Story A Day 05: "Shame" / "Acquired Confirmation"

I combined both the official Story A Day prompt with the Bay12Games daily prompt for this short story.

It was just like playing a video game. Darrell grew up playing video games, and he had a knack for piloting the drones. He picked it up quickly and breezed through the training course. It was easier than video games.

And it was easier than pointing a gun to a flesh-and-blood person and pulling the trigger, too. It was just a screen. They were just pixels. Target locked. Missile Detonated. Confirmation acquired.

Just like a video game.

50 points.

That’s not to say that Darrell was heartless. He knew what he was doing, and he had his sleepless nights wrestling with the morality of it. He’d rehash all the familiar arguments. It’s not like they were doing this out of hatred or malice. There were evil people out there. People who wanted war, who wanted to murder innocent Americans. The sort of people who’d fly planes into buildings. They’d gotten a lot of them, but there would always be more. There would always be people who hated his country, people who would kill his whole family given half a chance. These people had to be taken out.

Anyway, it was a job. He needed the money. What else was a poor black kid from Mississippi going to do? Work at McDonald’s? It was a job, with good benefits, and this way he wouldn’t have to actually go out and risk his neck on the front lines. He had managed to get himself a skilled job, and he intended to do well at it. He intended to keep it as long as he could.

All this might seem brutal, targeting someone from miles away when they couldn’t defend themselves, had no advance warning. It might seem unsportsmanlike. Unfair. But fairness wasn’t for war. Nothing about this world is fair. If he couldn’t take out the target cleanly from the air, a whole load of infantrymen would have to risk their lives to bust in there on foot. There’d be huge bombs dropped, loads of civilian casualties, not to mention dead American soldiers. No, it wasn’t an ideal situation, but it was better than it would be otherwise.

Of course, at least then it wouldn’t be him having to pull the trigger.

He rolled over in bed, flicked on a flashlight and shone it on the photo of his family. They needed him to come home when his time was up, and he might not be able to do that if he was on the ground over there. He was doing what he had to do to protect his country, his family, his own life.

He was human, after all.

He did his best not to think of his next target, maybe asleep in his own bed right now, having this same conversation with himself as he struggled with his own decisions. I’m doing what I have to do. I have to protect my country, my people, my family. They’d kill me if they could. I can’t feel guilty about killing them.


Darrell gave up trying to sleep for a while. He’d do what he had to do the next day. He was a man, and he’d do what he had to do. But there, in the dark, he allowed himself a few private tears of shame.