All of my fellow airmen and I knew that Hitler and his henchmen were atrocious and loathsome examples of the human race. Yet, any U.S. soldier or airman who thought even briefly about his job of trying to kill and destroy ‘the enemy,’ knew that he was not within range of damaging Hitler and other Nazi leaders. We could not reach their personal environments or influence their decisions; our activities were many magnitudes removed from hurting them. We could only chip away at the peripheries of their domain and hope that they would realize the futility and fallacy of their ways. To do so, we had to try and kill our enemy counterparts with whom we had no personal quarrel at all. We aimed our bombs at their strategic war-making industries and infrastructure, but in the process we knew that we could not avoid hitting churches, schools, and innocent people. Many of us thought that a better way must exist. Fifty-six years later, I still think so. …
[I]n their external affairs governments must resist any temptation to intervene in the affairs of other peoples. It takes a government to wage a war. So governments must take the same oath of nonintervention - live-and-let-live - with other governments as each individual observes with other individuals. The model for this point-of-view is the political system the Founding Fathers put together when they wrote the Constitution of the United States. …
Surely, if societies owe anything to the veterans of former wars and the innocent soldiers and people destroyed in these catastrophes, it is a responsibility to avoid further warfare by every practicable means. So far as I can see from my vantage point, societies and governments are not following my simple prescription - or any other effective strategy - for preventing wars of all varieties. In not doing so, they are betraying the trust that my wartime colleagues, especially those who made the ultimate sacrifice, and I reposed in them.
- Richard Timberlake (h/t David Henderson)
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