|
"Oh stop it, you are lying to yourself!" said Orlando. "You would have done exactly as you were told. You wouldn't have deviated one inch from your orders."
Jack nodded, silently. "Orlando and I go back a long way," he said moments later. "Orlando is right. Most of us at SAC would have done it. Who knows, I might have done it too? I might have closed my eyes and pressed the button according to the script that we were acting out. Do you know how easy it is in real life to kill a million people without raising an eyebrow?"
I turned away from him and looked down.
"You better believe it is easy. Let me tell you, it is done through relentless practice that shapes your very soul. You'll do anything! It's drilled into you with a finesse...! It works like this. You're trained first in playing games. There is never anything totally real about what you do. You attack simulated targets in simulated missions and chalk up simulated scores. And this goes on day after day. At first it bothers you a bit when you hear your teammates cheer as the team scores a hit on the computer score board. Everyone knows that not a single person is ever killed. You never see an actual target, although you can feel the bomb falling. It's all mathematically simulated. It's simulated to such realism that no one would be able to tell it from the real thing. Still, you know it is a game. Soon you allow yourself to become entangled in this game. You become like one of the players who all play their role well. In this role you kill with a smile! You destroy a few simulated Soviet cities in the morning, a few more after lunch. You get shut down once or twice a week. Of course, like your targets all have code names instead of names of real cities, your plane has a code name, too, against which the incoming hits are logged. It's a gentlemen's war. It has nothing to do with life and blood, down to earth killing or dying. It would be just like it in a real run. You would open the bomb bay, but instead of the computer simulating the effect of the lost load, it would be real, but you'd feel no difference. During practice, the computer analyzes wind, speed, direction, altitude, and calculates from this information by how many feet you're off target. The same would happen if the bombs were real. The two types of games are designed in such a manner that the borders begin to blur, so that in the end nothing feels real and anything becomes possible. Still, I like to think that I might not have done it if it ever had come to dropping a real bomb. But honestly, I really don't know."
I raised my hand to stop him, though to no avail.
"While playing the game," he said, "you can't help but cheer with your team mates when your simulated hit scores dead center. We all might cheer the same in real life. After every hit a code-named city gets automatically erased off the map. At this point you enter the coordinates of the next zero point and fly on. We flew those missions thousands of times. We had packed box lunches and coke on board. The whole game was carefully veiled to avoid the slightest human dimensions."
For some odd reason, Jennie began to laugh as if this were the biggest joke ever. She leaned over Jack's shoulder, "Forgive me, a crazy BC cartoon from our local newspaper came to mind."
Jack turned and looked at her astonished.
"Its about fish!" she added.
"Fish!" Jack repeated. He looked at her as if her interruption was in very bad taste.
"Two fish see an elephant's trunk dangle under water. One supposes it to be a worm. It bites. The next thing you see, the fish is raised out of the water at the end of the elephant's trunk and is being inflated like a balloon until it bursts. Alas, an ant, after observing this, runs to its dad excitedly and asks him if he saw the mammoth blowing up a fish. At this very moment it goes kabooom again. The dad raises his hand slightly and without looking up, calmly answers, 'twice.'"
Next Page
|| - page index -
|| - chapter index -
|| - Exit -
||
|
