Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

Imagine what it would have been like in the first world war as a heroic fighter pilot. Aeroplanes had only been around for 10 years and were made of wood and fabric.

On the training fields, you strap yourself into a wooden ‘bird cage’ and fire up the tiny propellor engine. You’d rattle into the air and observe the battlefield below from high up above. Your observatory man would drop bombs and take survilance photos, then you’d come back to base and have a beer.

Soon the German enemy would get wind of England’s tiny airforce of 33 planes, so the battle was now to be waged in the sky as it was on earth.

For these men, shooting down an enemy plane was nothing personal. These men were just doing their job. The wrecked plane would ignite and fall to the ground in flames, the pilot would be burnt alive, the flames from the engine in front of him engulfing him as he nose-dived. But after taking a kill, our heroes would never get to see the impact of loss on the enemy pilot’s family, the end result was not emotional - it was that of broken wreckage smouldering on the ground. They couldn’t even put a face or a name to men they’d just that moment shot down at close range.

Though one day a top ace of the British Flying Corps got a look into the cockpit of a plane he’d just shot down, the pilot dead from a bullet to the head, but also curiously a small terrier dog slumped dead in the cockpit.

The dog had been up in the plane, a mascot. The British flying ace felt something new - these planes he was shooting contained men just like himself, he was murdering man after man, their lives, the hopes and dreams along with them going down in flames. In situations such as these, there is no such thing as ‘the enemy’.

Even with the politics and technology which allow people to kill a faceless enemy, many times have soldiers looked into the enemy’s eyes as they kill, but rarely do they see the dead man’s family realising for the first time that ‘dad’ won’t becoming home again, or the moment’s in dad’s life which humanise him.

That it took a dead dog to make the fighter pilot realise this shows just how impersonal war can be. But after this, our hero was never the same. His mind got the better of him and his conscious was torn between continuing his successful elegance to his comrades and quitting altogether to get married and start a family featuring two kids and a pet terrier.

Sadly, before he could get his mind straightened out, the fighter pilot did something stupid. In the heat of battle, he swooped down over a wreckage he’d just shot down, he could bare no longer the impersonal nature of war, and flew by as a tribute to the fallen enemy. On the ascent back to the skies his plane was riven with holes from ground based machine gun turrets, and his engine set ablaze. The fighter pilot took out a pistol from a small pouch in the cockpit, and before the fire had chance to engulf him on the way down, he shot himself.

The best way to stop war is to make it personal.