THE LAST WORD
Anderson, Ray
THE LAST WORD Ray Anderson The Cost of Killing On the morning of July 13, 1943, I shot and presumably killed two enemy soldiers. I've thought about that every single day since then. I was...
...But in June 1944, it was a fair bit of money—enough to keep a single guy supplied with beer and cigarettes and hamburger...
...I wonder, too, about the two whose lives I'm sure I took...
...I spent ten months in military hospitals before being sent home with a plastic eye and what my sister called a "romantic" scar on my right cheek...
...That doesn't include the corrective lenses prescribed and issued to me by the Veterans Administration, the expense of transporting me to and from various hospitals and clinics, and the cost of surgery...
...Bold or fearful...
...I know nothing about them except that they went down when I squeezed the trigger of my M1 rifle...
...That may not seem like much of a reward for a wounded hero who had eliminated two of the enemy...
...Ray Anderson is a photographer in Ranier, Minnesota...
...Did they believe they were fighting for a noble cause, as I did...
...What the taxpayers spent for hospitals and medical equipment, what they paid the doctors and nurses and attendants who put me back together and cared for me, turned out to be only the beginning...
...After my discharge, when I had been home for a few weeks, the Veterans Administration notified me that I had been judged to be 70 per cent disabled, which qualified me for $98 a month in compensation...
...Army Medical Corps to rearrange my mangled face...
...Whether those two soldiers lived or died could in no way have affected the outcome of the war, nor would the war have ended differently if the grenade that damaged my vision had extinguished my life...
...In practical terms, then, the killing of those two unfortunate soldiers has cost American taxpayers a price totally disproportionate to any benefit derived from their deaths...
...If I could have known them, would I have liked or hated them...
...In the forty-plus years since then, though the wounded-hero aura has dimmed somewhat, my monthly stipend has increased almost tenfold...
...My rough calculation indicates that American taxpayers have put out about a quarter of a million dollars so far to compensate the killer of those two enemy soldiers...
...That kind of romance I could have done without...
...Were they lovers with sweethearts at home who awaited their triumphal return...
...I was drawing a bead on a third man when the grenade that destroyed my right eye and seriously damaged the left exploded in my face...
...Were they young or old...
...And bear in mind that I am only one of many thousands of veterans—of the Good War, so called, and the Korean war, and the Vietnam war, and even a few relics of the War to End All Wars-all of us still getting paid, now and well into the next century, for taking part in the senseless and stupid business of killing people...
...Were they single men or husbands and fathers...
...I wonder whether that third man is still alive...
...There is no way of calculating what it cost the U.S...
...I'm not complaining, and though I maintain (over vigorous objections from some quarters) that I've been living on welfare for more than four decades, I'm happy to accept the monthly check...
Vol. 52 • July 1988 • No. 7
