from Scheerpost.
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About “Shooting unarmed people is not bravery.”:
Shooting unarmed people are cowardly acts. Shooting Aysenur in the head was the act of a coward committing the sin of murder.
From Dictionary.com – cowardly [ kou-erd-lee ] adjective:
2. characteristic of or befitting a coward; despicably mean, covert, or unprincipled: “a cowardly attack on a weak, defenseless man.” https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cowardly
Drone operators, those who kill persons targeted by the security agencies and for each kill destroy many other lives should fear the same hell as described by Chris.
I’m really appreciative of articles like this. I only wish it had also pointed the finger at the state that not only condones this type of brutality, but makes these actions heroic, writes movies about them, and glorifies them. Would-be snipers are inspired by this and lied to. This is what the state does. It propagandizes and trains to kill other humans and then abandons that young man or woman to deal with it. In many ways, I see such snipers as victims themselves. The state is just as carelessly bloodthirsty and deserves a rebuke just as severe, if not more. But that falls short. Those humans running the state and making the decisions to send other people’s children to do the killing – they are the ones that deserve our ultimate ire.
Excellent points Todd.
Powerful stuff – surely any human being brought up with morals – as most are – will succumb to their evil crimes, such as this – years later.
Wonderfull text… Sheer poetry! But what makes it even more outstanding is that it touches the most abject side of our present reality: The complete colapse of morality in the people who govern our World.
What is happening in Palestine is inexcusable, it should be stopped immediately but it is not!
Our civilization will be defined by this moral depravation ..
This is why what Chris Hedges has just written is a redeeming moment for us all:
Despite the cruelty and indifference, there were still people who knew and cared.
Animals do not feel pity. Or remorse. The IOF (israeli Offensive Forces) are animals. Feral. Evil even.
You are wrong about animals. They feel everything…love, loyalty, kindness, grief. What happens to humans to make them not recognize this? The same things that makes them ignorant.
L.N. Tolstoy: as long as there are slaughter houses there will be battle fields
Soldiers are also victims of war, which is mass murder and State terrorism. They are deliberately desensitized to overcome the
natural aversion to killing a fellow human being. In combat the sense of the sacredness of life is further lost. In Australia also
soldiers often suicide, both during war and afterwards. If the leaders of countries had to lead the army into war, as was once the custom, there would be much fewer wars.
In my view, sniping is the most extreme form of cowardice, because it gives the victim absolutely zero chance of resisting the attack. The sniper is safe, a long way away, hiding behind the sights of his gun, concealed from sight.
It is the same kind of evil as we’ve just seen with the vicious pager attack by Israel, sneaky, devious, underhand and also extremely cowardly. Perpetrated by truly deranged people.
Every Israeli pilot who drops bombs over Gaza, with full foreknowledge that they will kill or horrendously maim entirely inocent children, women, civilians (40,000 and counting) is as bad if not worse than the snipers in Chris’s article. They too should suffer with their conscience – but they won’t.
I agree ‘WillD’. What kind of person would take part in DIRECTLY killing civilians, especially women and children, other than a coward of the lowest dimension! Even people dropping bombs from aircraft can somewhat hide behind the fact that they can’t see their victims and claim (speciously) that they were targeting enemy soldiers, but snipers shooting children are at the lowest end of humanity – right down there with serial women & child killers.
Well Chris, you are competing here with St. Augustine’s
“Confessions.”
And the Israeli military “the most moral army in world”
so the Zionist Israel lobby tells us, has turned Gaza and
the West Bank into a shooting gallery, our own
American government supplying the weaponry.
Forgiveness is hard to think of for these devil
worshiping demonic fiends, and yet, it’s there,
in the one who took the world’s murder upon himself,
but you forgot to mention His name.
Sheerpoetry
A sublime declaration of love in the face of absolute evil
The Israelis named the perpetrators of the holocaust and chased them across the world to face justice and retribution. Surely this young woman’s murderer deserves similar treatment.
Yes, the demons do come. A good friend, raised a good catholic boy, came back from Vietnam haunted by those demons. His first marriage went on the rocks. He molested the daughter of his second wife. He went to jail. and hanged himself on a sheet in his cell. Human beings are made for love, not for hate and murder. I still miss the person my friend once was, and who he traded to become damned in this life. War is a pile of crap.
Most poignant, deeply moving, writing. So well expressed. Thank you Chris Hedges.
Thank You, Chris.
Now I understand why I always hated *American Sniper*
Both the book and the perversely celebrated movie.
The problem is that these murderers believe they are serving & fulfilling their duty according to Talmudic scripture so I doubt very much ‘it’ will feel any remorse or suffer what you say ‘it’ will. Please read Israel Shahaks work called ‘Jewish History-Jewish Religion’ and you will see why they treat gentiles like Palestinians the way they do.
The worst parts of this racist and hate filled text has deliberately not been translated into other languages so western academics are none the wiser. I’ve learned that the very essence of their religion is based upon racism, exceptionalism and dominion over others.
I read everyone who are real reporters, Glenn, Norman, Aaron, Max, Anya, Scott, Alan, Tariq, Catlin, Ali, Joe, Kit, Miko, Ray…you know the rest.
Chris is the one who makes me cry.
You are absolutely right. It makes me cry, and it makes me shout, and it makes me hate all those murderers. It makes me desperate, and in the same time it makes me hopeful, because the sniper as described by Chris is still human and open to remorse. But is it true? All the warmongers surrounding us don’t seem to have any regret, they seem to have lost their humanity, they became robots.
My goodness, Rob Roy, and Will, and Randal, and Coram – Your words have got that SO right!!
Chris has a rare talent for getting to the deep heart of the matter. I’m aware of others as well as myself that have been reduced to tears over what he has written here. He really gets to the crux of how humans are manipulated into acting in a totally inhuman way which eventually destroys them. We must not allow this destruction of our humanity to continue.
I’m in full agreement Arch. I doubt the murderer will lose any sleep over this heinous act. The Zionists are brainwashed and do not possess a conscience where gentiles and others are concerned.
Valerie, do you REALLY agree with Arch that “the very essence of their religion is based upon racism, exceptionalism and dominion over others”?
Thank you for the reference Arch. On Amazon this hardback is unavailable. A used paperback version is 650$. Can you (or anyone else) suggest another source where we can read this text in english for a reasonable price or possibly for free. This information sounds like it’s critical to understanding the motivations of the Zionists.