Afrasianet - Chris Hedges - I know you. I met you under the shade of dense trees during the war in El Salvador. There for the first time I heard the loud sound of sniper bullets, a distinctive and terrifying sound. He terrified the army units I was traveling with, as they were furious because of the lethal accuracy of the rebel snipers, firing heavy 50-caliber cannons at the leaves above the heads until your bloodied and mutilated body fell to the ground.

I saw you working in Basra, Iraq, and of course in Gaza, where one autumn evening at the Netzarim crossroads, I shot a young man who was standing a few feet away from me. We carried his body hanging down the road.

I lived with you in Sarajevo during the war. I was only a few hundred meters away, hiding in the high towers overlooking the city. I watched your daily massacre. At sunset, I saw you firing a bullet at an elderly man and his bent wife on a small vegetable growing field. I made a mistake. She rushed towards the shelter stumbling. He did not move. I shot again. I admit the light was dim. It was hard to see. Then, on the third attempt, I killed him. This is one of those memories that recur in my head over and over again and I never talk about it. I saw it from behind the Holiday Inn, but now I've seen it, or its shadows, hundreds of times.

It targeted me too. I injured my colleagues and friends. I was in your crosshairs as I traveled from northern Albania to Kosovo with 600 KLA fighters, each rebel carrying an additional AK-47 rifle to hand over to another comrade. Three shots. That sharp sound is very familiar. You must have been away. Or maybe you're a bad sniper, even though you've got too close. I rushed into a shelter behind a rock. My bodyguards leaned over me, panting, the green bag hanging on their chests full of grenades.

I know how to speak. Black irony. It says of the children you kill "pocket-sized terrorists." You are proud of your skills. That gives you a kind of prestige. You embrace your weapon as if it were an extension of your body. Admiring its shameful beauty. That's you. Killer.

In a society of assassins, you are respected, rewarded and promoted. You are dead feeling about the suffering you caused. Maybe you enjoy it. Maybe you think you're protecting yourself, your identity, your comrades, and your nation. You may believe that killing is a necessary evil, a way to ensure that Palestinians die before they can attack. You may have compromised your morality for blind loyalty to the military, and integrated into the industrial death machine. Maybe you're afraid of death. Maybe you want to prove to yourself and others that you are cruel, you

can kill. Maybe your mentality is so shattered that you believe that Murder is a right.

You are drunk with the divine power that makes you withdraw someone else's charter to live on this earth. You enjoy the intimacy in it. You see the fine details through the scope of the gun, nose and mouth of your victim. Triangle of death. You hold your breath. You pull the trigger slowly, gently, and then the pink flower bursts. Severed spinal cord. Death. It's over.

I was the last person to see Aishnor alive. I was the first person to see her dead.

That's you now. And now no one can reach you. You are the angel of death. You are cold and dull. But I doubt this won't last. I covered wars for a long time. I know, even if you don't know, the next chapter of your life. I know what happens when you leave the army bosom, when you are no longer just a cog in these murderous factories. I know the hell you're going into.

It starts like this: all the skills you acquired as a killer abroad become useless. Maybe you'll come back. Maybe you become a hired assassin. But this will only delay the inevitable. You can run for a while, but you can't run forever. There will be an account, which is the account that I will tell you about.

You will be faced with a choice: to live the rest of your life distorted, dull, cut off from yourself and others around you. To descend into a nihilistic psychological fog, trapped in the tangled lies that justify mass murder. There are killers who, years later, will say they are proud of their actions, and claim that they have never felt remorse. But I wasn't inside their nightmares. If you're one of them, you'll never really live again.

Of course, don't talk about what you've done with those around you, certainly not with your family. They think you're a good person. You know this is a lie. Numbness usually fades. You look in the mirror, and if

you have any remnants of conscience, your reflection bothers you. But you keep your bitterness secret. Escape into the world of opioids and alcohol. Your personal relationships break down because you can't feel, because you bury your self-hatred. This escape works for a while. But then you sink into the darkness to the point that the stimulants you use to numb your pain begin to Destroy you. And maybe you die that way. I knew many who died this way. I also knew who ended it quickly. Bullet in the head.

Between 1973 and 2024, 1,227 Israeli soldiers committed suicide according to official statistics, but the real number is believed to be much higher. In the United States, an average of 16 veterans commit suicide daily.

I have a shock from the war. But the worst shock is not the one I've seen. Not what I experienced. The worst shock is what I did. They have names for them: "moral damage" and "stress for crimes committed by the offender." But these names sound weak compared to hot embers of anger, nightmares, despair. Those around you know something horrible is going on. They are afraid of your darkness. But you don't let them into the maze of your pain.

Then one day, you reach out in search of love. Love is the opposite of war. War is about filth. It's about. It's about turning human beings into things, maybe sexual things, but I mean it literally too, because war turns people into corpses. Corpses are the end product of war, what comes out of their production lines. So, you'll look for love, but death has struck a Faustian deal. It's this: Hell in the inability to love. You will carry this death inside you for the rest of your life. It corrupts your soul. Yes. We have souls. You sold your soul, and the price is very high. It means that what you want, what you desperately need in your life, you can't get.

Then one day, you may be a father, mother, uncle, or aunt, and you enter a young woman into your life that you love or want to love as your daughter. In an instant, you will see Eshnor's face. The young woman you killed. She came back to life. Israeli now. She speaks Hebrew, innocent.

Kind, full of hope, the power of what you did, who you were, and who you are now will hit you like an avalanche.

You will spend days wanting to cry and not knowing why. Feelings of guilt will devour you. You'll think that because of what you've done, this other young woman's life is in danger. Divine punishment. You'll tell yourself it's ridiculous, but you'll believe it anyway. Your life will begin to include some small offers of goodness to others, as if these offers will please an angry god, as if these offers will save her from harm, from death. But nothing can erase the stigma of murder.

Yes. I killed Eshnor. I killed others. There are Palestinians whom you have dehumanized and taught yourself to hate. Human animals, terrorists, barbarians. But it is difficult to dehumanize her. You know, I saw it through your lens, that she wasn't a threat. She didn't throw stones, the meagre pretext used by the Israeli army to fire live bullets at Palestinians, including children.

You will be overwhelmed by feelings of sadness, regret, shame, sadness, despair, and separation. You will face an existential crisis. You will realize that all the values you learned to honor at school, in worship, or in your home, were not the values you adopted. You'll hate yourself. You won't say this out loud. You may somehow end your life.

Part of me says you deserve this torment. Part of me wants you to suffer for the loss you caused to Eishnor's family and friends, to pay for robbing the life of this brave and talented woman. Shooting unarmed people is not courage, not honor, not even war. It's a crime. It's murder, you're a murderer. I'm sure you didn't receive orders to kill Echinor. You shot Aishnor in the head because you could, because you felt like it. Israel runs an open firing zone in Gaza and the West Bank. Total impunity. Murder as a sport.

One day, you won't be the killer you are now. You will exhaust yourself trying to cast out demons. You will desperately long to be human. You will want to love and be loved. Maybe you'll succeed, being human again.

But it will require a life full of regrets, it will require declaring your crime publicly, it will require that you beg, kneel, ask for forgiveness, it will require that you forgive yourself. This is very difficult, it will require that you direct every aspect of your life towards caring for life rather than extinguishing it. This will be your only hope In salvation. If you don't take this route, you're cursed.

Chris Hedges: American military writer and correspondent - former Middle East director at The New York Times