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The Gulf War and Beyond

What truly resonated with me while reading this essay is the fact that as our weapons merge man and machine we become detached morally from the death that we bestow. We view the bomb that was dropped from a plane high in the sky though a computer screen, and we can only see the explosion. Losing track of the sounds of the carnage taking plan far below. The screams of women and children being burnt alive in the flaming house. We don't smell the burning flesh or smoldering ruins. As we view this death through a monitor we do not actually feel the emotions that come with experiencing that shock first hand. The members of the Enola Gay felt the impact that there payload created through the heat, sound, and sight of the explosion. The men, to there deaths, were haunted by the murder they had been ordered to deal. In our modernistic world we can deploy "Smart Bombs" from a bunker in Arizona, through a drone over Afghanistan, aimed at some small village to destroy "The Enemy". The operator views the battlefield as a set of coordinates has no emotions attachment to the damage or destruction that the war is causing.

This emotional detachment is great for our solders but also causes them to lose some humanity.

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