10/22/2026
Tilting at Windmills is Okay, Tilting at Children is Not
(Another post where Thad rants at the world instead of going to therapy.)
Shall I start with the Picasso painting or with the term "human shield?"
Let's start with the "human shield" part. We'll get to the painting in a minute.
The term "human shield" has been used recently to justify a whole lot of atrocities. As if somehow killing innocent people, particularly children, is ever justified.
When I have spoken out about this in the past, a response I often get from people who don't know my background is, "Well, it's easy for you to say if you've never been the one faced with that decision."
I shouldn't have to have ever been put in that position to know that killing innocent people is wrong. No one should have to have ever personally made that decision to know that killing a child is wrong.
Sometimes I just let it go. I could tell them about my personal experiences and my personal decisions, but if they are justifying killing children then we are so fundamentally not the same species that it would probably be pointless.
But sometimes I don't let it go. It's times like this that I really miss No Tail. When the anger and the outrage at the blatant inhumanity around me fills me up so much that I barely feel like there is any room left for who I want to be.
Scenario: Someone is shooting at you from a building. You don't know if there are other people in the building. The easiest and safest thing to do is to blow up the building. The difficult and dangerous thing to do is get to the building, enter the building, clear the building, and eliminate the shooter.
Two questions: Question one – How do you think the scenario above should be handled? Question two – How do you think the scenario above should be handled if you know your child is in that building?
When I was in Iraq, the terrorists and the black marketeers would often set up their illegal arms bazaars in the middle of crowded market streets. When my team and I went in to disrupt their activities and detain the perpetrators, I always made my team sling their ri**es. My order to my team was that all combat was to be hand to hand. Side arms would only be used as a last resort and only if there was no risk of a round going into the crowd.
It would have been easier for us if we had simply used our ri**es. It would have been easier for us to call in an airstrike on the arms market and not even entered the crowded streets.
We weren't there to make it easy for ourselves though. We were there to make it safer for other people.
This is why it makes my skin crawl when someone uses the excuse that they were "in fear for their life" when they shoot an innocent person.
You were in fear for your life?
Well, of course you were! You put on the damn uniform! The bad guys don't like good guys in uniforms! If you are a good guy in uniform the bad guys are going to want to kill you! That is part of the job! If you are afraid of being "in fear for your life" then pursue another career!
It doesn't make you a coward for not wanting to get shot at. What does make you a coward is shooting at someone who puts their hand in their pocket. What does make you a coward is shooting into a moving vehicle when you can't positively identify all of the occupants inside. What does make you a coward is firing at a priest who is peacefully protesting. What does make you a coward is shooting tear gas into a crowd that is doing nothing more than singing. What does make you a coward is blowing up an entire building with children in it because there might be a shooter inside.
You know, the part that really gets to me, not as a former soldier but just as a regular, you know, non-monster human, isn't the people that are giving the orders to do these things. I've almost become numb to the atrocities that governments engage in. It's practically to be expected now. The people that pursue power are rarely going to be the ones that are filled with compassion and empathy. A monster in charge ordered a monstrous thing to be done. It's barely even noteworthy anymore.
The real damaging part though, is that the cowards who give the orders are carried out by the cowards on the ground. People who we thought were like you and me. People who we thought were people. Monsters in the halls of government I can shrug off. Monsters who live next door? That's a harsh reality to have to live with.
Satan I can understand. Mewling sycophants that lick up Satan's p**s and call it w**e are beyond my comprehension.
Yesterday, my daughter sent me a picture of a musician playing music in the middle of a tear gas attack and I just thought, "What was going through that police officer's mind when someone ordered them to shoot tear gas at those folks over there that are playing music?" Did the person object? Did they say it was a bad idea? Or did they just follow orders?
Not sure why this was the one that set me off. There have been a lot of atrocities recently. This last one hardly even qualified. What are a few whiffs of tear gas when measured against the life of a child?
Except we should not have to live our lives against a backdrop of a scale of atrocities that we have deemed acceptable to live within.
Which, I guess, finally brings me to the painting. There is still plenty of ranting to be done. I've not settled down yet.
Three deployments ago, I hung a poster on the wall of my tent. A cheap, paper poster stuck up with tape, hanging amongst the poetry that I had penned across the canvas walls of my enclosure. It was a poster of Picasso's "Don Quixote." When I came home, the poetry remained behind in my tent but the poster came home. I had always loved this particular piece of art and had had a copy of it when I was a kid, but lost it when our house burned down. I told Robin when I returned that now that I was home, I wanted to get a decent reproduction of the piece and have it framed. She told me that the quality of any canvas reproduction that I might purchase would never replace the emotional value of the poster that had actually hung in my tent in Iraq, so we had that cheap, paper poster professionally framed. It still has wrinkles in it and it is smudged with dust from the desert, and it has hung in every office I have had since that deployment.
A few years after that deployment, Robin asked a metal artist if he could do a three dimensional sculpture of the piece. That sculpture joined the framed poster. Last year, my younger daughter gave me a version of the painting with a subtle alteration. If you look closely, you will see that the abstract images of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are now cats.
This Picasso triumvirate now sits next to me in my office and greets any visitors that stop by.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with the story, Don Quixote was a seventeenth century novel about a man who was just wealthy enough to afford to be insane. He imagined himself to be a knight errant, traveling around the Spanish countryside and righting wrongs. He is most famously remembered for believing that windmills were giants and attacking them.
I have often been accused of tilting at windmills. Part of it is the madness that is inherent in all writers, but part of it also stems from a personal need to tackle the impossible. Cervantes, the author of "Don Quixote" suffered from this same affliction, using his own writing to take on the monolithic and tyrannical institution that arose from the unholy coupling of the government and the church, and risking his life in so doing. For Cervantes, attacking windmills was less about madness and more about committing one's self to an impossible task. As the inimitable Peter O'Toole sang, in the musical version of Don Quixote, "To Dream the Impossible Dream."
That is what this eclectic triptych means to me, when I look up from my mundane desk, where people don't shoot at me and my hands are always clean and see the two paintings and the sculpture there. It is the Impossible Dream. That one day the monsters in power will command people to do evil things, and the people who are still people will simply put down their weapons and say, "No. We will not be your pawns anymore."
Until then, I will continue to write, and tilt at windmills.
