←Recommendations of Zero Sum Game

Did you ever have your eyes water and spill down over your cheeks while reading something? Zero Sum Game did that to me. This is the brief story of the death at the hands of one young man by another. And you understand. You know he did the right thing. But it lingers, this killing.

War makes for impossible situations. Dave's tale of taking a life while in Vietnam is brief but powerful, and filled with questions. The one that stuck with me the most is: Who has the right to take a life? The killers in the trenches during a battle? The doctor who decides a patient isn't worth saving? The politicians who sent them all to fight in the first place?
This is part of a larger piece but "Zero Sum Game" easily stands on its own as a thought-provoking and powerful monologue.

It’s in the act of mercy that we are left with the deepest of questions. Questions about life, about death certainly, about war, about politics, about our place in the universe and our complicity in the worst aspects of the human condition, despite doing the best we can. In this deeply affecting monologue Philip Middleton Williams bring all of these questions up as a medic commits an act of immense philosophical and ethical import, but keeps grounded in the reality of a situation. A halting reminder that the real price of war may well be our humanity.

Maybe would argue that Dave the protagonist did the right thing; I certainly would. He stopped someone’s suffering. But Dave is a man of medicine. Beyond that, perhaps because he has seen so much death, perhaps because of his own dreams for his own life, he cherishes life. Williams illustrates the toll these decisions have on the human soul: not the life and death decisions as much as “this death or that death?” When one person’s suffering ends, the weight of that ending bears down upon the living. Powerful, simply told, endlessly complex.