Without remorse - Tom Clancy [138]
'You've killed people, haven't you?' Sandy asked.
'That's what happens in a war,' Kelly agreed.
'What did that mean? What did it do?'
'If you want the big answer, I don't have it. But the ones I took out didn't ever hurt anybody else.' plastic flower sure as hell didn't, he told himself. No more village chiefs and their families. Maybe someone else had taken the work over, but maybe not, too.
Sandy watched the traffic as he headed north on Broadway. 'And the ones who killed Tim, did they think the same thing?'
'Maybe they did, but there's a difference.' Kelly almost said that he'd never seen one of his people murder anyone, but he couldn't say that anymore, could he?
'But if everybody believes that, then where are we? It's not like diseases. You fight against things that hurt everybody. No politics and lying. We're not killing people. That's why I do this work, John.'
'Sandy, thirty years ago there was a guy named Hitler who got his rocks off lulling people like Sam and Sarah just because of what their goddamned names were. He had to be killed, and he was, too damned late, but he was.' Wasn't that a simple enough lesson?
'We have problems enough right here,' she pointed out. That was obvious from the sidewalks they passed, for Johns Hopkins was not in a comfortable neighborhood.
'I know that, remember?'
That statement deflated her. 'I'm sorry, John.'
'So am I.' Kelly paused, searching for words. 'There is a difference, Sandy. There are good people. I suppose most people are decent. But there are bad people, too. You can't wish them away, and you can't wish them to be good, because most won't change, and somebody has to protect the one bunch from the other. That's what I did.'
'But how do you keep from turning into one of them?'
Kelly took his time considering that, regretting the fact that she was here at all. He didn't need to hear this, didn't want to have to examine his own conscience. Everything had been so clear the past couple of days. Once you decided that there was an enemy, then acting on that information was simply a matter of applying your training and experience. It wasn't something you had to think about. Looking at your conscience was hard, wasn't it?
'I've never had that problem,' he said, finally, evading the issue. That was when he saw the difference. Sandy and her community fought against a thing, and fought bravely, risking their sanity in resisting the actions of forces whose root causes they could not directly address. Kelly and his fought against people, leaving the actions of their enemies to others, but able to seek them out and fight directly against their foe, even eliminating them if they were lucky. One side had absolute purity of purpose but lacked satisfaction. The other could attain the satisfaction of destroying the enemy, but only at the cost of becoming too much like what they struggled against. Warrior and healer, parallel wars, similarity of purpose, but so different in their actions. Diseases of the body, and diseases of humanity itself. Wasn't that an interesting way to look at it?
'Maybe it's like this: it's not what you fight against. It's what you fight for.'
'What are we fighting for in Vietnam?' Sandy asked Kelly again, having asked herself that question no less than ten times per day since she'd received the unwelcome telegram. 'My husband died there and I don't still understand why.'
Kelly started to say something but stopped himself. Really there was no answer. Bad luck, bad decisions, bad timing at more than one level of activity created the random events that caused soldiers to die on a distant battlefield, and even if you were there, it didn't always make sense. Besides, she'd probably heard every justification more than once from the man whose life