ROCKET SCIENCE
"Through whitish swathes of smoke a row of men with
packs came on in
a straight line.
Some fell and lay there, others turned head over heels like
shot hares. A
hundred meters in front of us, the last were sucked down into
the shell-pocked earth.
They must have been young troops, still unacquainted
with the effects of the modern rifle, for they came on
with all the hardihood of
ignorance."
In his war diary of
1916, Ernst Juenger took the visionary leap from men to hares. In those gas-bitten,
barbed-wire badlands
of the First World War, massive artillery shook the earth while mere men
scrambled
like rodents from
trenches to monster shell-holes.
Progress marches on,
so we are all hares now. Unlike the
soldiers that Juenger shot, we are healthily
spared
the illusion that an inner strength of blood and guts can ever outmatch steel
projectiles.
Subtract the vivid,
tender meat of hare and human from the parabolic equations of Nintendo warfare,
and
you have the lovely
martial landscapes of ROCKET SCIENCE.
No enemy, no front, no flags, no braid and
no salutes. No
trumpets and no parades. No courage, no
commitment and no martial sacrifice.
The whitish
swathes of smoke
have become our heroes. Ruptured
cruise missiles turn like hares, tumbling vent over
nosecone. Chill infrared scopes glow over the shell-pocked earth. It scarcely even looks like war.
If rocket science
kills us, we'll never know why. The explosion
hits before the sound of its arrival.
It's globalized
targeting,
satellite-coordinated, so any precise spot on Earth can become an instant
Somme. This is military art
for our own dear
times. If there's something very
obviously missing here, it is something we have truly and
irrevocably lost
with the dead century. Rocket science
took that from us. There is no
hardihood in ignorance.
We just can't have
it back, that glorious, murderous human innocence.
"When
once it is no longer possible to understand how a man gives his life for
his
country – and that time will come -- when all is over with that faith also, and
the
idea
of the Fatherland is dead; then, perhaps, we shall be envied, as we envy the
saints
their inward and irresistible strength."
2001 Bruce Sterling
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