to snipe or not to snipe

I don’t know, Dave . . . sometimes shoot/don’t shoot is not just a matter of cognitive criteria.

Case in point, that’s pretty important to one person, or perhaps his surviving children and grandchildren.  In 1968 I was riding down a mud track through a forest in the back of a dump-truck, part of a convoy of about a dozen trucks and one tank, no air support, just trying to get through the jungle as fast as possible.  Someone fired one rifle round at the tank.

Protocol for that situation was “stay or flee” – if we’d been on a straight paved road, we would’ve just floored it.  But we were wallowing in mud, so everybody put on the brakes and those of us with guns locked and loaded,  jumped out, and slogged as fast as possible to the treeline.

I took cover behind a couple of trees and looked for “targets of opportunity.”  Nothing obvious.

Then I saw him:  one guy in black pajamas (which was everybody’s everyday attire).  He wasn’t obviously armed.  He was hiding in the brush, looking off to my right.

I had a clear shot but decided not to take it.  Even if he had fired one ineffectual round at a tank, he didn’t present any real danger to us.  No radio to call in artillery.

It did occur to me that if I killed him I would get a pay raise, standard practice.  Not that I had anything to spend money on.

Then he turned around and looked right at me.  I nodded to him, and he stared for a moment and then turned his back.  After a few minutes someone blew a whistle and we got back on the trucks.

I sincerely hope he didn’t go off and kill a bunch of GI’s.  Maybe he even had the chance and said, well, one of them could’ve killed me and didn’t.

Interesting how that doesn’t translate to the current war[s].  I was a draftee with no dog in the fight, as they say, and deeply resented the fact that my government had kidnapped me and tried to turn me into a murderer.  In the same situation today, in the desert, I probably wouldn’t hesitate to fire.  Of course it’s not the same situation; can’t be.

Joe