THE ONLY WAR WE’VE GOT

I know we all feel bad about the Baptist missionary and her infant daughter who were killed by a Peruvian fighter plane that shot their plane out of the sky, thinking they were drug smugglers. We all feel sorry for the poor guy who lost his wife and daughter. We grieve with the six-year old boy on the plane who had to watch his mother killed by a machine-gun round that went all the way through her and hit his newly-adopted baby sister in the head. We feel bad about the pilot whose legs were smashed and who may not walk for the next year, if he ever walks again.

But we are, after all, at war. There’s bound to be some collateral damage, right?

I also know we all deplore the practice of "racial profiling"–targeting blacks and Hispanics for stops and drug searches purely on the basis of race. The practice has been reported in several states, such as Maryland and New Jersey, where the Chief of the State’s Troopers was dismissed by the Governor after asserting that it was "mostly minorities" who traffic in illegal drugs.

But we are, after all, at war. We have to be willing to give up some of our rights to safeguard the country. No less a champion of freedom than Abraham Lincoln suspended certain civil rights during the Late Unpleasantness. That’s the price you pay in war, right?

I know no one wants incidents like the killing of Ismael Mena, a 45-year-old father of nine who was shot by Denver Police after they broke down his door in a no-knock search for drugs. When Mena picked up a gun to defend himself against what he thought was a home invasion, the police shot him eight times. Unfortunately, they had the wrong guy. I know we all just hate that.

But we are, after all, at war. There’s always some poor civilian who’s unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s just the way it goes, right?

We know we’re at war with drugs because our leaders tell us so. We’re know we’re at war because they’ve appointed a general to lead the fight. We know we’re at war because we’re using the weapons of war, like the radar surveillance plane that sicced the Peruvian fighter pilots flying American-made jets on the unarmed Cessna full of missionaries.

In war, sometimes the innocent die. Like 64-year old John Adams of Lebanon Tennessee, who was shot down in his own bedroom when the police raided the wrong house. Or 11-year old Aaron Sepulveda, who was accidentally shot in the back by a member of the Modesto, California SWAT team as he lay on the ground during a raid on his father’s house. Maybe someday folks like John and Aaron will have a nice memorial in Washington.

So what if the war doesn’t seem to be making much headway? So what if the war has been going on for 30-plus years without a break? War is like that sometimes. Look at Vietnam. We ended up killing a lot of innocent villagers in our quest to eliminate the bad guys. We lost some of our own brave soldiers in ill-advised and badly led fiascos. We couldn’t even always trust our supposed allies, some of whom were brutal thugs and others of whom were in league with the enemy. We sure enough sent a message, though, didn’t we? We let them know we were serious. Just like the message we want to send to the purveyors of illegal drugs. Maybe they’ll get the same message the North Vietnamese got: we are serious people.

Don’t let me here any namby-pamby liberal whining about "treatment" for drug addiction, either. This is war we’re fighting here. You don’t treat an enemy, you exterminate it. If a few of the good guys get slaughtered in the crossfire, we can always give them a national holiday.

Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest said it best: "War means fighting. Fighting means killing." If that means that some of the people who are killed are infants in their mother’s arms, or Dads who get pumped full of state-purchased lead for trying to protect their homes, well, c’est la guerre, as the French say.

Because it’s war. The war against drugs. If we can keep one person from smoking a joint, it’ll all be worth it, right?

Right?

Dusty Rhoades lives in Carthage, practices law in Aberdeen, and has a terrible suspicion that the war is over and that drugs won.

COPYRIGHT 2001 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.