Unmanned?

We had the great privilege Friday night of watching Celeste Oliva inhabit the role of The Pilot in the play Grounded at the Nora Theater. She held the stage and our rapt attention by herself for ninety minutes. The play makes vivid the emotional and ethical complexity of drone warfare.

Patricia Weinmann wrote for this blog last week about the ways drones allow us to kill at a distance, inflicting violence with a cold, clinical detachment. The play highlights an additional dimension of drone warfare: the cameras bring their operators into intimate closeness with the target and with the aftermath of a strike. As the director of the show, Lee Mikeska Gardner pointed out, an F-16 pilot bombs a thing (a bridge, an armory), but a drone pilot gets in close enough to bomb a person.

An army at combat becomes its own world, surrounding its members with comrades who share the experience of warfare. A drone pilot carries out a strike and then goes home to a family, re-entering civilian society every day. Celeste Oliva and our guest Jason Ryan both spoke after the show about this constant re-entry as a new form of combat PTSD. We are insulated from the physical risks of combat, but the drone operators are still bearing the psychological cost of our wars. Are we asking too much of them?

 

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