Building a better killing machine

Waiting for my haircut last week, I was reading an article in Rolling Stone called "Soldiers Lost." I think the point was just to humanize the American soldiers by featuring the stories of nine who have died in Iraq. Eight of the nine died by IED, an improvised explosive device, which is the #1 killer there. The massive gas-guzzling Humvees have provided inadequate protection against these devices that kill everyone from civilians to medics.

The other person featured in Rolling Stone was Jeffrey Lucey, a soldier from Massachusetts. He returned home safe but killed himself shortly after by hanging himself with the garden hose. His family had tried to remove everything from the house that he might use to harm himself but hadn't thought of the garden hose. He had spent weeks drinking and taking drugs and repeatedly yelled at his sister "don't you know your brother is a murderer?!" He was haunted by the memory of "the bumps in the road," bodies of children they often had to drive over. In this new war, even children are terrorists and his superiors told him that killing them is included in the new "rules of engagement."

Frankly, I'm surprised that only 1 in 8 soldiers returning are reporting PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). Americans have essentially never gone to war to protect ourselves on our own soil. We fought for our freedom on our soil when we founded the country and fought each other later but our modern wars are fought elsewhere against people who have nothing to lose. Our soldiers have something to live for and can afford to question whether it's right to take a life.

The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has spent 50 years innovating breakthrough technology like the Internet but have only recently ventured into human augmentation - the science of making the human body more powerful. Around the country, the government is funding projects to make soldiers smarter, stronger, need less sleep and food, and give them more energy in life-threatening conditions. One project regulates the body temperature with a special glove that can keep a body from freezing to death or keep a soldier active when his body would normally overheat.

I think this technology is cool, of course, but why aren't we addressing the real problem of war? None of this technology will help the soldier struggling to live with what s/he's done. None of it will help us deal with the fact that war includes killing children. None of it will keep us from going to war. I wonder when we will put our superior brains to work on finding a way not to kill each other instead of killing each other better.