The Truth About Shields Is...

Two men stand across the room, eyes deadlocked, hands unwavering. Neither so much as blinks an eyelid, for an instant is all it would take for the twitch of a finger and the loss of a life. Arms bore, and sights set, neither can foresee the other’s true intentions, and so dares not lower his weapon.

In the absence of a true shield, one must defend with one’s sword. They say the best defense is a good offense, but I disagree. Tai chi would teach that agility and manipulation of momentum are the best offense. You can only brute against the sword for so long, but it takes little more than a single step to cast an attack aside. Weapons do not win wars, but neither so, do soldiers. Wars are won through endurance and manipulation of resources.

Run! Run until you cannot physically take another step. Run until you fall to the ground, your legs completely devoid of the energy necessary to maintain an upright posture. Try as you may, any man would give up long before they ever reached this state. The human mind is a quitter down to its core. We conserve. We cut our losses and give anything to go back to some level of comfort.

To win a war, you need not kill all of the humans on the other side, you simply need to wear them down. Take them from their families for long periods of time. Teach the other humans that the ideals on which they sent their pawns marching are not being realized as easily as they had imagined. Their biased utopia will remain, but their will to fight for it will quickly fade. Soon they will give anything to simply stop running, take to the ground, and catch their breath.

The chess master knows how to win the war, he is experienced, he is calloused. He knows not of the battles that make up the war. He sees only the path to the king. He will happily trade every pawn in his arsenal for another queen. Monarchy is a pyramid, though. The queen must be supported by a base of ever growing size. A world of royalty would find its residents helpless and at the mercy of the few pawns left alive who still knew how to reap the crops and bake the bread.

On the battlefield, however, there is no foresight, there is not even hindsight. There are only two men with the fate of each other’s lives in their hands. There is only this moment when they must face the prisoner’s dilemma. Do you trust your fellow human, such that you both reap the rewards, or betray him knowing that he would do the same and you are better off a murderer than a corpse?

Of course, this is all to be expected. It is, after all, human nature. Killing is only murder when it is done in one’s own name. Killing on the bequest of a government is a service to your country. We know this is so, because the other humans do it too. We cannot not kill them, lest we be killed ourselves.

So, those men, standing across the room, a moment each from death, will not lower their arms. They will not call upon their fellow human for a truce. They will not even leave the room, knowing that outrunning a speeding bullet is much easier when the rate determining step is the human reaction time. No, they will stand their ground and pull their trigger.

They will then spend the rest of their life telling themself, that they had no choice but to outdraw their adversary. They will speak of this day, as the day they defended themself. They will make their sword into a shield, lest they have to bear the burden of knowing that their fellow human was never going to shoot. Their fellow human was afraid, torn between self-defense and murder. Their fellow human was hiding behind their sword in lieu of a proper shield. The truth about shields is… that shields do not kill.

            -AMS