The troops

"I am an Nigerian soldier and I want to know, if I kill someone, is it a crime?"
Context is key to understanding how startling this statement was to me. This is not an unusual statement in a blog, or a quote from a news story, or in a book about war.
It was none of those. It was written in the sidebar of a on-line college course I'm taking at George Fox Seminary. For those who've never had the pleasure of taking a real-time, on-line college course, what usually happens is that a presenter - a professor or instructor - talks or presents either with video of him/herself in the center of the screen. But on the side, there is a place for dialogue from the rest of the participants; in this case, there were 22 others besides myself and the two professors.
And again, there is nothing particularly startling about the statement if we were talking about just war, or African conflicts; it might even have been appropriate if we had been talking about Nigeria, soldiers, killing or crime. We were talking about none of those things. The professor had merely said, "Does anyone have any questions," with the implication being, "about something we have just been discussing," which in this case was family systems theory.
One person asked a clarifying question, and then there was a pause, and the professor prepared to move on to his next point, when this flashed on the sidebar.
"I am an Nigerian soldier and I want to know, if I kill someone, is it a crime?"
Apropos of nothing, here was one of the participants with an obviously deep-seated, painful question. I don't know about my fellow students, but my reaction was, "Holy crap!" It felt a little like we had unearthed a time-bomb in this young man.
I do know what two of my fellow students thought, because they wrote underneath: "What an interesting question!" and "That's a good question."
And it is an interesting and good question. But, I'm sorry, when I meet this young man at our Face to Face in a couple of weeks, I'm going to have a hard time not thinking of him as a killer. Which he may not be yet, but probably will be, given his locale and the Times.
I have never been and never will be a soldier. I signed up for the draft when I was a kid, because in order to get a college scholarship, you had to. I saw a bit of the "baby killer" mentality of the post-Vietnam, post-Cambodian wars, and have been living in the backlash to that mentality, where the default clap line for any time or anywhere is to "support the troops." There seems to be a country-wide consensus that the two groups you can't say anything hateful about are gay people and The Troops. Even when we were vehemently against the war in Iraq or Afghanistan or almost-Syria, we would quickly add, "but of course I support the troops."
But why? Why this blanket pass on the military?
Of course, they throw themselves into harms way, and are brave and true. I have several former youth group members in various branches of the military and they are fine young men, one of whom has wanted to be in the Marines since the seventh grade.
And of course, they are making sure that our country is safe, which I'm grateful for.
But I didn't ask them to do that. I didn't ask them to kill pre-Christians - because that's what all non-Christians are, right, my fellow evangelicals? Just Christians waiting to happen? So by sending people to a place where they are not Christian and killing them, you have just sentenced them to an eternity in hell.
The Few. The Proud. The Killers of Unsaved People.
The loudest calls will be from those who say, "You'll be sorry when you have to learn Arabic/Russian/Korean."
No I won't. Christians throughout the millenia have had evil overlords, and their faith turned out just fine. They are floating on their own clouds right now. I believe the best thing that could happen to the religious life in this country is if Christianity were made illegal. Look at China. Look at Russia. Plus I've always wanted to learn another language, and about the only way that's going to happen is if I have an evil overlord making me.
So I think it's a good question, my Nigerian soldier friend. I will look forward to meeting you and saying, "While killing people is not a crime if you're wearing a uniform, it is still against God's law."