brighter it is, the more it soothes him. If he concentrates hard enough on the white light, he can’t see the streamers things make when they move too fast. Silver and gold with fiery red tails. He can’t smell Mommy’s perfume, which follows him everywhere. He can’t hear his sister popping her gum. He can’t even hear the furnace clicking on and off, on and off at maliciously irregular intervals. The light blocks out everything else, bathing his senses in whiteness.
* * *
The civilian casualty episode didn’t exactly trigger a conversion experience. Brown was still a beer-guzzling slacker. But he stopped hotdogging and started really listening to Todd’s pep talks about the ethics of combat. He deferred to his commander’s judgment and tried to act prudently under pressure. The other members of the peanut gallery, most notably Kucher and Poindexter, were not impressed. They razzed him about being teacher’s pet in an effort to shame him back into their ranks. Brown dug deep and stood his ground, retaliating the way self-respecting military men have retaliated for millennia. He told them to fuck off.
Recruitment posters list integrity, service, and valor as air force core principles. Once you actually wore the uniform long enough to scuff your boots, you learned that prudence was the better part of valor. Hurling yourself headlong into battle was a heroic fantasy only civilians could afford to entertain. In actual combat you ended up dead, not decorated with medals of honor. In virtual combat, the fact that it was impossible to be killed or even wounded increased the threat of making fatal mistakes. The safer you were, the more likely you were to end up with innocent blood on your hands. It was all the more important to be prudent when your life wasn’t on the line.
Paradoxes always abounded in war. They were waged to keep the peace. Hiroshima saved lives. That kind of thing. Drone warfare was especially paradoxical. Virtual pilots thousands of miles away from the action were trigger-happy. Statistically, they were up to two times more likely to bomb mistaken targets. The cause of this itchy trigger finger syndrome had yet to be determined. The psychology of virtual warfare was still in its infancy. It could have been as simple as boredom, not to mention complacency stemming from watching too many video-game deaths on too many computer screens, none of which produced a single drop of blood. The cause could have been physiological rather than psychological, phantom reflexes or synapses firing in response to sense memories registered during countless years of playing war games on laptops. Danger had a way of honing reflexes and tempering the kind of bravado that backfired in real combat. All these factors finally convinced Todd to invite Brown to go rock climbing.
Something about this particular kid spoke to Todd. Brown didn’t remind him of himself. Todd was a model of military precision and discipline. Brown couldn’t even keep his shirt tucked in. But as clueless as he was when he showed up at Creech, he emerged as the one lieutenant with a hint of the right stuff. In another era, combat missions would have scared the shit out of him. He would have emerged a better man. This new breed of warrior was at a distinct disadvantage. There was virtually no way to instill fear into the exercise of dragging a mouse across a virtual battlefield. Todd knew he was taking a chance, letting Brown into the inner sanctum of his death-defying rituals. There’d be hell to pay if the colonel found out a commissioned officer was climbing without ropes. The air force had invested too much money in his training to play games with death. But they’d left him no choice. The absence of clear and present danger was jeopardizing the integrity of his men. Unless you put skin in the game it was just a game.
Brown had done a little rock climbing growing up near the Shawangunk range in upstate New York. He had preferred getting drunk
* * *
The civilian casualty episode didn’t exactly trigger a conversion experience. Brown was still a beer-guzzling slacker. But he stopped hotdogging and started really listening to Todd’s pep talks about the ethics of combat. He deferred to his commander’s judgment and tried to act prudently under pressure. The other members of the peanut gallery, most notably Kucher and Poindexter, were not impressed. They razzed him about being teacher’s pet in an effort to shame him back into their ranks. Brown dug deep and stood his ground, retaliating the way self-respecting military men have retaliated for millennia. He told them to fuck off.
Recruitment posters list integrity, service, and valor as air force core principles. Once you actually wore the uniform long enough to scuff your boots, you learned that prudence was the better part of valor. Hurling yourself headlong into battle was a heroic fantasy only civilians could afford to entertain. In actual combat you ended up dead, not decorated with medals of honor. In virtual combat, the fact that it was impossible to be killed or even wounded increased the threat of making fatal mistakes. The safer you were, the more likely you were to end up with innocent blood on your hands. It was all the more important to be prudent when your life wasn’t on the line.
Paradoxes always abounded in war. They were waged to keep the peace. Hiroshima saved lives. That kind of thing. Drone warfare was especially paradoxical. Virtual pilots thousands of miles away from the action were trigger-happy. Statistically, they were up to two times more likely to bomb mistaken targets. The cause of this itchy trigger finger syndrome had yet to be determined. The psychology of virtual warfare was still in its infancy. It could have been as simple as boredom, not to mention complacency stemming from watching too many video-game deaths on too many computer screens, none of which produced a single drop of blood. The cause could have been physiological rather than psychological, phantom reflexes or synapses firing in response to sense memories registered during countless years of playing war games on laptops. Danger had a way of honing reflexes and tempering the kind of bravado that backfired in real combat. All these factors finally convinced Todd to invite Brown to go rock climbing.
Something about this particular kid spoke to Todd. Brown didn’t remind him of himself. Todd was a model of military precision and discipline. Brown couldn’t even keep his shirt tucked in. But as clueless as he was when he showed up at Creech, he emerged as the one lieutenant with a hint of the right stuff. In another era, combat missions would have scared the shit out of him. He would have emerged a better man. This new breed of warrior was at a distinct disadvantage. There was virtually no way to instill fear into the exercise of dragging a mouse across a virtual battlefield. Todd knew he was taking a chance, letting Brown into the inner sanctum of his death-defying rituals. There’d be hell to pay if the colonel found out a commissioned officer was climbing without ropes. The air force had invested too much money in his training to play games with death. But they’d left him no choice. The absence of clear and present danger was jeopardizing the integrity of his men. Unless you put skin in the game it was just a game.
Brown had done a little rock climbing growing up near the Shawangunk range in upstate New York. He had preferred getting drunk
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