Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Intent to Kill

Laid out in considerable detail, this post explores what happened to the deceased Gaza activists.  This is an excellent example of a basic premise: if you want captives, send police; if you want corpses, send soldiers.  Their training is different, and you get what you pay for.

I do not consider Israel a civilized nation.  (I wish it would have been, but sheesh and baksheesh, Germany  is accruing beans faster on the civilized side of the scale.)  I sincerely wish that America would stop sending money there.  It is funding atrocities.  This costs America a lot of civilized beans.
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  • 74 comments
...go 6 levels up... Expand
ysabetwordsmith

O_O

ysabetwordsmith

June 6 2010, 20:43:45 UTC 11 years ago

Wow. That is ... very fine writing. The hairs on the back of my neck give it a standing ovation.

I doubt I'd ever holler at someone for a linguistic digression on my blog. I'm too much a language maven for that, even if it's tangential to the topic. *ponder* On the whole, I think the snippet of fiction is a valuable contribution of food for thought, so thank you for sharing.
msstacy13

since you like it, here's a little more...

msstacy13

June 6 2010, 21:24:02 UTC 11 years ago

Hoping that air fresh from the sea would clear away the various scents lingering in my nostrils, and that the sight of sand washed by foam would dislodge what I still saw in my mind, I had walked down to the beach at Worthing, only to discover that a vast brood of giant slinkies had closed in around us. That summer, the southeastern coasts of England had been lined with triplicate coils of barbed wire nine feet high.

As the tide ran away, I could see more clearly the poured concrete blocks, massive and orderly, and evenly spaced in a line that seemed to go as far as the shore itself in either direction. At low tide, they would impede any tanks attempting to make their way inland. They would also tempt men coming ashore to hide in the apparent safety they offered. The few machine guns available were located on promontories overlooking these precisely positioned structures. Anyone hiding here would have their backs to a wall as they faced a firing squad. At high tide, the corners of these huge blocks would compromise the hulls of barges, preventing their return, and forcing the men on them to jump into water over their heads.

When General Sherman had said that war is all hell, he was being something of a Pollyanna.

* * *

Contrary to what she had written on the photograph she’d given him, this gunner’s mom would not see him again.

I tried to think of the men he may have killed, in Hurricanes and Spitfires, but I had not seen their blood or smelled the vapors and traces of their deaths, and without that brutal evidence in my mind, I could not convict this mother’s son.

I reminded myself that I had not seen him grasping her photo as he collapsed, and had not seen his dying crewmate’s frantic efforts. I had only imagined these things.

I also wondered about the pilot. Surely he had realized, the moment he’d lost his gunner, that within minutes, his unprotected aircraft would be riddled with bullet holes. How quickly had he simply let loose his bombs, and looked for a place to safely bring down what remained of his crew?

I didn’t know how many bombs a Heinkel carried, and so couldn’t guess how much damage had been left undone because of this German gunner being killed. I looked again at the beach defenses, and wondered how many Germans might die there. And how many English lives would thus be spared.

When I had returned to High Salvington, what remained of the Heinkel bore no resemblance to an aircraft. It was only ragged scrap neatly piled on the lorry.