We were just told to point, click, and shoot.
Almost no one accepts the legality of these murder operations.
The military take a person like me and put them in a room
where you teach them to kill with the press of a button.
That really makes life cheap.
It is a hard fact...
that US strikes have resulted in civilian casualties.
I’m not sure if gaming makes killing easier.
I think the act of it, yes, but the consequences, no.
It softens the consequences too much.
There’s no respawn.
There’s no reset button.
There’s no do-over.
There’s no level.
And so it’s permanent.
And when you get into the idea of what permanence really is,
then it seems so...
gross.
[Super_Users]
[The Gamer Who Flew Killer Drones]
I joined the military in 2005, July 4th.
The first time that I got introduced to the Predator drones was
a montage video in a military theater
played to Metallica music.
When it was over with,
the sergeant came down and stood in front of us and said,
“Our job is to kill people and break things.”
I flew Predator drones basically all over the Middle East
and the Horn of Africa.
I controlled the camera on the aircraft
and directed the missile to the point of impact.
I was a gamer.
The skills needed to be a gamer versus a drone operator
are essentially the same.
You just need to be able to sit in a place and stare at a screen
and move a control stick until time to action.
I know that there are military recruiters all over the world
that go to gaming competitions, conventions, nerd conventions.
They sit there and they lie and cheat and steal
and tell people that they’re fighting for the goodness of the world,
but they're really just recruiting people to be murderers.
Some people in my peer group, the ones who didn’t play video games,
you could tell that they struggled with hand-eye coordination.
It really has a lot of similarities.
The typical gamer nowadays could do it,
especially if they did competition gaming.
You’re yelling at your teammates over headset,
you’re coordinating moves and all that type of stuff.
The training simulator was like an Atari game,
but it malfunctioned more than an Atari would.
[No More Drones]
The idea of killing someone is out in our... it’s in our media.
It’s in our video games,
it’s in our television and movies and books and all sorts of stuff.
I never really wanted to do it.
And you never really think about how it’s going to affect you
or really if you could until you do it.
I avoided it as much as possible.
And even when it came down to do it,
it was basically me arguing with my flight commander
and him just telling me, “Bryant, shut up and do your job.”
There was no feelings.
There was no...
heartache or grieving or anything like that;
it was just toxic masculinity.
It felt like I lost a part of my soul.
And no one in the military that I knew would grieve with me.
They would cheer about it, and then when I would tell them how I felt,
they would be like, “Oh, don’t be such a **** bitch.
Don’t be a ****.”
You know, they just degrade you.
I knew I had to get away when we were hunting Anwar al-Awlaki.
Al Qaeda affiliates in Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa
pose real threats to the UK.
From his remote base in Yemen,
Al Qaeda leader and US national Anwar al-Awlaki broadcast propaganda
and terrorist instruction in fluent English over the internet.
The United States decided to kill him.
We were flying unarmed in Yemen up until then.
And then at that ten-month mark,
I came into work and we started flying armed.
And I was told that President Obama would call us himself
and give us the order directly to kill Anwar al-Awlaki.
And I had this moment of self-awareness and disconnect
because I was fully aware that
I had been made into the thing that they wanted me to be,
where I would sit there and I would follow orders.
I wanted to kill al-Awlaki at that time.
Every time we came into a briefing,
they would tell us that he was evil and he’d betrayed us
and he deserves to die.
“Remember 9/11.”
When I had that realization,
I knew that I was no longer fit to...
make that decision.
I decided to become a whistleblower on the program
because there was so much misinformation out there.
The United States military gave the purpose of flying drones
so that there would be less consequences of war
and no boots on the ground.
They tried to pass it off as surgical or sterile,
and it really wasn't.
I was watching President Obama on the news.
There was an accident where
friendlies were killed in a drone strike,
and he totally threw the crew under the bus.
He said, “It was the crew’s fault. It was the crew’s mistake.
Intelligence doesn’t act like that.”
That was ultimately the biggest piece of **** I’ve ever heard from anyone,
especially from the guy that I voted into office.
**** him. What a piece of ****.
The drones are disgusting.
We are the camera bitches of the military.
We have no authority. We have no rights.
We are just told to point, click, and shoot.