- Do you remember the first time you killed someone? Yeah. We weren't a family that carried guns or, any kind of weapon for violence or anything, though. We played war and stuff like that but you know, it's never real. And my dad and my mom, they told us, it’s like, to hurt people or kill or never, ever-- You always learned
that when someone died, it was, it was something
that was detrimental. Someone felt it. Someone else needed that
person in their lives. I grew up, you know,
protected all my life, even when I joined the military, you know, my guys treated
me as a kid brother. I was protected. - Have you ever killed anyone - and if so, what happened? Ah, which time? We were in a couple different villages in Surobi, which is a
city right next to Charbaron. We were going to the border of Albania, to a town nearby. We set up claymores, they're bomb devices that you face and they have like 700
steel balls in them. We were ambushed. My bus was blown up. I was the only one up there that wasn't hurt. And scared to death, scared to death, really, really, really, really scared. So I started asking, screaming for help. "Somebody get up here and help me. "I'm alone." And then, and then, then, two little heads. As I took the first three steps, I just was bounding up, basically, that's when the gunfire started. We gunned down these two guys holding a larger machine gun, a PKM, and another guy holding his ammo. So they were just running
from point A to point B. We happened to just gun 'em down. And they were right next to a qalat. A qalat's a house, like a little mud-hut, and a lady came out. That one guy is as close to me because Iranian, they come, they come very close to us and they attack us at night, so, we shoot everywhere. My head was ringing. Everything was in slow motion. And there was a rifle on the ground that had gotten blown out of the bus. I picked it up and ran towards the gunfire. I was down and all I could see was his head and shoulders, he had a hard hat on, and then I saw the red emblem. It was definitely, it was, and then when his, when I could see a silhouette, I blasted ‘em. Silhouettes. They're not real people,
they're just targets. You don't shoot women or
children on the battlefield. But we were just so, we were
just so into the moment. We watched her pick up
the rifle and that was, well the machine gun, and that was, that was the cue and we just lit her up. And I remember just watching, you know, there was three of us
and we just opened up and it was just blood up against the wall. She just slumped over and it was like, "All right, we got her." We found a very young Vietnamese person with his legs mostly gone. I come to him, I looked at his face with the flashlights. He told me just, just finish me, just finish,
I don't want to live, so, so I kill him. A bunch of the guys had caught up to me and they were like, "What did you do?" And I'm like, "What are you doing here?" I thought I was dead. I didn't realize I was the
only one that got off the bus. The whole situation is like almost an out of body experience
where you're looking down on this situation. You know, I could've
picked a bullet out of there. Every second, every small little detail of that exact moment. I can tell you that,
what the dust felt like, you know, how, how the
air tasted on my breath. Every little detail, you, you know. Because that's the first time
you've done something so big. If there's a hell, that's probably what it smells like there. It penetrates you and it just, won't go away for a long time. It's horrible. Once you realize they're
gone, they're dead, then what death looks like is nothing. There's nothing there. There's a body there, but there's nothing at all there. One minute you have
somebody walking along and the next, there's
just a lump of flesh. It goes from something, a big something, to the smallest nothing that there can be. It goes from dreams and aspirations to nothing. You know, you can kick it. You can hit it with a stick. You can throw rocks on it, you can do anything
and it won't bother it, because it's dead. I know it's not right,
it's not right to do this, but I have to. If I focus about all this stuff, in one minute if I focus, I lose my mind, but I never focus about this stuff. I didn't feel any personal guilt. I just, I felt sorry for them, but, no personal guilt, no. It was strange, you know,
you could disassociate when you're, you're shooting at a spot in the jungle, but this guy was right there and I felt very compassionate and
I was thinking about, you know his girlfriend,
his family, whatever. I didn't give a fuck who he was. I was trying to keep me alive. I wasn't, it wasn't me and a Vietnamese. It was me and anybody that's got a gun, anybody, I was, oh man this is hard. - When they find out that
you served in Vietnam, - do they ask you if you've killed anyone? Yes. What is normally your answer? I say, I'm not sure. I may have. Outside of the Army, when is it okay to take someone's life? Do you want to go home
and see your family? Hmm? Nah, the question's back on you. Would you want to go
home and see your family? Well then I guess it's okay. I mean the difference in war and in civilian life, you got no choice on one, on one of those. If they mean to do harm
to myself or my family, I'll do anything I can to
prevent them from doing it. If it means taking their life, fuck 'em, they've chosen their path. Outside of war, is mostly never justified. But in war, neither side
deserves to die, honestly. I mean, that guy over
on that side is fighting for what he believes in and you're fighting for what you believe in. Both have families and children
probably and, you know. I think there are people that just, it's not that they don't deserve to live, it's, well, it's not that they don't deserve to have been born, but maybe they don't
deserve to go on living. There are, I do have that belief. That there comes a point, when, you know, enough's enough from one person. Enough's enough. You can't live in our world. That's just the way it, you know, the problem there is somebody, someone has to have the power to say that you can't do that. And now who, and then somebody
has to give them that power. That's, it's all so confusing to me.
The way this is cut together really detracts from their stories and makes it hard to follow anything at all. They are telling completely different stories, there is no reason to intercut them all!
Lonnie is the kind of person I could listen to for many hours, you know? Like go get a beer and talk about shit.
That youtube channel has seperate videos for some of the veterans, I'm assuming the rest will be uploaded soon'ish.
Josh (Afghanistan): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAXCQZhtzEs
Lonnie (Vietnam): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxSR1VgVAUk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxSR1VgVAUk
Here's the vietnam vets full interview
I found this fascinating, because I was just reading "The Things they Carried" and I was actually reminded of a quote by the Dalai Lama, where he explains a Buddhist meditation technique used to develop empathy and compassion in a person. There was a whole chapter in the book that talked about killing someone, and how you start thinking about their lives. When Dan, at 5:30, starts to talk about this it really hit something that really helped me understand the gravity.
The Dalai Lama's quote exactly - "I think depending on the circumstances one might modify that technique. For instance, the person may not have a strong feeling of empathy towards animals but at least may have some empathy towards a close family member or friend. In that case the person could visualize a situation where the beloved person is suffering or going through a tragic situation and then imagine how he or she would respond to that, react to that. So one can attempt to increase compassion by trying to empathize with another's feeling or experience."
"Silhouettes, they're not real people, just targets."
damn
I had a teacher in high school that was a Vietnam POW. I don't know how long he was imprisoned for, but I do know he had all his fingers broken at least once and who knows what else.
He would randomly pause during lecture EXACTLY like the Vietnam vet in the video does at 2:50. He would go from mid-sentence to thousand yard stare in the blink of an eye. It was scary for us as kids not really understanding what was happening. Looking back, I can't imagine how terrifying it was for him, having already lived through it once and now not being able to let it go.
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Everyone commenting about Josh, but I'm pretty sure you would change as a person if you killed multiple people.