What Happens In Vegas - Should It Stay There?

Slashdot News Story | What Happens In Vegas Happens In Afghanistan.  I am of two minds on this story of the drone pilots, who sit in dark rooms in Nevada, and pilot armed drones in Afghanistan that seek out and kill people. Has technology removed us too far from the horrors of the battlefield? Of course, I would rather all of our fighting be done 7,500 miles away, in the safety of a Las Vegas bunker. However, I am reminded of the Randall Jarrell poem about World War I, "Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner". In the first world war version of raining death from the sky, a gunner sat in an exposed turret hanging from the bottom of the plane, shooting at other airplanes and at the objects and persons below on the ground. Jarrell's last line is a killer: "When he died, they washed him out of the turret with a hose." If war becomes like a video game, do we risk making it seem like a fantasy?

Comments

[Ted Weitz]

The story is interesting, but you are off on your time line. Ball turret gunners were not first world war but WWII. It was a very high risk position among the already high risk bomber crews.

[Bill Herrick]

I don't think it will become too detached that it becomes like fantasy (at least not in the next 50 years). Despite all the technological advances, there will always be a necessity for boots on the ground (just as there was in the day of the ball turret gunner).

However, there is also an interesting psychological effect of these operations that has not been seen on this scale before. Regardless of the distance, it is impossible not to realize you are ending a human life - which requires a certain "war mentality" to do so without psychological damage. Yet at the end of every day, these drone pilots go home and have dinner with their families- and ostensibly discuss such routine topics as school, bills, etc. The mental gymnastics required to contastantly shift from war front to home front is relatively unque - and is not necessarily healthy as there is a certain necessity of being isolated from the concerns of home in order to be properly focused on the fight.

[Michael J. Farley, Esq.]

I remember reading that poem (and the others in that collection) when I was in my teens, and that line has always stuck with me. It made me realize that war was not like it was depicted in the movies - your post suggests that now it has become a TV show.