I haven’t. I am just curious, be it through military service, self preservation, or whatever. Ground rules, I don’t want this to be a debate, if you feel you must hijack, please do so but in your own thread. I just want to know, what it was like and how it made you feel in the short term and in the long term.
Just a wild guess, but I think this is a subject that folks really wouldn’t want to discuss with a bunch of strangers. I know my husband doesn’t like it when someone asks him if he killed anyone. It’s very personal.
I’ve killed someone
in a video game
I haven’t either, dorkus, but I seem to remember having heard somewhere (sorry, it’s half-assed hearsay, and I have no cite) that 1 in every 1000 people has killed someone.
So, we have 29,861 Dopers. By that stat, roughly 30 have killed a person.
Driving down I-95 at night, in the rain, with my pregnant wife sleeping in the front seat, some idiot (I’m sorry, he was), decided to play frogger across 3 lanes of highway traffic. I was in the center lane and did not see him until the car to my right swerved right to avoid him and I saw him in my headlights. I swerved to the right as well, but there just wasn’t enough time or room, I clipped him with the front driver’s side of the car. He bounced up, hit the windshield and flew across the leftmost lane into the grassy median.
But wait it gets better. The whole thing was witnessed by a Florida Highway Patrol officer. Who happened to be there because he was flagged down by a woman on the grassy median. A woman who happened to be there because she had just jumped out of her boyfriend’s car and ran across the higway because he was drunk and was beating her. Yes, the boyfriend that I hit, as he came out of a drunken stupor and tried to make it across the highway to talk to the same cop.
One of the worst nights of my life. I recall pulling over and running back to where the guy had fallen, and as I got closer seeing the cop pick up the guy’s arm or leg, and the ways in which it bent. Not good. The next thing I remember is the cop radioing for an ambulance and then leaning on his car and throwing up.
It seemed like every cop in the world showed up after that, probably more like 7 or 8 patrol cars. I sat in one of them and gave a statement which a cop recorded. And to make everything more surreal, the dead guy’s girlfriend came over and in a drunken slur asked me to turn around because she had to pee. And true to her word, she squated next to the cop’s car, dropped her pants, and peed.
I am infinitely grateful to the cop for coming over and talking to me and my wife and telling us that it was NOT our fault. And to the other drivers who stopped and gave statements as to what had happened. And to the local hospital, where my wife was taken to make sure both she and the baby were fine, they were.
For the next two weeks I replayed, constantly, the 1-2 seconds loop of the guy (green shorts, white tank top with green stripes) in my headlights and the crunch of the impact. That damned scened played over and over, day and night, sleeping or waking, for two weeks straight. Then it stopped.
Taking another persons life even in combat or as a Law Enforcement Officer is not fun, it is not glorious, nor heroic. It is a job, and a horrible one at that.
I found that long range kills somehow did not really affect me so much, as when you are closer and have to see the persons face before he dies. But if you ever see the dead, whether you killed them or not, whether it be by bomb or bullet, I think that it is something that can never be forgotten and is as previously mentioned probably best left unspoken.
The nightmares and the guilt never really leave you alone, you only learn how to live with them, kind of like a mother-in-law.
Anyway…
It’s been 48 hours since I kilt me a man.
Well, 2 down, 28 more to go.
Day ain’t over yet.
Okay, Curly.
Amen, and well said, royjwood.
Giving blackmail-class material to someone with “mafia” in his name? You’ve gotta be kidding!
Lockdown.