A missile, a Chinese balloon, and all the other missiles we don’t talk about | Opinion
The ultimate American privilege was on display last weekend in the Myrtle Beach, S.C., area. An AIM-9X Sidewinder exploding just off our coast – but close enough to shake objects on the ground – was more an occasion for giddy gossip in my neighborhood than fear and rending of garments. That’s not the experience of fellow human beings in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where American missiles are cause for terror because death is often to be found at the end of the contrails.
Residents and tourists alike got to respond to an F-22 Raptor shooting down a suspected Chinese spy balloon with a $400,000 missile about 60,000 feet in the air as though it was a Fourth of July celebration. Their eyes were focused skyward like they were watching just another pricey fireworks display. I missed out on the fun. I was out of town. But my son made sure I got the scoop.
“They blew up a spy balloon over our house with a missile,” my son Kyle texted me, my wife and his sister shortly after the Raptor hit its target.
His description wasn’t quite accurate, of course. The explosion happened over the Atlantic Ocean, the natural resource that helps the area attract maybe 20 million tourists a year and is about an 8-minute drive from our house. But the way he talked about it, and the buzz in our neighborhood, you would have thought they had been privy to Tom Cruise secretly shooting scenes for a third edition of “Top Gun.” It sent an exhilaration through the community rather than a scare.
As far as I could tell, no one ducked for cover. Because they had nothing to fear. While military planes flying overhead is nothing unusual given our proximity to a former U.S. Air Force base, as well as death-defying stunts by the Blue Angels for our annual amusement, seeing weapons of war being used for their intended purpose isn’t. A man named Zabiullah Haideri knows what we don’t, though. In 2019, a U.S. airstrike that killed 12 people in his village also shattered his shop.
“Everyone here hated the Americans,” he told the Washington Post from a rural part of Afghanistan. “They murdered civilians and committed atrocities.”
In that part of the world, they had to choose between devastating airstrikes, raids and bombings or embracing an also-deadly Taliban. We are so privileged that even during what was America’s longest war, stretching over two decades, we never had to duck a missile here. Years ago, I cried in the kitchen of a home in neighboring Conway with a mother and father after they got word that their son had been killed in Iraq, watched them bury him. I commiserated with a mother who lost her son to suicide after he left the battlefield, a real issue for the U.S. military during a period of non-stop war. And yet, less than one percent of Americans got a close-up view of the products of wars we launched after terrorists attacked us.
We’ve never had to worry about another country deciding it had to launch missiles into residential areas of America to take out potential terrorists or other combatants the way the U.S. has been doing in Middle Eastern countries for the past couple of decades no matter if a Republican or Democrat was sitting in the White House. Domestically, we haven’t had to see innocent men, women and children killed or maimed by the weapons that keep us safe, and our enemies at bay. China, despite its nuclear capabilities and growing global interference, sent a balloon into our airspace, not a fighter jet or weaponized drone. We all know why, as well as why its public retaliation for a missile strike that turned their balloon into a 1,500-meter debris field was no more than a strongly-worded public relations statement claiming our government overreacted.
I don’t know the broader foreign policy implications. I can’t tell you if it was akin to an early battle in an emerging cold war, as some analysts have suggested. I don’t know if it really was a spy balloon, as U.S. officials suggest, or a benign weather balloon blown off track, a farfetched-sounding tale the Chinese government wants us to believe. I know, though, that Saturday’s events were a reminder of how much we value our own lives and comfort even as we lose little sleep over the lives being taken in far-off places in our names with weapons paid for with our tax dollars.
Few of us likely know that nearly 400,000 civilians have been killed during post-9/11 U.S. wars, according to the Watson Institute of International & Public Affairs at Brown University. Or that up to 48,000 civilian deaths came via U.S. missile strikes, according to monitoring group Airwars. Or that during some months, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism tracked roughly 40 airstrikes in Afghanistan every day before we left the country early in President Joe Biden’s administration.
Since the Supreme Court invalidated half-century-old Roe v. Wade, we’ve been loudly debating the sanctity of life and who among us really values it. Saturday’s downing of a balloon by a missile provides a true gut check. None of us should feel comfortable waving the pro-life flag as long as we so blithely accept the innocent blood being spilled in our name just because it’s over there rather than here.