March 28, 2009

Quincy and the Reaper - and the Creechers

Poor Quincy. He would like me to take him for another walk or go upstairs to bed. Instead he just waits - a bit impatiently - but he waits. He watches me search on my computer. I think he senses that I'm stressed and driven.

I've been troubled by the news about the predators for weeks. It's driving me up the wall. While I keep talking about the drones - they keep killing all these innocent people in Pakistan. Men, women and children being mutilated and terrorized by these robots in the sky.

I keep thinking about the women and children we killed by accident in Vietnam. They were only a few hundred yards away and we destroyed them.
Now the targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan are thousands of miles away. A Creech Air Force Base soldier, a Creecher,  sits in a cushy chair  in Nevada playing with peoples lives like it was only a game. 
The gamers are everywhere. It's like a science fiction movie. People tell me they are in places from Virginia to Nevada to Iraq to Gates knows where.

I think it's racist. It's similar to the Vietnamization of the Vietnam War. If we can keep the body counts of American troops low enough, maybe nobody will care that Pakistan people or Afghanistan people are dying. When the drones go in there are no Americans on board. It's just a robot. It's only money. They just tack it on to the next War Supplemental (which is coming up shortly - they need it by the end of Junish or they will run out of money for Iraq) or the Defense Budget which goes up every year (including Obama's)

What are we doing?  Has Obama gone mad? 

The Creechers  are running Reapers that can spy on people for 16 hours at a time. That would be bad enough. But then . . . ZAP ! They're dead. . . gone.  Game's over. 

And the Chreechers go home for the night. Maybe a few beers on the way. 

Someday these Creechers are going to be hit with reality. It wasn't a video game. They murdered real people. . . ended real lives. . . destroyed real families.

I always wondered about the B-52's over Vietnam. These guys would sit on base or in a bar in Thailand, go to work, fly over Vietnam with little or no danger, drop their bombs, kill the innocent people, wipe out the communities and fly back. They never got to see what they did. The little finger sitting in the dirt. The hole in the little boys head.

I still wonder about those guys (most of them were men). After they learned what really happened in Vietnam and thought about what they did, do they have nightmares? Do they experience the same horror as the soldiers who had seen what they did? 


Hunter-Killer is a military term traditionally used to describe an entity in which the roles of "sensor" and "shooter" are separated. However, in the case of unmanned aerial vehicles, it means the opposite: an aircraft system designed to find, identify and kill its target; the first purpose-designed hunter-killer UAV is the MQ-9 Reaper.[1]MQ-9 Reaper
                   -From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 

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