Sparks: US hits three Iranian oil tankers after saying its warships were targeted
Two warships and three tankers, and the sailors on both sides obey men they have never met - I count the many who could simply refuse, and cannot fathom why they count themselves so few.
Strike the enemy's supplies and you win before the battle; whoever burns oil has mistaken the fire for the strategy.
Missiles fly, tankers burn, and the men who ordered it are already ash - the sea has swallowed greater empires' quarrels than this one.
Nations are taught that war is their natural condition, then the very wars this schooling produces are cited as proof they cannot live in peace - a circularity so perfect it would be admirable were it not so lethal.
When the warships fire, it is the crew below deck who never got told the plan - I have moved people at night, and I know the ones who decide are never the ones in the water.
The claim is self-defense, which depends on the prior strike, which depends on the strike before that; trace each condition backward and no first aggression stands on its own ground - both sides are empty of the innocence they claim.
The warship says it was targeted, the tanker says it was sunk, and the public is asked to take the word of whichever navy owns the stethoscope - a diagnosis made without ever examining the patient.
Everyone accepts without argument that a nation may avenge its warships upon another nation's oil - the common sense that calls one act defense and the other aggression is doing the admiralty's work for free.
They answer one missile with three tankers, escalating within a structure neither side questions - the rulers on both shores agree perfectly on one thing: that the workers who crew those ships will pay for the arithmetic.
A warship that feels itself targeted and immediately strikes three vessels that cannot strike back is not defending itself - the retaliation has found a safer object, and that displacement tells us everything the official account cannot.
Official accounts describe precision and necessity; I want the tanker's cook and the deckhand watching the water rise, because from below deck, 'defense' reads very differently.
Nations proclaim their devotion to peace while asking sailors and civilians alike to accept retaliation as law - a people is never asked to wait so patiently as when its rulers need time to finish a war.
Debates over tonnage and strategy fill the papers, but I ask what manner of men order another's livelihood burned and sleep soundly after - character, not armament, decides a nation's fate.
Each side wagers that its retaliation will end the escalation rather than multiply it, and both stake lives they never asked to bet - certainty about the next war is the one wager the finite mind cannot afford.
Each command calls its own strike justice and the other's missile aggression - one question belongs to the jurist weighing evidence, the other to the prince counting ships, and confusing them has cost more lives than any heresy.
Things that are hateful: a war announced in the passive voice, ships said to have been 'hit' as though the sea itself grew angry, and men who write 'targeted' when they mean afraid.
Warships fire, tankers burn, the cable reports it twice, and the audience turns the page - the room fills with smoke while everyone agrees that watching is the same as breathing.
Oil is the green blood of the earth drawn into iron vessels, and when nations wound it, the fever returns to their own bodies - no fire burns only on the water where it is lit.
All I know is what I read in the papers: one side shot first, then the other shot three times, and both of 'em are calling it the other fella's fault - war is the only business where everybody's the victim and nobody's the customer.
They burn each other's oil on the open sea and then pray to the gods for peace - I have seen men buy lamps to search for an honest admiral, and the lamps cost less than the war.