The Cold War turned the entire United States into a suicide bomber rehearsing obsessively for the moment when we would ‘push the button’ and take down millions of our enemies with us. Seen in this light, Americans trained for the biggest suicide bombing mission of all.
by HUGH GUSTERSON
“As for the Taliban fighters, they not only don’t cherish life, they expend it freely in suicide bombings. It’s difficult to imagine an American suicide bomber,” Washington Post pundit Richard Cohen opined in a recent column. A few columns later Cohen returned to this theme, which clearly matters considerably to him: “There is really no such thing as an American suicide bomber. We don’t extol the bomber and parade his or her children before the TV cameras so that other children will envy them for the death of a parent. This is odd to us. This is chilling to us. This is downright repugnant.” Cohen added, “Maybe we have come to cherish life too much.”
Reading Cohen’s words made me recall a passage written by the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, my graduate adviser. Rosaldo was classified 1-A for the draft during the Vietnam War while he was doing fieldwork with the Ilongot headhunters of the Philippines. “[The Ilongot] immediately told me not to fight in Vietnam, and they offered to conceal me in their homes. . . . Unthinkingly, I had supposed that headhunters would see my reluctance to serve in the armed forces as a form of cowardice. Instead, they told me that soldiers are men who sell their bodies. Pointedly, they interrogated me: ‘How can a man do as soldiers do and command others to move into the line of fire?’ This act of ordering one’s own men (one’s ‘brothers’) to risk their lives was utterly beyond their moral comprehension.”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for more